Showing posts with label mathematics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mathematics. Show all posts
WATCH: Depiction of 200 Years of Data on 200 Countries in 4 Minutes
This is a great example of how mathematics, combined with intelligence, can be entertaining.
Toy Story 3 Tops 2010 Box Office With $415M
Toy Story 3 has ended it's box office run with a total of $415 million, which puts it at #9 on the all-time domestic box-office champions list, just behind the execrable Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest at $423 million.
Toy Story 3 will almost certainly end the year as the #1 movie of the year, with only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 possibly having enough legs to challenge it. That movie is already at $232 million in just under three weekends but it is highly doubtful it will break the $400 million dollar barrier; it almost certainly will become the highest grossing of the Harry Potter franchise (at least until the final film y Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is released, in 3-D, on July 15, 2011).
The rest of the Top 10 grossing films for 2010, so far, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com are:
| Rank | Movie Title (click to view) | Studio | Total Gross /Theaters | Opening / Theaters | Open | Close | ||
| 1 | Toy Story 3 | BV | $415,004,880 | 4,028 | $110,307,189 | 4,028 | 6/18 | 12/2 |
| 2 | Alice in Wonderland (2010) | BV | $334,191,110 | 3,739 | $116,101,023 | 3,728 | 3/5 | 7/8 |
| 3 | Iron Man 2 | Par. | $312,128,345 | 4,390 | $128,122,480 | 4,380 | 5/7 | 8/19 |
| 4 | The Twilight Saga: Eclipse | Sum. | $300,531,751 | 4,468 | $64,832,191 | 4,468 | 6/30 | 10/21 |
| 5 | Inception | WB | $292,316,474 | 3,792 | $62,785,337 | 3,792 | 7/16 | - |
| 6 | Despicable Me | Uni. | $249,787,065 | 3,602 | $56,397,125 | 3,476 | 7/9 | - |
| 7 | Shrek Forever After | P/DW | $238,395,990 | 4,386 | $70,838,207 | 4,359 | 5/21 | 9/9 |
| 8 | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 | WB | $232,301,000 | 4,125 | $125,017,372 | 4,125 | 11/19 | - |
| 9 | How to Train Your Dragon | P/DW | $217,581,231 | 4,060 | $43,732,319 | 4,055 | 3/26 | 7/22 |
| 10 | The Karate Kid | Sony | $176,591,618 | 3,740 | $55,665,805 | 3,663 | 6/11 | 9/23 |
Interestingly, I have seen 7 of these Top 10. (Happily I have missed viewing the cinematic trainwrecks that are The Last Airbender, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and The Karate Kid.)
Some people believe that Toy Story 3, in addition to being the top grossing film of 2010 is also the best picture of the year. I would have to say that I disagree (see MadProfessah's review) although it is currently tied with Inception (see MadProfessah's review) as my best reviewed film of the year (4.167/4.0). Another contender for Best Picture, The Social Network, is languishing at 3.73/4.0.
There are a lot of outstanding movies released in 2010 I have yet to see, such as Black Swan, 127 Hours, The King's Speech, True Grit and The Fighter. What films are you hoping to see before 2010 ends?
Celebrity Friday: Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of the "fractal," died at the age of 85 on Thursday October 14. The Mandelbrot set, pictured above, is one of the most famous and canonical example of a fractal, a shape with "self-similarity" so that no matter how closely one looks at the object, copies of itself appear to be present, in an infinite progression.
First Planet Found In Habitable Zone 20 Lights-Years Away: "Gliese 581g"
From the official report:
The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system outside of our own. Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly-circular orbits.
The new planet designated Gliese 581g has a mass three to four times that of Earth and orbits its star in just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere.
Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has two previously detected planets that lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The newly-discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.
The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet's surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet's surface would be the line between shadow and light (known as the "terminator").
Makes the geek in me very happy!
538 Claims Marriage Equality Support Accelerating
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com has analyzed the polling on public support for marriage equality and notes that there appears to be an acceleration in the rate at which support for legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples is increasing.Something to bear in mind is that it's only been fairly recently that gay rights groups -- and other liberals and libertarians -- shifted toward a strategy of explicitly calling for full equity in marriage rights, rather than finding civil unions to be an acceptable compromise. While there is not necessarily zero risk of backlash resulting from things like court decisions -- support for gay marriage slid backward by a couple of points, albeit temporarily, after a Massachusetts' court's ruling in 2003 that same-sex marriage was required by that state's constitution -- it seems that, in general, "having the debate" is helpful to the gay marriage cause, probably because the secular justifications against it are generally quite weak.
In mathematical terms we we would say that the second derivative (the rate of the rate of increase) is positive, but you can just notice that there is an uptick in the blue graph at the end.
But no matter how you analyze it, it shows that the National Organization for Marriage will be out of business soon. Hurray!
Celebrity Friday: David Blackwell (1919-2010)
David Blackwell, the most prominent Black mathematician of his generation, has died at the age of 91. MadProfessah blogged about Blackwell last year on the occasion of his 90th birthday.From his The New York Times obituary:
David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22.
After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statisticianJerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also blocked his appointment.
[...]
His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage decision-making.
“He had this great talent for making things appear simple,” Peter Bickel, a statistics professor at Berkeley, told the university’s Web site. “He liked elegance and simplicity. That is the ultimate best thing in mathematics, if you have an insight that something seemingly complicated is really simple, but simple after the fact.”
Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.
As I noted before, Blackwell was the first Black person elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, which happened way back in 1965. I have attended the biennial Blackwell-Tapia conference in the past (2006 and 2008), which highlights the contributions of Black and Latino research mathematicians.
Condomania Ranks U.S. Cities By Average Penis Size
Joe.My.God has posted this great map which ranks American cities by average penis size by analyzing the size of the custom condoms ordered to addresses in those cities via online retailer Condomania.com. "The Big Easy" (New Orleans, LA) ranks first. I'm somewhat surprised but I have barely ever been there. However, if my memory serves me right, I am unsurprised by the District of Columbia being ranked #2! *cough* majority Los Angeles, my fair city, placed 17th. Oh, the shame! Then again, yours truly didn't order any condoms from Condomania, or else I would have skewed the rankings up! *grin*
Here's the Top 20:
- New Orleans
- Washington DC
- San Diego
- New York City
- Phoenix
- Portland
- Atlanta
- San Francisco
- Chicago
- St. Louis
- Seattle
- Miami
- Indianapolis
- Columbus
- Boston
- Denver
- Los Angeles
- Detroit
- Philadelphia
- Dallas/Ft. Worth
20 Cities Ordered by Penis Size
I would love to know what this is going to do to my blog traffic now that I have a blog post with "penis size" in the title!
WATCH: Animation Illustrates Fibonacci Sequence
The Fibonacci sequence, 1, 1, 3, 5, 8,13, ..., is one of those amazing mathematical objects which shows up in nature in some of the most unusual places. There's a very cool video demonstrating this idea, below. WATCH:
Hat/tip to TowleRoad.
Hat/tip to TowleRoad.
Another Reason We Need National Health Care...
Jaime Escalante, the famous mathematics teacher depicted by Edward James Olmos in the 1988 film "Stand and Deliver" is facing bankruptcy as he deals with expenses related to his treatment for cancer.Is this really how we want our national health care system to be treating our national heroes?The Bolivian-born Escalante, now 80 years old, gained international renown for his work teaching advanced math to “un-teachable” students at Garfield H.S. in East L.A.Vanessa Marquez, who also appeared in the 1988 film, said that so far $5,000 has been raised toward the $30,000 needed by the family. A fund for Escalante has been set up by “Stand and Deliver” cast members and The Foundation for Advancements in Science and Education in Pasadena, which publishes Escalante's educational materials.Contributions can be sent to "Friends of Jaime," C/O FASE, 236 W. Mountain St., Suite 105, Pasadena, CA 91103. Call 626-793-5300 for information.
13-Year-Old Morehouse Whiz Kid!
.Thanks to Jack and Jill Politics, I found out about this heart-warming story about a 13-year-old Black male college student:At thirteen years of age, Stephen Stafford is causing quite a stir at Morehouse College. Stafford has a triple major in pre-med, math and computer science. Though he loves playing video games and playing his drum set, he is no typical teenager.Isn't that a great story? In a perfect world, Stephen Stafford's name would be more well-known than Chris Brown. I'm jus' sayin'!
"I've never taught a student as young as Stephen, and it's been amazing," said computer science professor Sonya Dennis. "He's motivating other students to do better and makes them want to step up their game."
Stafford began his college career at the age of 11, after being home-schooled by his mother. Stafford's mother said that when Stafford began to teach her instead of being taught by her, she knew he needed to be in a college environment.
π Calculuated to 2,700,000,000,000 Digits!
Big news, y'all! The number π has just been calculated to 2.7 trillion digits!According to the Mathematical Association of America news story:
Computer scientist Fabrice Bellard has computed Pi to nearly 2.7 trillion digits, breaking the record by 123 billion places.Pretty cool, huh?
It took him 131 days to do it. The old record had been set in August, 2009, by Daisuke Takahashi(University of Tsukuba, in Japan), who needed just 29 hours on a supercomputer 2,000 times faster than Bellard's desktop.
"I got my first book about Pi when I was 14 and since then, I have followed the progress of the various computation records," Bellard told BBC News.
LOOK: A 3-D Depiction of the Mandelbrot Set
Thanks to io9, I was alerted to this interesting 3-D visualization of the famous Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set is a very famous example of a fractal, which is an object which is self-similar under magnification. It is usually depicted in two-dimensions, since it is generally generated using complex variables. There are many more stunning images available.
MadProfessah is watching AVATAR *right now*
I'm in the 7pm showing at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. Will try and write a review over the weekend. So, far the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Chicago Sun-Times have given the film rave reviews of 100/100 and Steven Spielberg reportedly said "The last time I came out of a movie feeling that way it was the first time I saw Star Wars."
Mathematical Visualization Of U.S. Public Opinion and Policy
The above graphic is getting a lot of buzz in the blogosphere after it appeared in the New York Times Economix blog and many LGBT blogs, like Professor Nan Hunter's Hunter of Justice.Recently on DailyKos, Steven Singiser posted this corrolary picture, showing the age democraphic split on explicit support for same-sex marriage by cohort (65+, 45-64, 30-44 and 18-29). The results are quite striking:
The point here is that by the time the 18-29 cohort is fully into the 30-44 cohort, the kulturkampf over marriage equality will probably be over. The only question is how closely public policy will follow public opinion at that time (10-15 years from now).
Legal Marriage Challenges Correlate With Increased Popular Support
Celebrity Friday: Alan Turing
Alan TuringBritish Prime Minister Gordon Brown released a statement apologizing for his government's past treatment of a famous gay mathematician, the icon Alan Turing:
2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.Woo hoo!
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
Gordon Brown
Gay Marriage Tipping Point Reached?
Kevin Drum and Joe.My.God both blogged about the above graph from Andrew Gelman at FiveThirtyEight.com in the last few days. The key paragraphs are:Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I'm going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage.These are definitely important and interesting observations, but digging deeper, there is even more.
In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.
In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage--Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.
Most other commenters did not also discuss this even more interesting graph, which shows the current percentage of people who, when polled who support marriage for same-sex couples and/or civil unions.
Looking closely at the dark red dots, notice that marriage for same-sex couples is basically only legal in the states where it is above 50 percent. The three states which have marriage (within margin of error) at 50 percent but do not have marriage equality right now are Rhode Island, California and New York.Clearly, a state to look at closely at in the future is Iowa which legalized marriage equality though a unanimous court decision in April.
Other interesting data to include here would be to indicate the states which have comprehensive non-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation (and gender identity).
Celebrity Friday: David Blackwell
David Blackwell, the first African American person ever elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and possibly the most famous Black mathematician alive, turned 80 on April 24.Happy (Belated) Birthday, Professor Blackwell!
Predicting The Future Of Marriage Equality in the U.S.
A blogger by the name of Map Scroll has taken über-geek Nate Silver's soon-to-be famous post presenting a model predicting when a public vote on marriage equality will be favorable for the forces of equality and put it in the form of an easy-to-digest map of the United States.Silver came to prominence with his shockingly accurate predictions in the 2008 election season and continues to provide fascinating examples of applying mathematics to what the general public generally believes are non-mathematical topics, such as whether anti-gay marriage ballot measures will pass or fail in the future:
This would tend to support the position of Love Honor Cherish and other grassroots marriage equality organizations about going back to Califonia voters in 2010 or waiting until 2012 to repeal Proposition 8. Most of the "grasstops" organizations like the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and (tacitly) Equality California and the National Center for Lesbian Rights seemed to endorse the later date at the recently Town Hall on Marriage Equality MadProfessah was invited to appear at last week.I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.
It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:
1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.
These variables collectively account for about three-quarters of the variance in the performance of marriage bans in different states. The model predicts, for example, that a marriage ban in California in 2008 would have passed with 52.1 percent of the vote, almost exactly the fraction actually received by Proposition 8.
Unsurprisingly, there is a very strong correspondence between the religiosity of a state and its propensity to ban gay marriage, with a particular "bonus" effect depending on the number of white evangelicals in the state.
Marriage bans, however, are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we'd project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year.
All of the other variables that I looked at -- race, education levels, party registration, etc. -- either did not appear to matter at all, or became redundant once we accounted for religiosity. Nor does it appear to make a significant difference whether the ban affected marriage only, or both marriage and civil unions.
My position is that we should go back to the ballot (in November 2010) and if we lose there be prepared to go back in November 2012 also.
Silver is good, but he isn't perfect. His attempt at predicting the Oscar results this year was pretty laughable.
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