How to Count Infinity
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities” - Hazel Grace Lancaster, in “The Fault in Our Stars,” by John Green
minutephysics is now on Google+ - http://bit.ly/qzEwc6
And facebook - http://facebook.com/minutephysics
And twitter - @minutephysicsMinute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics — all in a minute!
Music by Nathaniel Schroeder
Thanks to Perimeter Institute for support.
http://www.perimeterinstitute.caI feel kind of silly but I don’t understand this? I mean I understand WHAT its saying but I want to disagree. I know I shouldn’t but am I wrong to question it?
Its always good to question things we don’t understand, that’s how we learn. In this case its just very counter-intuitive (like most advanced maths).
Another example to try and explain this:
Think of all the “natural”, or “counting”, numbers. 1, 2, 3 … 400 … 5 billion … etc
You can drop a decimal-point in front of any of these numbers and get a decimal between 1 and 2.
So now you have an infinite series of decimals between 1 and 2, and that’s the same “size” as the infinite series from 1 to ∞.
But you can go a step further, by taking these decimals and putting them in front of the full series.
So between 0.1 and 0.2 you have another infinite series that’s the same size as between 1 and 2.
Then do it again. So that that between 0.11 and 0.12 there’s a third infinite series of the same size. But not just there, there’s another one between 0.12 and 0.13, and one between 0.40 and 0.41, and so on…
So we can just keep going, doing that an infinite number of times for every decimal place.
What's your heroic title?
Caroline, The Cold Call-Center Agent.
Taela, The Friendly Guardian.
Rinzi, The Inexhaustible Killer.
Flo, The Apocalypse Summoner.
Little Golden Apple, The Strong Oracle
Ignatius, The Dragon Food-Seller.
Jake Lsewhere, The Terror’s Swordsman.
via quantumaniac:
Solar System Symbols
Hey now, if we’re going to include Pluto, don’t neglect the other “dwarf” planets.
Ceres
Eris
Haumea
Makemake
Orcus
Quaoar
Varuna
Ixion
Sedna
Ceres & Eris are more or less “official”, others are from Denis M Moskowitz, because they’re cool.
“Science On!” ; Archiving Science On Tumblr.
A blog dedicated to bringing the science world of Tumblr closer together in a quick and easy way of archiving who blogs about what, so other science enthusiasts can search for new and upcoming blogs to follow.Remember that idea I talked about earlier? Well, it’s been created! We all want to follow new science blogs online - and there sure is a lot of them - so this will be an easy way to find what you’re looking for. Read below for more information.
What Is It Again?: If you post and/or have blogs on Tumblr fully dedicated to the world of science, we want you! What “Science On” is dedicated to achieving is archiving who blogs about what types of science on Tumblr. There will be tags you can search, pages with lists of blogs fully categorised on what they blog about, and an easy way to find new blogs right from your dashboard.
How Does It Work?: Go to the page - scienceon.tumblr.com - and click the “submit” button. Follow the instructions on how to submit your blog, and send! These posts will then be published for the followers to see through their dash or by visiting the blog. Then once it’s published, we’ll archive your blog(s) under the appropriate categories in our “science categories” section. Here’s an example of what I (crownedrose) would submit:
Blog: crownedrose.tumblr.com
Fields Discussed: Palaeontology, Geology, with other tidbits of Astronomy and nature in between.
Extra Information: I mainly focus on Mesozoic theropods, but I post and discuss Palaeontology as a whole, along with Geology. I also blog other types of science too, plus some random topics as well. One of my main work series on Tumblr is called “Theropod Of The Day”, where I write posts up discussing theropods and information you may (and may not!) have known originally. I also contribute to two other science related blogs: geologise, and scinerds.As well, if you have multiple science blogs like I do, please submit each blog separately. It will make our job of archiving blogs much easier. If you want to add other blogs you contribute to in the extra info section (as I did above), you’re more than welcome, but those blogs will not be counted unless they are submitted separately.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I’m still getting the blog 100% up and running, but let’s get submitting to really get a good archive of science blogs on Tumblr! Feel free to reblog this post to spread the word to the science bloggers out there! I feel it’ll be very beneficial for everyone out there in search of science-related blogs.
Tumblr is shaping up to have one of the biggest communities of science-bloggers out there, not by design, but by a combination of utility and emergent community. So, I’m gad to see an independent, community, self-driven project like to collate all of us together and make that networking even easier.
LIVE- SpaceUp SF
SpaceUp is a space unconference, where participants decide the topics, schedule, and structure of the event. Everyone who attends SpaceUp is encouraged to give a talk, moderate a panel or start a discussion. Sessions are proposed and scheduled on the day they’re given, which means the usual “hallway conversations” turn into full-fledged topics.
I was skateboarding around town today looking for good spots when suddenly I stumbled upon this thingamajig . Its pretty much a small public library. You take a book out than bring back another book to put in. I took a Mitch Albom book who’s a really good author. In return I’m going back tomorrow and putting my copy of Dante’s Inferno in there.
NBC did a short piece on these nifty little library things, for their Nightly News a few weeks ago. I love this idea, and keep thinking about making one locally.
Thanks macmankev for submitting this!! :O
Shirt.Woot Presents: Mathcathalon!
Shirt.Woot is having a limited sale on math themed shirts, hoodies, book totes and even a backpack and an apron. Check out these designs and others. And if you want one for Pi Day, be sure to get faster shipping.
Don’t just get your math on, put your math on!
I just ordered an I Heart Math tote bag because I am an impulsive buyer and guys, math.
Bought the “Extended Bell Curve” shirt. It’ll be nice to have it on a shirt after being my Tumblr icon for so long :D
Gooddess, I want one of each … :eyes checking account: …
THIS. Omg.
Well, “Is a blast at Christmas and birthdays” literally made me snarf hot coffee… so I’ll pass this along.
Archaeologists strike gold in quest to find Queen of Sheba’s wealth
via archaeologicalnews:
A British excavation has struck archaeological gold with a discovery that may solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba of biblical legend derived her fabled treasures.
Almost 3,000 years ago, the ruler of Sheba, which spanned modern-day Ethiopia and Yemen, arrived in Jerusalem with vast quantities of gold to give to King Solomon. Now an enormous ancient goldmine, together with the ruins of a temple and the site of a battlefield, have been discovered in her former territory.
Louise Schofield, an archaeologist and former British Museum curator, who headed the excavation on the high Gheralta plateau in northern Ethiopia, said: “One of the things I’ve always loved about archaeology is the way it can tie up with legends and myths. The fact that we might have the Queen of Sheba’s mines is extraordinary.”
An initial clue lay in a 20ft stone stele (or slab) carved with a sun and crescent moon, the “calling card of the land of Sheba”, Schofield said. “I crawled beneath the stone – wary of a 9ft cobra I was warned lives here – and came face to face with an inscription in Sabaean, the language that the Queen of Sheba would have spoken.” Read more.
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here…
via ignatius-m:
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - [I pretty much hate whoever made this list originally for treating the whole of Shakespeare’s output as a single book … and then appending Hamlet at the end. I’ve read about half … and I get credit for reading Hamlet. Fuckers.] {I second this rant, wtf.}
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis - [Apparently not a part of the Chronicles of Narnia]
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert {So is this the series, like Harry Potter or Narnia or just the one book?}
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Winterval Music
Non-sectarian songs for the Winter Festival Season of Midwinter, Yule, Solstice, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Years and all the rest.
Its that time of year again, hope everyone enjoys the music. Anyone with suggestions, please feel free to share.
?
Yesterday we focused on Nobel-an eponym that has entered the world of science courtesy of the man who invented dynamite (only one of hundreds of patents he held) and whose will created the prize that bears his name.
Today, however, we turn away from the eponym and focus on the opposite effect. Today is the birthday of Annie Jump Cannon, known variously as one of ‘Harvard’s Computers’ or one of ‘Pickering’s Harem’. She is credited along with Edward Pickering as the creator of the Harvard Classification Scheme which remains the foundation of today’s stellar classification system.
One of a dozen women hired by Pickering to do the hard work of identifying, classifying and cataloging hundreds of stellar objects, Cannon distinguished herself as the brightest of the bright and rose finally to a full professorship before her death in 1941. While no eponym celebrates her name, her contribution (along with the remaining group at Harvard) as well as the countless women throughout history to impact science, math, politics and all human endeavor, today we remember and say Happy Birthday. A true pioneer, gone but not forgotten.
Image curently in the public domain courtesy New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper.
Today’s post is for hb.
These are the patterns of planets orbiting around each other. It’s as though they’re eternally dancing around each other. Each step, pattern, movement makes a beautiful shape unique to their relationship. It’s so… glorious.
It also hurts my eyes if I stare at it for too long.
All based on this:
“Take the orbits of any two planets and draw a line between the two planet positions every few days. Because the inner planet orbits faster than the outer planet, interesting patterns evolve.”
Lovely!
These are so beautiful.
It’s the Doctor Who theme, a capella- now with lyrics!
I was so pumped for Saturday, I couldn’t help but sing! The lyrics are comprised of some of my favorite Doctor-isms. Sorry for the crappy construction paper bow-tie and fez.
TROCKAPELLA!has anyone told you you’re perfect today or
oh this is just so beautiful and perfect.



