Subj : Re: Hey Nick To : alt.tv.farscape From : weirdwolf Date : Tue Sep 06 2005 03:08:20 From Newsgroup: alt.tv.farscape Jim Larson wrote in news:Xns96C8BB9D778383v234oiwofui3284af93@130.133.1.18: > weirdwolf wrote: > >> Jim Larson wrote in >> news:Xns96C85DFBB4CE3v234oiwofui3284af93@130.133.1.18: >> >>> weirdwolf wrote: >>> >>>> Jim Larson wrote in >>>> news:Xns96C7DDDCD78E23v234oiwofui3284af93@130.133.1.18: >>>> >>>>> weirdwolf wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Jim Larson wrote in >>>>>> news:Xns96C7D1AFD4DF83v234oiwofui3284af93@130.133.1.18: >>>>>> >>>>>>> weirdwolf wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>>> You know you were saying about how you would trust a big U.S. >>>>>>>> news corporation to give the facts correctly: >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> http://makeashorterlink.com/?K2F412CBB >>>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> (All the cool kids use tinyurl.com) >>>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> Well there's the problem, I'm all hot and sweaty. >>>>>> I did however show some adults today the thing about the >>>>>> internal angles >>>>>> in a triangle don't add up to 180 degrees and pi isn't 3 an a bit >>>>>> that I >>>>> >>>>> (Sphere? Poincare plane? What?) >>>> >>>> Balloon. You draw a triangle on a ballon and then inflate it. You >>>> then put it ontop of something circular like a mug and push the >>>> centre part down. I've found that it's the best way to get people >>>> thniking about it, cheap and simple to do as well. >>>> >>> >>> (Positive curvature then. Kind of impossible to demonstrate the >>> hyperbolic case with real props.) >> >> We have several buildings in my area with hyperbolic paraboloid >> shaped >> roofs. They are rather nifty. Of course it's not that uncommon a >> shape, think a power station cooling tower cut vertically down the >> centre. >> They were all designed by a local architect called Sam Scorer. >> Not a great picture I'm afraid but the best I could find: >> http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/newsbyte/issue10-img/scorer-library.jpg >> > > Yes, yes, but that's not quite as easy to produce as something with > obviously positive curvature (with props and stuff) like say, a > sphere. Also, it's not really the negative curvature analogue to a > sphere, since that has constant positive Gaussian curvature at every > point. The canonical hyperbolic paraboloid has asymptotically 0 > curvature in any direction away from the origin. An analogue with > constant negative curvature is generally difficult to picture in R^3. > You could take something like a pseudosphere (surface of revolution of > a tractrix) or Kuen's surface, which just looks freaky. But again, not > exactly easy prop material. WHooaaa! Dude I like didn't even understand like every other word in that.. You have to remember that I only have a G.C.S.E. in maths which is the basic maths exam all schoolkids take at 15/16. Most of the stuff I read is so non-technical, I'ld love to learn more but if you aren't interested i doing an A level,(the exam taken at 17/18 before you go to uni,) there aren't any courses except the basic ones for innumerate/illiterate types. Which if course seem about my level after reading that >;-) Hmm the Dini's surface looks like the easiest to at least approximate. http://math.cl.uh.edu/~gray/Gifccsurfs/ccsurfs.html Either end of the Kuens surface reminds me of the centre spiral of a snail shell the "spine" if yo will of the shell when you reomve the outer surface. Mind you whenever I see pictures of a Calabi-Yau space,(that has to be spelt wrong,) I always think of a really long crumpled mobius strip so it's no surprise I have problems with maths. Ages ago I went to the science museum, they have a gallery with various maths bits in it. Appart from Claire and myself it was absolutely empty, we even saw people come in realise what it was and walk straight out again. It's a shame because this is the kind of maths that people can appreciate more than the working out of compound interest that you see being taught in schools. >> You should have seen the puzzled look on my face when I was reading >> a >> book on n dimensional geometry where n was greater than 3. Hell I get >> confused reading Euclid, but it's a lot more interesting than just >> counting things when you look at the patterns and weird stuff. >> > > Woohooo! > > (I spent a number of years in a PhD program in math before switching > to CS. My area of research was CAT(0) spaces, which are a type of > negatively curved length space, but not in the traditional sense, > since they are not necessarily anywhere differentiable. They are > defined largely in terms of how triangles behave on them...which is a > lot like what you were trying to demonstrate to your amazed audience. > Barbie says, "Math is cool!") WOW! big ol brain. I tend to do the Barbie math stuff because I just read stuff for fun and so have huge gaping holes in what I know. > ((P.S. I've forgotten so much, it's like someone took several years of > my life and fluhed it down the proverbial crapper. Also, you get so > immersed in technical minutiae so fast, that fun examples totally > elude you. Sort of like walking up to a radio astronomer and asking > him of where in the sky to look for Sirius and getting the response, > "Huh?")) > I've forgotten so much of the biochemistry I used to know, it's unreal. Ted -- Stare too long into the abyss and the abyss looks like a nifty place to hide the bodies .