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@math
That time a mathematical proof to an unsolved math problem was just casually posted anonymously to 4chan... Mathematicians found it some time later and realized, remarkably, a long outstanding problem in maths had finally been solved...

Sometimes life is funnier than fiction

youtu.be/OZzIvl1tbPo

I shared this in a reply recently but thought the information and maps might be neat on my main timeline...

Here is one of my favorite maps showing water ways (attached), the coloring is significant.

Each unique color represents a watershed, that is each color all drains out in the same direction and to the same point, ultimately draining to a single outlet into an ocean. You can always get from any point in the same color to any other point.

WRT a waterway which connects from ocean to ocean that would occur anytime there is a point that sits between two colors, almost always a lake, that drains off into each color in different directions. These lakes are special in the sense that they are the relatively rare waterways that belong to two or more watersheds.

@Science

@Science

I really do love heat map visualizations of data, there is a certain beauty to it when seeing patterns emerge.

The following is a chart from a study that shows how peoples mobility in parks has been affected by covid. Original study can be found here:

openriskmanagement.com/2021-02

"It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions" -- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

@Science

A project I did a while back for shits and giggles was a neural network that learned off random photos what natural coloring looked lik for various objects and faces. Then you could feed it random black and white photos and it would try to color them. Only spent a few days on it for fun, and as you can see the results were not perfect (had some artifacts). but the results were surprisingly good if you ignore the blemishes.

Can we please stop talking about a geomagnetic reversal as if it is some sort of extinction level event. There have been at least 25 geomagnetic pole reversals since humans evolved 6 million years ago and we are still here. If it happens it may cause all sorts of technological challenges and perhaps some ecological ones, but it will not be anything close to an extinction level event.

@Science

Man I wish the American economy still had small stores like this... Radioshack put them all out of business then stopped selling it when places like digikey put THEM out of business.. now you can only order from a catalog and its just not as satisfying.

ledpixelart.com/shenzhen/


@Science

I literally had this exact thing happen to me about a week ago yet the article claims there has only been 26 cases in over 60 years. I call bullshit. I think it happens all the time its just people notice it, pull the hair, and it never gets a case study done.

I have, in my life, probably had this happen in 20 different places other than my foot, my foot was only once. Every time its obviously a hair with a sharp end, and when i notice the hair i pull it and im fine.}

inb4 its not an ingrown hair or anything as it always happens in places where hairs dont grow like my finger tips (most common) or as was the case last week the bottom of my foot.

livescience.com/65881-hair-spl

Threw together a parameter optimization algorithm for my stock trading algorithm last night. Nothing too ground breaking but hell-a useful and cool all the same.

There are about a dozen variables, some of which have some limited dependence on each other. I suspect the search space however is relatively simple based on my expiernce os optimizing it by hand with trial and error.

The challenge is the possible valid range of these variables is huge, most bounded at 0 but with a max that is in the hundreds of thousands.

The other challenge is that each test takes a few minutes to perform (simulated over a years worth of data one minute per data point). So even with some extreme multi-core usage and optimization it is too slow for a naive search algorithm to just do a random walk across the problem space.

So the search pattern had to be an exponential one that pulls back on overshoot in a decaying exponential form as well. Identifies the boundaries and then halves each side of the boundary until the boundaries are narrow enough to find a solution. Then it moves onto the next attribute and repeats, after it optimizes them all it does another run through and another (to account for interdependence) until none of the parameters are significantly adjusted.

All this takes several hours to run at least. Still cool to see its working as it drops the error rate significantly and gets to the point where it makes fairly good predictions about how a stock is likely to change in the near future (the value measuring the error against)... in fact i'm amazed just how powerful an accurate this algorithm is at predicting stocks right now.

@Science

@funny

This pretty much sums up how I pickup women... or I should say, how I imagine my attempts to pick up women will go.

@Science

@Science
Interesting fact of the day:

Despite popular belief it is not really correct to say the speed of light is a universal speed limit in the universe. It would be more correct to say one object can never go faster, relative to another object by the speed of light.

In other words, no matter what speed I am going relative to the earth (or anything else) doesn't matter; if there is some object going the same speed and direction as me I can still accelerate up to the speed of light faster than it.

All that matters is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light relative to me the observer.

Outlier looks pretty exciting. At first glance it appears to be something like Masterclass but for STEM, plus it counts as actual college credits for anyone in university. basically it is university level courses taught by famous experts in the field.

Also gets some brownie points from me for highlighting Hannah Fry as one of the instructors. She is awesome and has done a lot of great stuff over the years. I got to talk to a her a few times and she helped me out with some problems I was working on once or twice (not through outlier)... so cool they snatched her up.

outlier.org/ is the link for anyone who wants to check it out.

@Science @math

Could you imagine going back in time and telling Newton that we put a man on the moon. Then after all his excitement just going "Yea but that was before I was even born, we are way more advanced than that by the time I was born and grew up!"

@Science

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