Confused by AJAX, RSS, “wisdom of the crowds” and shadow-casting color gradients? Spreeblick explains Web 2.0 for everyone.
Second Life Second Life is a virtual swinger club for journalists. The platform is financed by the big media companies of the world to replace in the coming years the cafeteria, off-site meetings and conference rooms. Finally sexual harassement at the workplace becomes accessible even to those who don’t have one.
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Add comment March 28th, 2007
We are going from product economy, to service economy, to experience economy.
observes Cem Basman at vowe.net and I think Annie’s experiment in context-sensitive collaborative filtering is in fact recommending experiences (not all of them commercial).
Add comment February 21st, 2006
Complex functions that are complex differentiable are holomorphic. James confirmed that if a region is holomorphic, then, when looking at the region in the small (distances tending towards zero), angles are preserved and aspect ratios are preserved. Thus, when you transform a picture by a complex function and look only at a small spot, it looks perfectly normal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_function
… which brings us to Escher and elliptic curves
One of M.C. Escher’s most intriguing works depicts a man standing in a gallery who looks at a print of a city that contains the building that he is standing in himself. This picture, with the title Print Gallery, contains a mysterious white hole in the middle. It turns out that basic theory of elliptic curves over the complex numbers tells us how to complete the picture. In the course of a 3 year project at the University of Leiden the hole has been filled, and many variations were made.
http://escherdroste.math.leidenuniv.nl/
Another interesting tangent on complex numbers is their extension to more than two dimensions:
Quaternions are a non-commutative extension of the complex numbers. At first, the quaternions were regarded as pathological, because they disobeyed the commutative law ab = ba. Although they have been superseded in most applications by vectors, they still find uses in both theoretical and applied mathematics, in particular for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
Add comment February 16th, 2006
Scanned the same slide with two film scanners and compared the images.
Continue Reading Add comment November 6th, 2005