Chaos3612 - Chaotic Dynamics

What do we say when we are in a Summer School and we are living hard the impostor syndrome life?

We say: I'm gonna take these much-smarter-than-me people and asked them a fuckton of questions. And I won't stop asking until I have absorbed all their knowledge and they've forgotten their own name.

Alejandro Guijarro photographs the chalkboards of some of the brightest minds in quantum physics for his continuing series Momentum. He went to research facilities like CERN and many of the top universities in the world to find them.

Moving blog! @chaoticaldynamics

Hi everyone! I’m moving my blog to @chaoticaldynamics

Long story, but tumblr is a chaotic website. Follow me there if you are interested!

Water calms me down for some reason

ESO’s La Silla Observatory over the night sky

Image credit: ESO

really in love with my workspace and bedroom lately. Messy but warm.

my instagram

The 'witch' who protected a village from genocide

Zura Karuhimbi had only her wits to protect the people she hid during the Rwandan genocide.

This s the obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who may have been over 100 years old when she died and protected hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide. 

She did it by pretending to have magic powers. 

Picture with me for a moment the sheer gall necessary to do this. An old woman, living alone, stuffs her tiny house with people running from militias. And when the militias show up at her door covers herself with irritating plants, so that when the militia try to manhandle her it ‘burns’ and proves her powers. 

We’ve lost a legend.

It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

Littlewood polynomials are polynomials all of whose coefficients are either +1 or −1 (so even 0 is not allowed). If you take all Littlewood polynomials up to a certain degree, calculate all their (complex) roots, and plot those roots in the complex plane, then you get a beautiful fractal-like structure above.

The image is slightly misleading, because the “holes” on the unit circle tend to completely fill in if the degree goes up. Intuitively, the holes mean that complex numbers on the unit circle that are close to low-degree roots of unity are hard to approximate by low-degree Littlewood polynomials (unless they already are roots of unity).

In particular the structure at the edge of the ring is deeply interesting. Notice the familiarity with the dragon curve?

Heres the thing you gotta understand about statistics. 

“Increases your chances by 80%” does not mean “there is now an 80% chance”. 

If your chances were previously 10%, your chances are now 18%, not 90%. 

if your chances were roughly 1%, they’re now just slightly less than 2%. 

thats how that works.