randform

The VVR berek – a subsidiary company of the Berlin public transport company BVG which is in charge for selling advertisement spaces in Berlin public transport is going to be sold. Unexpectedly…
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There are those parties, where you are asked in the very first minutes of a small talk, what you do in your life. And if your answer is “I am a mathematician” then the reaction is usually rather passionate. Either you found some kind of soul mate, someone who understands or – and that happens very often – you are confronted with sentences like: “Ohh – really — I always hated math – I always had problems with the math!”. Now replace “math” with “law” in the last two sentences and look what you get….—OK -put that ittle joke aside- instead of lawyer, plug in: social worker, english teacher, baseball trainer etc. You will rather rarely hear: I was always hated social sciences, english, sport etc. , whereas for math (and physics) it is the generic situation. This is because in nowadays (western?) society it is too often a good thing to dislike math.
If you are on a party it is easy to deal with that disdain – either you stick to the math lovers or you take your revenge by “Oh you just had bad teachers – let me explain the addition theorem of trigonometric functions!” :O (yes this is a nerd joke — happened out of desperation :))

However if the open dislike of math is expressed by a public person like a politician or a journalist than this isn’t fun anymore, because it involves the development of a public opinion about an issue.
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From July 19 to 21 the annual conference “New Media and Technologies of the IT Society” (“Neue Medien und Technologien der Informationsgesellschaft”) took place under the title “Film, Computer and TV”. (more…)

The german artist Dirk Schwieger spent some time in Tokyo and has posted a regular comic blog called tokyoblog on this experience, which is funny and interesting. He had lived also one year in Iceland and did some research on elves. The rumours are that he is about to move to Siberia. So we are of course now anxious to read a Siberiablog and to get interviews with bears, or mathematicians in Novosibirsk.

99% of todays math literature are typeset with a typesetting language called “LaTeX”. There is basically no other way nowadays to publish mathematical texts in a decent form. In earlier times publishing mathematical texts was tedious. (more…)

The internet was also nice before… (more…)

This applet was originally done for another project than just our blog…
but after all this preparatory “eye work” we thought we could publish it anyways. Please visit also our daytar site.

a comment on architecture in different contexts: two videos by Michal Levy and Pierre-Abraham Rochat

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This is a follow-up to our holodust post.
“iRomance-Die Romantik der Zukunft” (Romance of the future)– is a 6 min. funny comedy by Jan-M. Studt mixing the aesthetics of 2001 and star wars with the typical aesthetics of commercials. Unfortunately only in german, but may be the mimics and gestures are enough to understand the film…
Via the blog of Tim Bruysten, also featured on hackermovies.com (both links in german)

to the day one month ago the world’s first truly open source short movie made its online appearance. Since then a vivid discussion about “what is it all about” emerged (see e.g. here (german)). As for end of May they counted half a million downloads. The project was realized almost etirely by using open source software (most prominently blender for modeling) and sponsored and hosted by the Netherlands Media Art Institute. (complete credits here)