Chalkdust

Love Chalkdusk! My 3 favorite math, physics and cs websites that I discovered this year are: - https://www.quantamagazine.org - http://chalkdustmagazine.com - https://fermatslibrary.com These 3 provide a stream of amazing, very well curated content, with no nonsense or spam. Have learned a ton from these this year.

You reminded me of Chalkdust [0]. I would love to see more publications along these lines. [0] http://chalkdustmagazine.com

SEEKING WORK Location: Dorset, England (Remote) CV: https://colinbeveridge.co.uk/cv/CV_Colin_Beveridge_mathematician.pdf Email: [email protected] I'm a mathematician who can code and write. I love solving problems and I love writing things up in creative and engaging ways -- whether it's explaining why the Black-Scholes equation is what it is, why this bridge [^0] has weird curvy bricks, or how to make your graphs look nice in matplotlib. If a mathematically-switched on writer can solve problems for you, hit me up. I'm open to contract work, freelance projects, or a permanent post. [^0]: https://chalkdustmagazine.com/features/a-canal-runs-through-it/

https://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/review-of-galois-knot-theory/ is probably the best review.

Some of these point arrangements superficially resemble Chladni figures (https://chalkdustmagazine.com/regulars/on-the-cover/cover-chladni-figu… coming from the vibrations of a square drum. Orthogonally, I wonder if these arrangements are generalizable to give lower bounds for N = n^2 + 1

Reminds me of the Hamming distance texture: https://chalkdustmagazine.com/features/the-hidden-harmonies-of-hamming…

Stand up maths did an episode on a similar "machine" called MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine) that learns to play tick tac toe. https://youtu.be/R9c-_neaxeU The video description has additional links to resources: https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/19 http://chalkdustmagazine.com/tag/menace/

If we're looking at the hull story, J J Sylvester might be of tangential interest to some. https://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/sylvesters-convex-hull-problem/

There is an RSS feed: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/feed/ Pretty sure there's a mailing list - certainly I get email from them. Here are their contact details: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/contact/

The mailing list link is http://chalkdustmagazine.com/sign-up-to-the-newsletter/

That's strange. Didn't find it, now it's there. Did they just add it? I'm using the TLS version, though: https://chalkdustmagazine.com/feed/

This is an awfully verbose write-up trying to glean a kind of handwavy deeper meaning behind flocking. I kind of get what its going for, you'll see a lot of interesting crowd behavior from a simple view of a predator-prey model where you replace lions consuming gazelles with arrests. A couple people have asked me about what they should wear to protests and I suggested wearing zebra stripes. If enough people do it, it makes it hard to visually track what direction people are going in when they disperse and has the benefit of reducing bug bites. The idea here is good though, a swarm is a decent model for how protestors should behave because their forces are about numbers whereas the police are about specialization. I mean one of the more remarkable things about protests globally is the emergence of more distinct support classes offering dedicated services. As soon as trouble brews, I see people on both sides clearing out the most vulnerable because they probably can't afford to get arrested. There's definitely a hierarchy of high-value targets unfortunately. A good example is the emergence of white shields. If you really want to get into it, attrition models here model rates for both factions. You can simulate it yourself with a cellular automata model for a visual representation. Appropriate considering they are literally using phalanxes. http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-warfare Here's the interesting thing to me. What allows swarm behavior in humans isn't the…

The entire system is really cool! Polygons with a negative number of sides: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/thinking-outside-box Polygons with a fractional number of sides: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/fractional-polygons (hint: the pentacle you may summon a demon with is a fractional-sided polygon) Polygons with -2 to 2 sides: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/overturned-polygons I think the analysis of [-2..2] (including the boundaries, 2-sided 'polygons' that he calls 'digons') is questionable. Polygons consist of straight lines, so bending lines and introducing loops seems unjustifiable until you can tell me how to distinguish a bent line from a curve. Until then, polygons with -2 to 2 sides are just lines, at least the parts we can see in our mathematical universe. I can understand the temptation to fill in the number line, but perhaps we should just accept that some of the shapes are singularities, hidden within a mathematical event horizon.

Though for this specific discussion (which illustrates the uncountably infinite nature of the set of real numbers), it is useful to note that the class of realizable computers includes both analog and digital variants, though usually we are more familiar with the digital in the form of our desktop/laptop computers or servers. Analog computers can be indeed be used for these types of problems, and their usage in the field predates their digital siblings. Sampling of the result of an analog calculation is of course limited by analog noise (e.g. thermal noise), which we must contend with in this universe. On the other hand, processing in the analog domain gets us further than quantization noise and heat dissipation (due to clock signal & switching) would in the digital domain. Edit: If you are interested further, here is a discussion of the application of analog computing in solving differential equations: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/features/analogue-computing-fun-different… Also, someone on here once posted a link to a recent dissertation comparing the efficiency of solution finding for a problem tackled analog vs. digital, wherein given the problem's nature, the analog computer outperformed its digital counterpart both in terms of performance and energy consumption. Edit2: Here is the dissertation http://www.cisl.columbia.edu/grads/gcowan/vlsianalog.pdf And the comment it was from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11728186