As I already did with Douady Rabbits, here is another dynamical plane, this time corresponding to a Siegel disk in an entire transcendental family in a parameter corresponding to a polynomial-like region.
Siegel disk in an ETF, available below as wallpaper
Siegel disk for desktop background 1280x800
Siegel disk for desktop background 1024x768
You can also buy a poster version here.
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Screenshots!
Back when I was in school, I had a really nice game in my 80286 computer, under Windows 3.1. Yes, it was 15 years ago… The game was Hyperoid, by Edward Hutchins. When I got my first Pentium with Windows 95, I longed that game… and the 3.1. version didn’t work completely OK in it. Anyway I played… then found Hyperoid95. I even recompiled it, to add firepower (the author of this version cut the fire speed).
Image from Flickr
Arrow’s impossibility theorem and related results
Background: Let K={A,B,C…} be a finite set of alternatives (maybe political parties), with more than 3 items. Let’s call transitive preference a way to sort all these elements, with draws possible. It’s just a funny name for a vote, in the more general sense as we can split our vote (Let A have 0.5, B 0.25 and C 0.25 of our vote).
This evening I was bored at home, and decided to have a look at my old Lisp raytracer… a project that just went idle a year ago. I picked up another programming project I had idling for a long time (an emacs lisp project, to interact with my console-based fractal drawers). I had a coding breakthrough that time, and managed to advance quite a bit in a little time, so today I tried again.
Sometimes I feel like a character from a RPG (or NetHack), where you have a certain level and experience, and as you advance killing monsters, your experience points go up, your level eventually rises and your enemies turn harder.
I guess life (or at least a mathematician’s life while doing his thesis) is more or less like this… Enemies appear, you overcome them, and as you advance, they get stronger, bigger and thicker.
Stephen Wolfram (owner of Wolfram Research) has released (after announcing it in March) Wolfram Alpha, a kind of web search aimed at natural language and intelligent answers. JME pointed me to this question:
Taken from Wolfram Alpha
The strange thing about it is that is is fully written in Mathematica (or so they say, 5 million lines of code). Strange indeed, Mathematica isn’t a particularly fast or “comfy” programming language.