Mathematical Music

There have been a surprising number of posts here about poetry.

Here is some Mathematical Music, via Heather. Better to watch at Youtube with the lyrics visible.



The Klein 4 Group.

Coincidence?

A fantastic video by Rives at Ted exploring the nature of coincidence and revealing a deeply disturbing conspiracy.



and a poignant love story...



'nuff said.

Geek Ruby Poetry

From dougpete's delicious feed comes the 99 Bottles of Beer site. The site features the code to produce the lyrics in 1264 different programming languages and variations.

One that caught my eye was Ruby.



One commenter wrote:

This may not be the shortest and most efficient version, but it's definitely the version that was the most fun to read.
Especially the parts "wall.call" if you need the next bottle, "step = method :buy" if you have no beer left and "beer.drink" as what to do in each stanza.

I would actually call it a geek poem.

For those of you who don't code Ruby: Learn Ruby, so you can enjoy reading this poem and writing your next scripts/applications/whatever.

There are "poems" written in Actionscript, Pascal, Turing, APL and lots more.

Poetry is a bit of an unintentional recurring theme in this blog. There certainly are times when programming feels elegant and creative and expressive. It certainly has plenty of rules that constrain - syntax, keywords, etc. Maybe it is like Haiku on a grand scale!

The Joys of Google Earth

I got my edition of the Google Earth Sightseer today and spent a little time updating Google Earth, downloading the browser plugins, and generally reminding myself of how cool it is.

There is a contest to create models of bridges in Google Sketchup for inclusion on Google Earth. How authentic would that be for students?

You can map the big melt. Global warming made real.

You can look at up-to-date Earthquake data and wonder why there has been such a serious earthquake in Italy, seemingly far away from fault lines.



You can even view photos of the area to see what it looks like. That's current Current Affairs.



The next step is probably figuring out how to program the browser plug-in!

Friday Funny Care of Microsoft

Microsoft has some very funny spots. Maybe it helps explain why they charge so much for some of their products.

The videos below are from the collection found here.
The embedding below only works in IE for me.




I have blogged previously about the Software Architect guy video from Microsoft.

Embed Flickr Slideshows with flickrSLiDR

This via Patricia Donaghy. The slide show below is of my favorites - mainly coming from an RSS feed of the images tagged with "Geometry". However, you can create an embeddable slide show of any combination of user, group and tag that you like.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The Google Maps API

I have been learning a lot about javascript and the Google Maps API lately. If you are interested, you might find my delicious tags helpful. It includes links to sets of map markers that have been painstakingly created and then shared.

I have created a geocoding tool that shows off some of my learning. It will allow you to enter an address and get its lat/long coordinates. It also displays the lat/long coordinates of the centre of the map in case the address isn't enough. If you view the source, I have commented the more interesting bits.

The tool is a dumbed-down version of one that I am working on with all the Thunder Bay Community Services Agencies.
It takes 20 or 30 seconds to map the hundreds of addresses out of their database, assign different markers, set up the interactions, and display the results on three maps.


It has been interesting to apply my growing knowledge of actionscript (which is a derivative of javascript) to the object model of a browser page.