I was reading the other day about the Tube Challenge, where people attempt to visit all 270 stations on the London Underground in the quickest possible time. Apparently successful routes are a closely-guarded secret, which got me thinking about how difficult an optimisation problem it must be to find the best route.
I saw an article on the Guardian website here on the 3D-printing of shapes which project interesting patterns of light. Ignoring the strangely forced Halloween reference, I thought this would be an interesting project to attempt for an arbitrary pattern, perhaps as a personalised lampshade. Buoyed by the continuing high of leftover sweets from Friday night, let’s have a look.
A while back I heard about the Summer Data Challenge, hosted by my university. A number of datasets are available to download and analyse, and I chose to look at data on the selling price of properties in London over the past 5 years. I’ve assembled a number of plots here in order to examine this slightly cumbersome dataset more easily.
Diseases have been in the news recently, for one reason or another, and journalists are engaged in an increasingly ridiculous race to construct the most alarming headlines possible. How about we cut through the noise and indulge in a calming bit of maths?
I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong:
The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector ‘read out’, i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about, lets have a look.
From a recent post I’ve had the scripts lying around to calculate the trajectories of particles around black holes. The paths were pretty crazy, which got me wondering what such a system would look like. For that I need to calculate how photons move around black holes, which is a slightly different problem, and doesn’t offer up much in the way of puns for post titles…
If you’re anything like me, the excruciating boredom of a trip to the supermarket is enough to get you thinking about anything else, in a desperate attempt to avoid a conversation on the best value lettuce on offer. I’ll do you a favour then by presenting some brain-fodder suitable for the next grocery hell-ride.
What’s in a rainbow? Fairytales and pixie dust? Gold and leprechauns? A boatload of drugs? Nope, just clear cold geometry and physics, just how we like it.
I’ve spend an unreasonably significant fraction of my life sitting in traffic, particularly along the infamous M4 corridor in England. Now, living in London I’m well acquainted with the various ways traffic jams can form. The ones which result from stuffing too many cars into too tiny streets have an obvious cause. Somewhat more irritating are those forming for seemingly no reason out on the motorway – queueing for ages at a standstill only to suddenly drive away like nothing happened. I’ve spent enough time in this unenviable state that it’s almost (though inevitably not quite) worth dedicating some brain time to thinking about why.
During one of my many spells stumbling around on the internet, I came across a very cool paper on modelling the trajectories of particles around black holes (bear with me…). It has all the required ingredients for this blog: maths, physics, nice pictures, and the chance to throw in a Muse reference. Let’s have a look.
Almost looks like work 