Simon Beck's snow art

Cartographer Simon Beck uses snowshoes and math to make BIG art in the snow:








...and sometimes he vacations at the beach:

Diversity topology

In cartography there's a concept called "topology", or in other words the math behind how objects are spatially related to each other.  Topology can be a rather complex field of mathematics.  Luckily people like Vi Hart and Nicky Case can do an excellent job of explaining it.

And they can go a step farther, by using the principles of topology to create an interactive website that illustrates the math behind the segregation of "slight" racism.

Proof

I'm fairly decent at most math.  I thoroughly disliked proofs

Topology

I'm posting this because it mentions topology and modern geographics is heavily dependent on mathematical topology,  

Out of this world

That's nice?

Beauty of Mathematics

This is a still from a video about the Beauty of Mathematics.  At about the 0:50 mark the example is a weather map.  It's a pleaseent view of math set to pretty music from Parachutes.tv.

BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS from PARACHUTES.TV on Vimeo.

60-second thought experiments

Today's map animation comes from a compilation of 60-second explanations of famous thought experiments. Specifically, the first clip comes from the explanation of Einstein's "Twin Paradox" thought experiment. It has both the earth globe and a GPS joke. The complete video is below that.

Travelling Salesman two-fer

While there are still a lot more items to post about the Apple Maps troubles, we'll take a break from that this week and post a two-fer from everybody's favorite science/math/tech themed webcomic: xkcd by  Randall Munroe.  Today's two-fer has to do with the "travelling salesman" problem which is a central component of geospatial network and logistics analysis.   

The connection to mapping in this first example is relatively obvious as the representation of the problem is roughly the shape of the U.S.A.  http://xkcd.com/399/

The "title-text" at the actual webcomic says:

What's the complexity class of the best linear programming cutting-plane techniques? I couldn't find it anywhere. Man, the Garfield guy doesn't have these problems ...

The second one is more about just the traveling salesman problem as applied to relationships. Title text:  

It's like the traveling salesman problem, but the endpoints are different and you can't ask your friends for help because they're sitting three seats down.

Update:
I originally meant to post this one to tie into the xkcd comic.  It's from Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal (click on it to make it big enough to read):

Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land

A couple weeks back we had an excerpt from the animated short The Dot and the Line from that giant in animation Chuck Jones. So here we another giant in animation, Walt Disney, with another math-themed animation with "Donald in Mathmagic Land", a fun and educational film from 1959 that many of you may have seen as a kid.  The bit towards the end about sections of a cone ends up showing the globe of the Earth.  Here's just that bit:


Many people who saw this in their youth found it inspiring... although many of the aesthetic qualities and other information about the "Golden Ratio" are actually myths.  Nevertheless, math is still fascinating and this cartoon demonstrates so very many of the reasons why.

The only place I was able to find the entire video on YouTube had an introductory logo for what appears to be a YouTube channel for a guy who is ...um... keenly interested in numerology and symbology and also a quote from the 1995 movie "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers" which, along with the apparently incorrect, information about Walt Disney's Masonry, kinda suggests that the guy who posted it thinks there's something deeply sinister in the cartoon... or maybe he just likes that Halloween movie.

The Dot and the Line: A Romance

Here we have an excerpt from "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics" by the incomparable Chuck Jones.  It's a classic 1965 Oscar-winning short film based on Norton Juster's 1963 book The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics inspired by Edwin Abbott Abbott's 1884 novella "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions."

In this short clip the line imagines himself in various roles of great importance that might impress the dot, the object of his obsessive affection.  One of these roles is, of course, as "The Equator" .... although technically that's a circle, not a line.

This is an impressive piece of art, to be sure, but I can't help feeling that the message of self-discipline comes off as a bit heavy-handed and at the expense of raw unbridled spontaneity.  The film is just dripping with the cultural conflicts of the '60's.  But it certainly deserved its Oscar.

Mathy weather

Another item from the webcomic Abstruse Goose.This one is somewhat like the xkcd comic that paid homage to everything ... and the Discovery channel ad.

Texas textbooks

An editorial cartoon by Mikhaela Reid. This was a comment on the controversy about the Texas Board of Education approving history textbooks which presented a... "different" take on history. It is far, far cheaper for textbook producers to make one textbook for the whole nation's public schools. So those publishers seek to get their books approved in the largest states, because after the larger states are sold, the smaller states tend to follow (not that they have much choice at that point). So the textbook publishers have learned to keep anything that might remotely be considered controversial out of the history textbooks because they don't want to risk not making a sale to the people who get themselves on to the larger states' textbook advisory boards. That's a lot of the reason history can be so boring: All the exciting stuff gets cut. In this controversy the Texas board was seeking changes in the history texts that weren't supported by historical facts. It led to a lot of school boards around the country looking for textbooks that weren't influenced by Texans.

The book with the title "Brrrrr! Our Chilly Planet" is the one that qualifies this editorial cartoon for posting here, with its image of something vaguuely Earth-like. Of course a big fat textbook on just climate or meteorology is unlikely to find its way into a public high school curriculum, no matter what it's climate change position might be.