Cool Math

I would have a really great Sundays in My City blog if I had thought to take the camera out of my pocket rather than just stare in amazement yesterday.

I was taking out my recycling and suddenly here comes this 4 in hand coach, 4 dainty little horses pulling three men in a carriage. I said "OMGOSH" and just stared at them. They trotted right up the street, shoes clanging on concrete. 2 of them were body clipped and they were all really delicate looking - like Hackneys.

I watched until they were just a dot in the distance, and that is when I thought, "Oh, you had the camera the whole time!"

There is a driving club nearby, and I am so jealous.






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Today is my man's birthday and I baked him a chocolate cheesecake to bring to the family gathering today. It's an American style cheesecake - you know - cream cheese and sugar and eggs (and chocolate melted with heavy cream in this case), blended on a cookie crumb crust. This is the kind of cake that will knock down your average German person with the sugar/fat content. Even though I appreciate a German style cheesecake, I love the decadence of American cheesecake. (German cheesecake is made with Quark, which is like sour cream, so you have a sour tasting but still moist, pretty good cake.)




I drew a math equation on the cake, as I do every year for my man. (He's a math teacher.)

I can't wait to see the family's reaction to this cake. I will warn them about taking small slices.

Can you guess which math equation I used this year?





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The Mandelbrot Set

I've always been fascinated by the mandelbrot fractal. That z -> z^2 + c can mimic life so perfectly, I love it.

If you want to see this equation in action, there are a couple beautiful animations on wiki:

Animated Mandelbrot Set

I'm not mathematically inclined at all. Imaginary numbers that bend the rules of math, they hurt my brain. But with the help of computers, mathematicians have been able to discover breathtaking, inspiring things.

I was just talking to my man about it and I suddenly realized that the word Mandelbrot sounds suspiciously German!

Regardless of the extent to which one zooms in on the boundary of a Mandelbrot set, there is always additional detail to see.

Wouldn't it be cool if my point and shoot camera had this capability?

Have you seen the book "Powers of 10"? It's a picture book starting with the microscopic, and then zooming out each photo by the power of 10. It shows us how our cellular structure resembles the stars above.

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Oh boy, it's snowing again! We had a little tiny respite - a few days last week where the temperature raised to above freezing. We could actually see our lawn again - and it was so green it was shocking, after so much white and grey. The drifts remained, however. I shut Baasha out on the pasture to remind him how to trim grass. Funny, even under all that snow all month, the grass must have grown a little bit, cuz there are green tips everywhere. After the sheep left, it was pretty much just brown.

Now it's coming down again, and I don't think we'll be able to see our lawn this evening.

UPDATE, 22:35 -

No, we cannot see our lawn anymore. Nor the street. It's another white out. We followed a salt truck on the autobahn tonight, and he was in the center lane, spraying salt on all three lanes. Our car got totally salted (sigh). Then we drove on the silent white country roads, and this time I was in the passenger seat. When we finally pulled in our snowy driveway, Baasha was nickering to the car from the gate. Happy to see us? From the looks of the snow, he'd been out for hours, even though the hay bale in the stall was well started. I dumped a kettle of warm water into his bucket, and fed him his mash inside tonight. I wonder what it will look like in the morning. As of tonight, I still love the snow, and I still get excited like a kid when I see it falling.