Drawing for everyone

Mark Jason Dominus:

If you wanted to hear more about phylogeny, Java programming, or tree algorithms, you are about to be disappointed. The subject of my article today is those fat black lines.

I had no idea that the PBM/PGM/PPM formats were so simple. (Or that I had forgotten so much Perl.)

Now that I know, I feel strangely empowered.

As a direct result of that article, here are some SVG images I made in Python. (Heh.)
[For a reply to my mother about the Missing-square puzzle.]

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African Institute of Mathematical Sciences

TED talk by Neil Turok.

Neil Turok is a mathematician/physicist at Cambridge University.

He has founded an institute in Africa from which students have graduated to go on to great places, including for instance a student who is now pursuing a PhD at Cambridge under Stephen Hawking. They now want to start (a few) similar institutions in other sciences, and hope to replicate these successes.

Other notable highlights from the talk:

Maps from World Mapper. Maps in which countries’ areas correspond to a certain characteristic. Along with Gapminder, wonderfully illustrative visualisation tools.

“All known physics” equation:

Probably the most interesting blog I’ve seen

I’m afraid to look at it, because I expect I’ll get tempted into spending hours and hours reading all the old posts: Strange Maps