Internet Justifies Existence

For most of my adult life, I held it as an iron rule that nobody but Ray Charles should be allowed to play the song he'd made a hit, 1959's "What'd I Say."

Then, during one of the random playlists I cued up while working this afternoon, YouTube offered this:



I stand corrected.

Strong Bad Hardest Hit

Adobe has announced it will accept reality and stop updating or offering its Flash web app in 2020. As the article notes, not very many people will miss it.

But as my headline notes, the wacky cast of Homestar Runner depends on Flash for their existence. The site doesn't update much any more, but here's hoping they find a good replcacement and start making some more funny cartoons.

They're Coming Right at Us!

They'd probably burn up in the atmosphere before actually hitting anyone, but it sure doesn't look like it, does it? Which makes me just a touch glad that someone else took it.

Window to When

We're accustomed to seeing old photographs in black and white because that was the simplest and least expensive manner of making them for many years. Taking color pictures was possible, but it was complicated and expensive. If you happened to be a wealthy chemist who got the gift of a special railroad car with its own darkroom from your kinsman Tsar Nicholas II, then you could probably handle it.

Which Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii did, taking color photos of life in many of the most far-flung areas of Russia in the years leading up to World War I and the later Bolshevik revolution. Prokudin-Gorksii was impressed by the many different kinds of people he met in his enormous country, and wanted to use the fascinating technology of color photography to teach children about their diverse homeland. Unfortunately, said WWI intervened, Nicholas made some disastrous decisions that set the stage for the Communist takeover and Prokudin-Gorskii got the heck out before he could be comradized.

The variety of cultures he found is indeed fascinating. We're accustomed to thinking of Russia as gray, cold and oppressed -- and thanks to Vladimir Putin, that last one is making a comeback -- but that's just what you might call "European Russia." As the photo above shows, the vast nation included an astonishing variety of peoples and cultures, and it still does. More of Prokudin-Gorskii's photos are available here, at the Library of Congress.

Sequentially Amazing

Although watching these dominoes fall is pretty amazing, it's not the wildest thing about this video.



Nor is the wildest thing the way her mind must work in order to envision this kind of massive project and how it will look when it's finished. I'm not even really all that amazed that she spent 25 hours putting it together over eight days.

No, I'm most amazed that she put it together in only 25 hours. I'd still be stacking when I was 80...

I'd Let Him Play Through

In Florida, it's not uncommon to see alligators in settings that we ordinarily don't see them -- like out in the open instead of in an enclosure. Especially near bodies of water. Sometimes, Floridians seem almost blasé about the whole business, if they're far enough away from the toothy lizard, that is.

But every now and then even they get a little nervous when ol' Chomp shows up, as did the fellows in this video linked at Time. I suspect most of us would, as the gator in question is probably fifteen feet long. It was taking a stroll along the golf course, and a golf course employee says it's shown up there now and again and is almost like a mascot for some of the players and employees. They don't bother it, she says, and it doesn't bother them.

Well, I am certain I would have no problem keeping my end of that bargain, but betting on the other party keeping his part of that deal might cost you an arm and a leg.

What Did He Say?

Earlier this month, a group of mathematicians met at the University of Oxford in England to discuss something one of their number, Shinichi Mochizuki, calls “inter-universal Teichmüller,” or IUT, theory. Dr. Mochizuki first offered his proof to the maths community in 2012, when he posted his five hundred page proof online.

As you might expect when it comes to a 500-page math problem, the number of people who really understand it doesn't require exponential notation. It may not even require you to remove your shoes to count them up. The conference may have had a goal of explaining Dr. Mochizuki's work, but in the end organizers found themselves settling for the idea that more people than ever before "kind of" get it. And they "kind of" get it in the same way I "kind of" get stochastic oscillators, and while I know that stochastic oscillators are equations that predict trends in stock prices based on their high and low prices over a given length of time, I could neither create nor solve one even if you told me the answer was Angie Harmon's cell phone number and favorite restaurant.

Anyway, frustration amongst the mathematical community over the proof is at a high level, as it seems Dr. Mochizuki feels no obligation to travel the world and teach his proof and some of the folks who say they do understand his work haven't had much success in passing along their knowledge.

And after a couple hours reading up on just the names of the things Dr. Mochizuki writes about, I am no closer to offering a witty yet clear description of what IUT theory is even about, let alone what the proof is supposed to prove. My only victory is that I arrived at this place without having to travel to Oxford and spend four days listening to math professors talk about it, which is probably cheaper for me and requires much less aspirin.

The Fantastic Ordinary

At the beginning of the 20th century, Antarctica was an unexplored icy hell that only a handful of explorers had visited, and then only for relatively brief times.

Today, it has an ATM cash dispenser.

What a world.

So That's How Those Things Work

If you've got a few (dozen) spare hours, you too could design a set-up of dominos that looked and worked like the old Etch-A-Sketch toys.

Or if you haven't got the patience for that (like me) you could watch this:



From FlippyCat.

Scout II

On the one hand, a number of factors seem likely to make Harper Lee's recently-discovered manuscript Go Set a Watchman not as good as her famed To Kill a Mockingbird. As the ABC story notes, the more famous manuscript required quite a bit of editing, and Lee herself is not really capable, health-wise, of interacting with an editor to help make this new one both ready for publication and representative of her own voice for her characters.

On the other hand, with a sequel more or less from Lee's own hand, we can be spared from crap like this being done to Scout, Jem and Atticus.

Let's See a Salmon Try This!

The fish, which swim many miles upstream to reach their spawning grounds, may do something that's pretty impressive for a fish. And they do often have to swim against rapids and leap to higher levels when the river is uneven.

But this dude climbed Niagara Falls:

He's the small red dot in the upper left third of the picture, on the side of the falls that freezes in the winter. The non-frozen part is doing its regular thundering down bit next to him.

Achiever

So, when you were barely out of high school, were you writing a song based on Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit in a language other than your native tongue, accompanying yourself on the guitar while playing fingerstyle? No?



Slacker.

I Have Set My Bow in the Clouds...

Well, technically there are no clouds, and it's not a double rainbow or nothin', but this view of the Milky Way as an arc across the night sky in Utah is pretty cool nonetheless:

The View From Home

Stephen King, Maine's resident horror maven, might be able to tease something scary out of the following picture, taken at the Raven's Nest Cliffs at Acadia National Park in Maine by Adam Woodworth:

Some kind of eldtritch horror hiding behind the stars or something, maybe, I dunno. I'm just too busy saying, "whoa."

Abstract Fields

Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford University has become the first woman and the first person of Iranian birth to win the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics. The prize is awarded annually to mathematicians under 40 for outstanding and groundbreaking work.

Dr. Mirzakhani focuses on what are called "hyperbolic surfaces," a branch of geometry that would be described in layman's terms as "really really weird."

The normal space we live in features what we call "Euclidean geometry," named after good ol' Euclid, the fellow who codified some of the basic features of the way spaces, lines and points relate to each other. One of his postulates is that if you have a line, and a point not on that line, you can only draw one line through that point that is parallel to your first line. That means the two lines stay the same distance apart forever in either direction.

If you tweak the parallel postulate, you can suppose different things, such as parallel lines that eventually intersect. Or, as in the case of the area in which Dr. Mirzakhani works, you suppose there is more than one line through the point that parallels your first line. Usually when you take a basic postulate and assume some different condition for it, eventually you run into a contradiction that proves your altered postulate is false.

Unfortunately for the headache-free existence of non-mathematicians, starting in the 19th century it became clear that there were several geometries that did just fine with an altered parallel postulate. The "hyperbolic geometry" that Dr. Mirzakhani studies is one such vision. This may seem like not such a big deal until you try to make your mind accept the picture of two distinct lines through a single point, both of which are parallel to a third line. There is no real-world situation analogous to this idea, which means people exploring it have to use both sight and imagination to understand what they're doing. In a manner inexplicable to those of us who feel like running an algorithmical victory lap when our checkbooks balance, mathematicians such as Dr. Mirzakhani must combine their math with art in order to understand the fantastic "space" in which they work.

That's worth a medal.

Now THAT's a Selfie

A young man in Nebraska was walking around downtown and spotted Sir Paul McCartney and Warren Buffet sitting on a bench. So he made sure he got into the picture. Hope he asked for some investment and/or songwriting advice as well...

A Look at the World

Some more fantastic photography, this time from several photographers who've taken pictures in Iceland (which, in the country's native language, means "island," and not "land of ice").

The page is in Russian, which your browser can probably translate well enough for the picture labels even if the introductory text is a little strange. Most of the pictures have also been a little enhanced with photo software, it looks to me, but they're still spectacular.

These three look as much like covers from a fantasy novel series as they do photos of actual places:

And even though it's the wrong mythology for the area, this one would make a great illustration for one of the old stories about Vulcan (if you're Roman) or Hephaestus (if you're Greek):

Note: I reduced the picture size uploaded to this page because I'm just copying; the original work at the links is where you should look for the real thing.

Big Little Project

When I putter around in the garage, I may get some old moving boxes or unneeded junk cleaned up.

When Momir Bojic putters around in his garage, he creates an oaken VW Beetle.

I may lack ambition.

Marlin Perkins, Please Call Your Office...

The existence of photo software that lets skilled folks alter almost any image so that it's next to impossible to tell it's not real sometimes lets photographers cheat.

But hard work still exists, and Russian photographer Katerina Plotnikova worked with animal trainers to get these fascinating photos with models and a variety of critters. My two favorite ones are below:

Mr. Bear is a gentleman...

And after a couple too many, Mr. Bear gets a little fresh...

 

I always knew ursinoids couldn't hold their liquor.

Go Light Your World?

Possibly, considering sculptor Andy Yoder made a version of it from painted matchsticks, glued to a frame.

But probably not, since his safety-minded son doused all of the matchsticks with flame retardant before the project began two years ago.