Maths Blogs

I just found a really cool list of mathematical blogs by academics on Hacker News. I apologize for the several week lull since my last post.

Nothing is Original

It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to

The Vastness of The Universe

Bellow is a short video, “The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D” which makes you wonder at the size of the universe.

What are the 5 most important things you’ve learnt in life?

Okay, so I asked 10 people to tell me the 5 most important things they have learnt in life in no particular order. Here are the replies in no particular order:

Individual A:

• Not to limit my beliefs and abilities to merely what I consider logical and possible.
• How important good friends are.
• To take time each day to slow right down and just enjoy creation.
• That it’s okay to need things and want to feel secure, significant and accepted.
• Not to try to find absolute fulfilment in a person, a job or a hobby.

Individual B:

• When you recognize Truth, you will be overwhelmed and joyous, and then you will be accepting. After this, if you allow it to, it will encompass you wherever you may be.
• At most, you can only try your best. You do not control the outcome. Accepting this makes those difficult moments easier, if only a little bit.
• Inner peace will get you through just about anything. The journey towards inner peace begins by forgiving people, overlooking their faults and having a genuine concern for them.
• Maths is difficult but maths is oh so cool.
• If you don’t stand for something you really will fall for anything. Alongside this also learn to take on board advice and criticism and realize that everyone gets it wrong sometimes.

Individual C:

• Everyone is really weird and messed up in private. I have learnt this through accidentally discovering horrible ridiculously weird things that my immediate family do in private, and also through grouphug.us and things that I do. and maybe it could be just that I have a weird family and everyone on that website is weird, but I think it’s more likely that everyone has disgusting weird habits and thoughts that they’d never tell anyone. That’s probably not a very important thing to learn though, because everyone just ignores it and can talk to people properly and formally, ignoring that they’ve just been doing unusual things with vegetables or having imaginary conversations with the mirror.
• For everything I am good at, there is someone who can do it better. and likewise there are people worse off than me in every respect of my life.. i.e. I am pretty average and most probably won’t make any impact on mankind.
• Quite a lot of people apart from me also think they are the subject of The Truman Show and everyone else isn’t real.. so it can’t be true.
• Life is a bit mean. of all the human emotions only one of them is positive (joy) and all the others are either negative or neutral. I’m not sure what my point is by that.. maybe that i have learnt it’s a bit tricky to be in a constant state of joy (i.e. impossible).
• and maybe my most important thing I have learnt is that the world is really, really tiny. there’s this picture taken from 8 billion miles away or something (I’ll find a link) that shows the earth as a tiny weeny dot and it’s so amazing. to think that everything that seems really important happens in such a tiny place.. here’s the link.. which is a bit scary I think because there is no possible way that I will ever be able to understand everything but also quite comforting when you’re sad, makes you realise there’s no point being sad.

Individual D:

• Health and taking care of your body (as you only get one!) is kinda a prerequisite (unless you can’t help it) for enabling you to do mental and physical activities to the fullest, so basically: eat and drink well, exercise, meditate, stretch.. blablabla – being unhealthy can limit your potential.
• There’s never enough time to do everything you could possibly want to try out in life, so think about what types of things you enjoy doing best, and MAKE the time for them! – prioritize.
• Don’t waste time worrying about little things but train yourself to have positive thoughts (because happiness is a STATE of mind after all, not something that you achieve once and for all, but that happens in moments). – Live in and savour the present.
• Don’t compare yourself with other people too much, although it is a bit inevitable, but try and discover what path will suit you the most, and put things into perspective. – Zoom out into the bigger picture.
• Your aim is to, at the end of your life, looking back, feel as little regret as possible, have as many heart-warming and fun memories as possible, and to be proud of your life story and the decisions you made, with the circumstances outside your control you were in. – Choice Circumstances.

Individual E:

• Your family and friends are the most important thing you will ever have in this world, even more than the things you really really really like, such as football, or cars.
• Your brain is immensely complicated, and it takes very little for everything to go tits-up, and it’s really harsh if it happens.
• Being satisfied with your everyday life is pretty important. If you find it boring or monotonous then do something else (exceptions to this rule include your spouse and your kids).
• Being in relationships is really nice, and makes you feel good about yourself.
• Being in a relationships totally sucks.

Individual F:

• Anything is subject to change. (I don’t know, in a way I learned that from my failings. I think that to a certain degree I’m in control of the change itself but on a level where I can’t directly waiver the exact direction of where things should go. Actually it’s more like I do choose the direction, but I can not be aware of the situation enough to actually pick and choose. I use to make plans, long term plans, but every single one of them I’ve given up at some point, and even if I later went back to some of my old goals it was in a totally different pattern from the one I had hoped for. I’m in control of my paucity of control… not to mention how other people manage to alter your life without you even asking them for the favour.)
• My mom will die one day, and that’s okay. It’s the scariest thought ever but yea, it was important that I realized that for myself and try to make use of time.
• God is an Artist.
• Being honest is beautiful. Use it wisely… not for your benefit but more so for that of others.
  So hard… but feels so nice when you done.
• I’m beautiful and exceptional and it’s okay to know that. You must love yourself to be able to give love.

Individual G:

• Don’t hold grudges. The only person you damage is yourself.
• Friends are far more important than boyfriends. Friends are forever, boyfriends never are.
• The best thing for anger, sadness or feeling blue is to cook.
• Travelling really does broaden your mind and blow away the cobwebs like nothing else.
• Don’t beat yourself up when you’ve done the best you could possible do.

Individual H:

• Your parents aren’t always right.
• Being alone is sometimes actually really important.
• Even if you think you love someone…if it ends if probably wasn’t really love.
• Trusting people is really hard – even if it supposed to be the most important thing in any relationship – it’s pretty much impossible to completely trust anyone.
• Go with your gut instinct – it’s usually right.

Individual I:

• Always back up files on your computer. I mean actually do it. I should do it again now… maybe even twice. Though it might not happen very much, if you’ve not backed up, and something goes wrong, you really are screwed.
• It’s cliché, but, nothing is impossible. Seriously… don’t stop trying to do something you want to do because you think there’s no chance you can do it. There are MANY times in my life I’ve surprised myself and done things I didn’t think I would.
• Compliment people.
• After a drinking a lot of alcohol, drink loads of water before you go to sleep. I don’t just mean a couple of glasses of water either. Drink so much you feel like you’ll puke, then go to sleep, and you’ll feel a lot better in the morning.
• If you’re a student, take advantage of the McDonald’s student offer. Not many people know about it, but you get a free cheeseburger with any standard meal if you show your card.

Individual J:

• You can never really truly 100% trust anybody. Probably the hardest lesson to learn.
• Nobody is perfect.
• If it doesn’t kill you, even if it’s awful at the time, it makes you stronger.
• Make the most of the opportunities that come your way.
• You should never be too proud to ask for help.

Optical Illusion: I

Optical Illusion I - Rings of Squares

Programs I Use To Automate Stuff: I – Autohotkey

Autohotkey is an incredibly useful programmable hotkey utility for Windows. When you hear the term ‘hotkey’ you probably think of something like using ctrl + a to highlight text, or win + d to show your desktop. Now, true, these kinds of shortcuts are useful, and speed you up no end, but Autohotkey allows you to take the humble hotkey to a whole new level. Almost anything you can think of can be assigned to a hotkey. You could:

• Create simple programs to carry out repetitive tasks while you relax.
• Create a program to automate tedious game sections, or allow you to achieve a bragably high score.
• Reconfigure the buttons on programs that don’t have this functionality built in, to make life easier for yourself.
• Create your own personalised set of shortcuts to do the things you do daily. (You could press shift + e, say, to check all your email and social networking accounts).

Clearly I could go on. Because Autohotkey is somewhere between simple hotkey utility and powerful programming language, there is little limit to what you can do, whilst at the same time the learning curve isn’t very steep at all. Especially if you have any previous programming experience. Two final things, although I’m using it on Windows right now, I think you can also run it on Linux using WINE, and lastly, Autohotkey also enables you to create GUIs, so the world really is your oyster.

Go download it here.

Learn Maths Online

I have spoken to a lot of people who’d like to be able to improve their maths skills from home online, and have decided to try and create a pool of useful free online maths education resources. Here we go:

• MathTV.com – This site has lots of helpful short video lessons split into 4 main sections: basic maths, algebra, trigonometry and calculus. It also has a ‘textbook’ feature, essentially a sequence of videos for learning a given area. For example, an algebra ‘textbook’  is a series of progressive videos, which build on each other and attempt to slowly increase your algebraic ability.
• MathForum.org – Ask Dr Math on The Math Forum has a large archive of educational maths materials. For example, doing a quick search for “fractions” led me to a great “Converting Fractions, Decimals, and Percents” explanation.
• That Quiz – Although this site isn’t solely for maths, (it has small amounts of vocabulary, geography and science educational material too), it does mainly focus on maths, and provides good interactive tests for 20 basic maths topics.
• Jimmy R’s Speed Math Trainer – This site allows you to give your mental arithmetic skills a serious boost. Perhaps the main attraction is the Speed Maths flash application, which manages to make mental arithmetic strangely addictive. There is also a list of tips and tricks for increasing the speed and complexity of mental calculations you can perform.
• Standard Google Plug – You probably hear it about eighteen times a day, and you certainly already know, but Google is great for finding stuff. Maths resources are no exception, and if you know what you want to learn you can make your search terms pretty specific. Just try searching for something like ‘fraction tutorials’ or ‘free online algebra lessons’ and I’m sure you’ll find something. If you find anything really good, let me know.

This list is more than likely work in progress. Hope it’s helpful.

Robotic Hand Video

Check out this amazing high speed robot hand demonstrating it’s ability to throw and catch, spin a pen, tie knots, dribble a ping-pong ball and use tools designed for humans:

Then, if you liked that, check out Hizook – The Robotics News Portal, for robotics information, articles and videos.

Maths and Computer Science Puzzles

Today I came across Gurmeet Singh Mankus blog, which contains a really good set of mathematical / computational puzzles and solutions:

go check them out here

Also, he has an interesting selection of computer science related posts here, as well as some other interesting stuff, so I encourage you to explore his blog.

Two Lists of Recommended Computer Science Papers

Very short post, just two links to loads of recommended computer science papers:

• Wikipedia’s “List of important publications in computer science”
• List of papers recommended by people on Reddit.