Cosmos Computed

For some reason I felt like this was relevant Happy Pi Day! The digits of the date - 3.14 - contain the first couple digits of π. But that's not all. If you add the year to get 3.14.16, you have the first 5 rounded digits of π. This is better than last year's version (3.14.15), which contained a truncated version of π. Today's date contains the more accurate rounded version. In this post, I'll describe the process of finding an algorithm to approximate the number π. There are three main types of algorithms. The first type converges very quickly to the correct solution; we use algorithms of this type in computers and calculators. The second type converges slowly, but is interesting to think about; we take this type of algorithm to mathematics conferences. The third type is slow to converge, and is boring to think about; these are pretty much useless so we get rid of them. This may be interesting to know, but I wasn't too worried about it when I wrote my Pi Day post l...

First off, apologies for this long-overdue post. I've had a busy month, and although I would have liked to post this within a few days of the beginning of 2016, I wasn't able to get it done until now. 2015 was a great year, and I think the images in this post will reflect that. In the previous year's image collection ( click here to view ), the images were only photographs. The image editing was restricted to cropping; I didn't need anything more. In this collection, though, I have drawings, CGI, and microphotography. These new types of images required more processing to prepare them for viewing. Of course, I used GIMP. I can't afford to pay for software. Instead of listing tons of images, I picked out the most important ones. I also tried not to add the images from previous blog posts; the majority of what follows is new stuff. I also attempt to analyze the images from both a scientific and artistic standpoint. Most likely, by the time most of you read this, you...

I'm thinking of two common English words, W1 and W2. W1 is half as long as W2, but has twice the syllables. When combined, the two words form a phrase that can be used to refer to a nonspecific stage of a meal. The letters in these two words can be rearranged to form two new common words: W3, and W4. W3 is half as long as W4, and it also has half the syllables. The two words, when combined, may be used when telling somebody to draw with a certain art medium. What are all four words? New posts every month - subscribe for free !

The Perseid meteor shower is coming up! After midnight on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, an observer under a dark sky may see up to 100 meteors per hour - an average of nearly 2 per minute. If you live in a city, the light pollution will wash out most of the meteors, so the countryside or mountains will be a much better place to watch them. Meteors start as small bits of material floating in space, usually dropped from comets that passed through the area. At this stage, they are called "meteoroids". When the earth passes through a cluster of these particles, they hit our atmosphere and burn up as meteors, and we have what's called a meteor shower. If you're looking up at the sky, and you see a streak of light zip a short distance and then disappear, this is a meteor. One of the best things about this particular shower is that the moon won't come out all night, so the sky will be darker than usual - making it possible to see more meteors than in most showers. If ...

This morning, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to make a flyby observation of the Pluto system. During the mission, the spacecraft captured the most detailed photographs of Pluto's surface we've ever had, and possibly ever will have. It also found many new properties including size, mass, atmosphere, and surface composition. In a period of a few hours, we discovered more about Pluto than we've found in the 85 years since Clyde Tombaugh captured its first photograph. Before After  (images credit: NASA) To complete this mission, the spacecraft flew for more than 9 years through the emptiness of space. This may sound like a long time, but it's actually amazingly quick. In fact, New Horizons set the record for the fastest speed at launch, and during the flyby, the spacecraft was moving at a rate of over 30,000 mph, or roughly 50 times the speed of sound. Picture an object twice as heavy as a grand piano moving 25 times faster than a bullet from a gun. Yikes. The man...

Edit: April Fool's. The article completely fails to answer for the benefits of math and science (including medicine and natural disaster prediction). It grossly exaggerates the negative aspects of math and science. Incidentally, math and science have made a large positive difference in my life. Good morning, everybody! I decided to write a blog post to say that I will be completely changing the way I view knowledge and the purpose of life. Photo credit: my sister Basically, "higher" knowledge (including logic, science, mathematics, etc.) is completely useless. There is no point in learning these subjects, which is why I have dropped all my college classes and will not be going to school today. Instead, we should go to the fields, with a shovel and a rake, and grow crops. I will therefore end my blog and begin life as a worker at a ranch in Wyoming. Why this sudden change, you might ask? A few days after my last post (which nobody seemed to read), I came upon a realizatio...

The year of 2014 is over; the year of 2015 has begun. Over the past year, I took a lot of pictures - more than 1200 photos of clouds, bugs, plants, rocks, and more. I deleted most of the low-quality and repetitive photos. Then, I selected 20 of the remaining photos which I thought were the most interesting or significant. In this post, I'll include those photos, in chronological order. Spring 1. Cold Hummingbird I took this photo after a late snowstorm in Spring. In the days leading up to the storm, it was warm and sunny and the fields were green, so the snow came rather unexpectedly. During the storm, one of the hummingbirds at our feeder was covered in ice and could barely fly. This hummingbird was more fortunate, but unlucky nevertheless. 2. Green Landscape I took this photo on the side of a biking trail. I didn't edit or crop the photo - this is how it looked. 3. Indian Paintbrush The Indian Paintbrush is an unusual flower. What appear to be flower petals are actually brigh...