Love you babe.

dailymeh:

Oh, mathematics! Have I ever doubted thee? Here I was thinking I had to sort out my interpersonal troubles on my own, but then you swoop in and save my ass with a magnificent theorem on friends and strangers!

Well. It appears that the mathematicians prefer not to deal with the messiness of human relations directly (I don’t blame them) and instead reduce the whole thing to a problem of graphs, of vertices and edges. Specifically, the theorem says that if you’re at a party and there are at least six people, then at least three of them will either be mutual strangers or mutual friends. And the way the theorem is proved goes something like this: imagine that the people are vertices and the edges between them represent their relationship (either friends, blue, or strangers, red). Consider one node in the graph. Out of it shoot five edges, and since there are only two colors, at least three of them must be of the same color. Let A, B and C be the ends of these edges. If one of AB, AC or BC is the same color as the edges, you’ve got a triangle of that color; and if all three are of the other color, you’ve got a triangle of that color. Either way, you have three mutual strangers or three mutual friends.

Which is neat, if not exactly useful at an actual, non-graph-theoretic party.

I learned about this result because I like to eavesdrop on really smart people. Specifically, I went snooping in the Prometheus Society’s member magazine. (It’s one of those societies where you have to be several standard deviations above Mensa level to apply.) The good Prometheans have pulled their back issues from the web, but they are still available through archive.org. And when I find myself reading about how to “compute the fractal dimension of a thought” (not making this up), I feel reassured that stoner logic and insanely-smart high-IQ logic are not all that different.

The above picture shows all possible friend-stranger graphs for six party-goers.

love this show.

(Source: frankcrimes)

Simply Stunning natural phenomenon 

emergentfutures:

Will a Harvard Professor’s New Technology Make College Lectures a Thing of the Past?

 Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur is championing the “flipped classroom,” a model where information traditionally transferred during lectures is learned on a student’s own time, and classroom time is spent discussing and applying knowledge to real-world situations. To make it easy for professors to transition out of lecture mode, Mazur has developed Learning Catalytics, an interactive software that enables them to make the most of student interactions and maximize the retention of knowledge.

Full Story: Good Education

mothernaturenetwork:

T-shirt charges your phone by absorbing ambient sound
Shirts made of piezoelectric fabrics could make charging your portable electronics easier than ever.