#particles

Webcam Model(PINKI-1090) is live
LIVE
 The building heights of English cities – mapped These colourful images show the heights and density

The building heights of English cities – mapped

These colourful images show the heights and density of buildings in different cities around England. Taken from a new interactive map produced by Emu Analytics, they are created using Environment Agency LiDAR data, an airborne mapping technique. Data was only available for England

Source:The Guardian


Post link
 “Urban” World?by Daniel IbañezA visual narrative of major metageographical visions of the city, the “Urban” World?by Daniel IbañezA visual narrative of major metageographical visions of the city, the “Urban” World?by Daniel IbañezA visual narrative of major metageographical visions of the city, the

“Urban” World?
by Daniel Ibañez

A visual narrative of major metageographical visions of the city, the urban and the world that animate contemporary discussion of world urbanization.

‘Urban’ World? is a project developed by Daniel Ibañez.
Produced by: Daniel Ibañez & Roi Salgueiro.
Voice over by: Azzurra Cox.
Supported by: Urban Theory Lab, Harvard GSD [urbantheorylab.net]
Special thanks to: Neil Brenner.

Source: urbannext.net


Post link
purestform:Visual clutter remains a challenge in cartography, especially for web maps depicting vo

purestform:

Visual clutter remains a challenge in cartography, especially for web maps depicting voluminous, unfiltered collections of point type data. This issue is particularly prevalent in datasets generated in cities due to urban density. Professor Andrew Vande Moere and myself developed BinSq (abbreviated Bin2), a novel gridded dot density mapping technique to overcome this challenge. We demonstrate this technique on a large dataset of language referenced, geotagged tweets to reveal language communities in Brussels. The figure above compares our technique to the [a] standard dot map and six related solutions namely: [b] jittering, [c] refinement, [d] distortion with pixel map as well as [e] aggregation with categorical binning, [f] splatter plot and [g] dot density map. Our output is depicted in [h]. An implementation of BinSq in Java is avaliable on GitHub. Read our paper for a complete description of the technique.


Post link
brucesterling:*Europe mapped in geotagged Twitter tweets.  Surprising how often people tweet from

brucesterling:

*Europe mapped in geotagged Twitter tweets.  Surprising how often people tweet from ships.


https://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/8798022019/in/set-72157633647745984

The Geography of Tweets

The images we’re sharing here use all of the geo-tagged Tweets since 2009 — billions of them. (Every dot is a Tweet, and the color is the Tweet count.)

Source:Twitter Blog

New York

Tokyo

Istanbul


Post link
The Motorbikes of TaiwanFrom Hiroshi Kondo, a mesmerizing short film called Multiverse of the motorb

The Motorbikes of Taiwan

From Hiroshi Kondo, a mesmerizing short film called Multiverse of the motorbike-jammed streets of Taiwan. Right around the 50 second mark, Kondo starts to use a clever time lapse technique to highlight individuality within the bustling mass of traffic. It’s a really cool effect and reminded me of this clip art animation by Oliver Laric. (via colossal)

Source:Kottke


Post link
First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake Newsby Emerging Technology from

First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv August, 2017

Automated accounts are being programmed to spread fake news, according to the first systematic study of the way online misinformation spreads

Fake news and the way it spreads on social media is emerging as one of the great threats to modern society. In recent times, fake news has been used to manipulate stock markets, make people choose dangerous health-care options, and manipulate elections, including last year’s presidential election in the U.S.

    Recommended for You

  1. A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
  2. The mass shooting in New Zealand shows how broken social media is
  3. IBM’s photo-scraping scandal shows what a weird bubble AI researchers live in
  4. No, scientists didn’t just “reverse time” with a quantum computer
  5. The collision of two distant galaxies was caught in this new Hubble image

Clearly, there is an urgent need for a way to limit the diffusion of fake news. And that raises an important question: how does fake news spread in the first place?

Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Chengcheng Shao and pals at Indiana University in Bloomington. For the first time, these guys have systematically studied how fake news spreads on Twitter and provide a unique window into this murky world. Their work suggests clear strategies for controlling this epidemic.

At issue is the publication of news that is false or misleading. So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.

These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com. “We did not exclude satire because many fake-news sources label their content as satirical, making the distinction problematic,” say Shao and co. […]

Shad and co say bots play a particularly significant role in the spread of fake news soon after it is published. What’s more, these bots are programmed to direct their tweets at influential users. “Automated accounts are particularly active in the early spreading phases of viral claims, and tend to target influential users,” say Shao and co.

That’s a clever strategy. Information is much more likely to become viral when it passes through highly connected nodes on a social network. So targeting these influential users is key. Humans can easily be fooled by automated accounts and can unwittingly seed the spread of fake news (some humans do this wittingly, of course).

“These results suggest that curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for mitigating the spread of online misinformation,” say Shao and co.

That’s an interesting conclusion, but just how it can be done isn’t clear.

[Full article]

Source:MIT Technology Review


Post link
 Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret The millions of dots on

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret

The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.

One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night.

Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.

An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.

The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s home, information she found disturbing. […]

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.

These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year. IBM has gotten into the industry, with its purchase of the Weather Channel’s apps. The social network Foursquare remade itself as a location marketing company. Prominent investors in location start-ups include Goldman SachsandPeter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder. [Full article]

Source:The New York Times


Post link
When People Are as Predictable as WaterImage: Start of the 2016 Bank of America Chicago Marathon. Le

When People Are as Predictable as Water
Image: Start of the 2016 Bank of America Chicago Marathon. Left panel: images after correction from perspective distortion effects. Right panel: Walking speed of the crowd, measured from a PIV analysis. Credit: Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo

Can we apply a physics-like reductionism to people? That’s a question we asked Simon DeDeo, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, who also heads the Laboratory for Social Minds at the Santa Fe Institute. DeDeo was well suited to the question. With a background in astrophysics, studying galaxy formation, he’s applied a similar, mathematical approach to both contemporary and historical social phenomena (see his Nautilus feature on shifting attitudes toward violent crime, “When Theft Was Worse Than Murder”).“

One of the bugbears of the social sciences—and the study of groups and the origins and development of civilization—is this notion of human nature,” DeDeo told Nautilus editor in chief Michael Segal. “Since the very beginning of what you might call a ‘science of society,’ people have always gone back to this idea that there are some invariants of human society.” These boil down to a list of biological constants that are able to generate a diversity in human societies that somewhat mirrors galactic variety. “If you’re a physicist, you’re really proud of how little you need to assume to get where you’re going—and I think in the modern era now, in the study of society, of human behavior, we’re beginning to develop a taste for those kinds of explanations that get further with less,” DeDeo said.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, to hear that people, moving as a crowd, shift and jostle in ways that render them as predictable as water spilling down a channel. In a paper published in Science this month, two French scientists, Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo, modeled marathon runners as they walked up to the starting line of the Chicago Marathon. However, they modeled the runners not as individuals, but as part of a continuous flowing material. “Guided by the spectral properties of velocity waves, we build on conservation laws and symmetry principles to construct a predictive theory of pedestrian flows without resorting to any behavioral assumption,” the authors wrote.

As if taking a cue from DeDeo—getting further with less—Bain and Bartolo eliminated any trace of human characteristics in their model and explained human behavior with a physicist’s precision. From a practical perspective, they concluded, understanding the behavior of crowds in terms of hydrodynamics could help civic planners design more efficient and safe crowd controls.

Source:Nautilus,phys.org


Post link
visualizingmath: The Ulam Spiral The prime spiral, also known as Ulam’s spiral, is a plot in which t

visualizingmath:

The Ulam Spiral

The prime spiral, also known as Ulam’s spiral, is a plot in which the positive integers are arranged in a spiral with primes indicated in some way along the spiral. Unexpected patterns of diagonal lines are apparent in such a plot. This construction was first made by Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1986) in 1963 while doodling during a boring talk at a scientific meeting. While drawing a grid of lines, he decided to number the intersections according to a spiral pattern, and then began circling the numbers in the spiral that were primes. Surprisingly, the circled primes appeared to fall along a number of diagonal straight lines or, in Ulam’s slightly more formal prose, it “appears to exhibit a strongly nonrandomappearance”

In the above variation of the Ulam spiral, red squares represent prime numbers and white squares represent non-primesImage source.


Post link
image

Muon                                              Tau

Mass: 105.658 MeV/c^2                      Mass: 1776.86 MeV/c^2

Charge: -1 e                                        Charge: -1 e

Spin:  ½                                               Spin:  ½

Color: None                                         Color: None

Antiparticle: antimuon                         Antiparticle: antitau

The muon and tau are second and third generation, respectively, leptons and fermions. There are a total of 6 leptons in the standard model. The electron, muon, and tau are the three which have electric charge while the others, the neutrinos, do not. Both the muon and tau are much more massive than the electron and decaydue to the weak interaction. The muon decays on average 2.2 microseconds (2.2*10^-6 s) into usually an electron and two neutrinos of different types. The tau decays much quicker in 2.9 * 10^-13 seconds into hadrons(composite particles made of two or more quarks, e.g. proton). The tau is the only lepton able to decay into hadrons because it is the only one with sufficient mass.

image

The muon was discovered by Carl D. Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer in 1936 by studying cosmic radiation and observed particles which deflecteddifferently than electrons in a magnetic field. The radius of deflection depends on mass and charge. Since the charge is the same the difference must be accounted through a greater mass.

The tau was theoretically predicted in 1971 by Yung-su Tsai and experimentally detected between 1974-1977 at the Stanford Linear AcceleratorandLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Probably the most well known experiment that involves muons is the Muon g-2 (”g minus 2″) experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory or Fermilab. The goal is to measure the magnetic dipole moment at a very high precision because there is a slight deviation from g=2 (hence g minus 2) known as the “anomalous” part predicted by the Standard Model theory. A large enough difference between the experimentally measured and theoretically determined values could point to the existence of more undiscovered subatomic particles. Read more about the Muon g-2 experiment below:

Muon g-2

Sources:(1)-(2) & Image 2 -(3)Image 1 

 Sneezes, Rain Clouds and Ink Jets: Improved Accuracy in Measuring MicrodropletsScientists boost the

Sneezes, Rain Clouds and Ink Jets: Improved Accuracy in Measuring Microdroplets

Scientists boost the accuracy of optical microscopes to image microdroplets in flight and apply the method to analyze the concentration of plastic nanoparticles.

Sneezes, rain clouds, and ink jet printers: They all produce or contain liquid droplets so tiny it would take several billion of them to fill a liter bottle.

Measuring the volume, motion and contents of microscopic droplets is important for studying how airborne viruses spread (including those that cause COVID-19), how clouds reflect sunlight to cool the Earth, how ink jet printers create finely detailed patterns, and even how a soda bottle fragments into nanoscale plastic particles that pollute the oceans.

By improving the calibration of a conventional optical microscope, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time measured the volume of individual droplets smaller than 100 trillionths of a liter with an uncertainty of less than 1%. That is a tenfold improvement over previous measurements.

Read more.


Post link
 Splashdown: Supersonic cold metal bonding in 3-DWhen a fragile surface requires a rock-hard, super-

Splashdown: Supersonic cold metal bonding in 3-D

When a fragile surface requires a rock-hard, super-thin bonded metal coating, conventional manufacturing processes come up short. However, Cold Gas Dynamic Spray (CGDS) can do just that - with a big caveat. CGDS is enormously versatile, but is also very difficult to predict key aspects of the entire process. Now a temperature-based 3D model by Professor Tien-Chien Jen from the University of Johannesburg starts unlocking the mysteries of the CGDS film-growing process in the particle deposition zone.

Themodel is the first to connect the dots between particle impact velocity, energy transformation, and temperature rise in the particle impact zone, in three dimensions.

CGDS is already used extensively to manufacture or repair metal parts for large passenger airliners, as well as mobile technology and military equipment.

In the process, a de Laval nozzle sprays micron-sized metal particles over a short distance, typically 25mm, at a metal or polymer surface. The particles impact the surface at speeds ranging from 300 meters per second to 800 meters per second. As a frame of reference, the speed of sound is 343 meters per second.

Read more.


Post link

Kim Pimmel interview coming next week

Kim creates stop motion analog vfx with things like ferrofluid, toner particles and magnets. He’s also into synths … our type of guy. Full interview coming next week!

-terry
twitter.com/7electrons

#stop motion    #engineering    #electronic music    #abstract    #particles    #7electrons    

Beyond the Enlightenment Rationalists:
From imaginary to probable numbers - II

image

(continued from here)

When a geometric interpretation of imaginary numbers was at last proposed,  long after they were invented,  it was as though accomplished by central committee. The upshot was easily enough understood but also simplistic. In broad brushstroke here is what seems to have gone down.

The 3 dimensions of Descartes’ coordinate system-a number already deficient from the perspective of mandalic geometry-were reduced to just one.  Of the real number axes then  only the x-axis remained.  This meant from the get-go  that  any  geometric figure that ensued  could encompass only linearity in terms of real numbers and dimensions.  It was applicable only to a line segment,  so the complex plane that resulted  could describe just one real dimension and one imaginary dimension.  It consecrated the number line in a single dimension, to exclusion of its proper habitation in two others besides. Strike one for imaginary numbers.[1]

With that as background let’s look now at the rotations described by this geometric interpretation of imaginary numbers in the context of the complex plane.

image

i in the complex or cartesian plane. Real numbers lie on the horizontal axis, and imaginary numbers lie on the vertical axis By Loadmaster (David R. Tribble) (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0orGFDL],via Wikimedia Commons

The number 1 is the multiplicative identity element for real numbers and the number -1  is the  reflection inversion element  for real numbers.  Put another way, the number one times any number equals that number;  the number -1 times any number is  a negative of that number  or  the inverse number through a reference point, usually taken as zero. Multiplying by 1 then leaves 1, -1, i and -i all unchanged. Multiplying by -1  changes  -1 to 1, 1 to -1, i to -i, and -i to i.  In terms of rotations in the complex plane, these changes  all involve a rotation through 180 degrees.  Multiplication of the number 1 by i changes it to i; i by i changes it to -1; -1 by i to -i; and -i by i to 1.  These changes all involve rotations through 90 degrees.  And finally, multiplication of 1 by -i changes it to -i; -i by -i changes it to -1; -1 by -i to i; and i by -i to 1: all changes involving rotations through -90 degrees.

The figure below shows another way to interpret these rotations that amounts to the same tbing: i1 = i; i2 =-1; i3 = -i; i4 = 1.  Click to enlarge.

image

Four numbers on the real line multiplied by integer powers of the imaginary unit, which corresponds to rotations by multiples of the right angle. By Keφr [CC0],via Wikimedia Commons

I think a committee of some sort must have come up with this resplendent plan. For certain it was an Academy of Mathematics and Sciences that endorsed and enthroned it. All bow to central authority.

I had planned to include a comparison of imaginary numbers and probable numbers in this post as well but because that is a long discussion itself, it will have to wait till the next post.  I might add it should prove well worth the wait.

(continuedhere)

Image: A drawing of the first four dimensions. On the left is zero dimensions (a point) and on the right is four dimensions  (A tesseract).  There is an axis and labels on the right and which level of dimensions it is on the bottom. The arrows alongside the shapes indicate the direction of extrusion. By NerdBoy1392 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0orGFDL],via Wikimedia Commons

Notes

[1] Mathematician William Rowan Hamilton  subsequently addressed this deficiency in 1843 with his  quaternions,  a  number system  that  extends the complex numbers to three-dimensional space.  Hamilton defined a quaternion as the quotient of two directed lines in a three-dimensional space  or,  in other words, as the quotient of two vectors.  This complicated matters even more by introducing a non-commutative multiplication operation to the system, though to be fair the quaternion coordinate system has found some useful applications mainly for calculations involving 3-dimensional rotations,  as in 3-dimensional computer graphics,computer vision, and crystallographic texture analysis. Still it becomes problematic when theoretical physics attempts use of quaternions in calculations pertaining to  atomic and subatomic spaces  where rotations do not actually take place.  The conclusion to be drawn here is that quaternions can be usefully,  if somewhat clumsily,  applied to 3-dimensional macro-spaces but are inapproriate for accurate description of higher dimensional spaces. What is here unfortunate and misleading  is that quaternions apparently do describe outcomes of events in the quantum realm to some partial degree,  if not the mechanisms of the events themselves.  Physicists would not long tolerate them were that not so.

[ADDENDUM (24 APRIL, 2016)
Since writing this I’ve learned
that quaternions are not currently used in quantum physics nor were they ever, to any great degree, in the past.]

In other words, sometimes  the right answer  can be reached by a wrong method. In the case under discussion here, we should note that it is possible for a rotation to mimic inversion (reflection through a point). A 90° rotation in two dimensions can mimic a single inversion in a single plane through an edge of a square, and a 180° rotation in two dimensions can mimic a single inversion through a diagonal of a square  or  two successive inversions  through  two perpendicular edges of a square.  A 180° rotation in three dimensions  can mimic three inversions through three mutually perpendicular edges of a square;  a combination of  one inversion through a diagonal of a square  and another through an edge perpendicular to the plane of the first inversion;  or a single inversion through a diagonal of the cube. Subatomic paricles exist as discrete or quantized entities and would follow such methods of transformation rather than rotations through a continuous space.  Of course, transformations involving a diagonal would require more transformative energy than one involving a single edge.

Such patterns of relationship and transformation could no doubt be described in terms of quantum states and quantum numbers without too much difficulty by a knowledgeable theoretical physicist.  Surely doing so could be no more difficult than using quaternions,  which may give a correct answer while also misleading and limiting knowledge of the the true workings of the quantum realm by using an incorrect mechanism, one non-commutative to boot. Nature doesn’t approve of hat tricks like that.


© 2016 Martin Hauser

Please note:  The content and/or format of this post may not be in finalized form. Reblog as a TEXT post will contain this caveat alerting readers to refer to the current version in the source blog. A LINK post will itself do the same. :)


Scroll to bottom for links to Previous / Next pages (if existent).  This blog builds on what came before so the best way to follow it is chronologically. Tumblr doesn’t make that easy to do. Since the most recent page is reckoned as Page 1 the number of the actual Page 1 continually changes as new posts are added.  To determine the number currently needed to locate Page 1 go to the most recent post which is here. The current total number of pages in the blog will be found at the bottom. The true Page 1 can be reached by changing the web address mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com to mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com/page/x, exchanging my current page number for x and entering.  To find a different true page(p) subtract p from x+1 to get the number(n) to use. Place n in the URL instead of x (mandalicgeometry.tumblr.com/page/n) where
n = x + 1 - p. :)

-Page 307-

Light Splash

#splash    #particles    #mograph    #animation    
loading