There Is No Branch Of Mathematics, However Abstract, Which May Not Some Day Be Applied To Phenomena Of

websurfer1994:

me: *overestimates the length of a yellow light and completely 100% runs a red light* me while driving away: I AM A BEACON OF SIN I AM A BEACON OF SIN I AM A BEACON OF SIN I AM A BEACON OF SIN I AM A BEACON OF SIN I AM A BEACON OF SIN I AM A BEACON OF SIN I

Do math majors graduate with degrees or radians?

Mars will lose its largest moon, but gain a ring

Mars’ largest moon, Phobos, is slowly falling toward the planet, but rather than smash into the surface, it likely will be shredded and the pieces strewn about the planet in a ring like the rings encircling Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.

UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal estimate the cohesiveness of Phobos and conclude that it is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that will pull it apart when it gets closer to Mars.

Mars tugs differently on different parts of Phobos. As Phobos gets closer to the planet, the tugs are enough to actually pull the moon apart, the scientists say. This is because Phobos is highly fractured, with lots of pores and rubble. “Dismembering it is analogous to pulling apart a granola bar”, Black said, “scattering crumbs and chunks everywhere.”

Read more about the fate of Phobos

While not all graphs can be drawn in R2, every single finite graph can be drawn in the 3 dimensional space R3. The example I will use is called a book embedding.

Imagine you put all of the vertices on the same line in R3. There are an infinite number of planes that go through every point on that line, and do not overlap anywhere else.

You can put each edge on a distinct plane, and they do not overlap, so it is a valid embedding in R3.

In fact, you don’t need to have one plane for each edge. You can put multiple edges on the same plane and they still don’t cross each other.

The minimum number of pages you need to embed a graph is constant no matter which order you put the vertices on the line.

Mt. Fuji and Sekiyadojo castle at dusk, Chiba, Japan via GANREF

If Earth had Saturn’s Rings

From an excellent post by Jason Davis

From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.

From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.

From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.

At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.

At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.

via x

Chemistry + Physics

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Image via http://rainbowkitteh.tumblr.com/

Imagine a droplet sitting on a rigid surface spontaneously bouncing up and then continuing to bounce higher after each impact, as if it were on a trampoline. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are two key features to making such a trampolining droplet–one is a superhydrophobic surface covered in an array of tiny micropillars and the other is very low air pressure. The low-pressure, low-humidity air around the droplet causes it to vaporize. Inside the micropillar array, this vapor can get trapped by viscosity instead of draining away. The result is an overpressurization beneath the droplet that, if it overcomes the drop’s adhesion, will cause it to leap upward. For more, check out the original research paper or the coverage at Chemistry World.  (Video credit and submission: T. Schutzius et al.)

Python: What if everything was a dict?

Java: What if everything was an object?

JavaScript: What if everything was a dict *and* an object?

C: What if everything was a pointer?

APL: What if everything was an array?

Tcl: What if everything was a string?

Prolog: What if everything was a term?

LISP: What if everything was a pair?

Scheme: What if everything was a function?

Haskell: What if everything was a monad?

Assembly: What if everything was a register?

Coq: What if everything was a type/proposition?

COBOL: WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS UPPERCASE?

C#: What if everything was like Java, but different?

Ruby: What if everything was monkey patched?

Pascal: BEGIN What if everything was structured? END

C++: What if we added everything to the language?

C++11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff?

Rust: What if garbage collection didn't exist?

Go: What if we tried designing C a second time?

Perl: What if shell, sed, and awk were one language?

Perl6: What if we took the joke too far?

PHP: What if we wanted to make SQL injection easier?

VB: What if we wanted to allow anyone to program?

VB.NET: What if we wanted to stop them again?

Forth: What if everything was a stack?

ColorForth: What if the stack was green?

PostScript: What if everything was printed at 600dpi?

XSLT: What if everything was an XML element?

Make: What if everything was a dependency?

m4: What if everything was incomprehensibly quoted?

Scala: What if Haskell ran on the JVM?

Clojure: What if LISP ran on the JVM?

Lua: What if game developers got tired of C++?

Mathematica: What if Stephen Wolfram invented everything?

Malbolge: What if there is no god?

Epimetheus Above the Rings of Saturn

via reddit