@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

theohonohan

@theohonohan@graphics.social

Interested in the roots of design

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ColinTheMathmo, (edited ) to random
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz avatar

An answer to a 100-year-old puzzle. I say an answer, because there is still part of the question that's open.

EDIT: The author/discoverer is here on Mathstodon!

https://mathstodon.xyz/@vesatimonen

And his post of this:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@vesatimonen/112513347111148808

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@ColinTheMathmo So there's Loyd's problem (still open) and Dudeney's conjecture (now disproven)? Is that it? The phrasing of your toot feels a little tortuous.

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@ColinTheMathmo Tortuous, not torturous! In a nutshell, I'm just complaining that the wording "an answer" is not the clearest way of conveying the intended meaning of "a partial answer". Thanks for the clarification.

ltratt, to random
@ltratt@mastodon.social avatar

What Factors Explain the Nature of Software? https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2024/what_factors_explain_the_nature_of_software.html

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@ltratt I wonder if you are overlooking what's known about design (as an activity). You don't use the word at all in the piece—yet one could easily frame the topics discussed as primarily issues of design. I know it's not a discipline you are trained in, but it's not good to risk coming across as oblivious to the expertise of other fields! Even a nod to Fred Brooks' book would be better than nothing.

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@tetrislife I guess I find the choice to refer to Hillel Wayne's (narrow!) perspective, and not to show any evidence of knowing about the discipline of design or the huge literature of Science and Technology Studies, unsatisfying.

But it's just a blog post. And yet, it's a blog post by a professor, so I think it's fair to call it out for what I perceive to be a solipsistic attitude.

onpaperwings, to random
@onpaperwings@typo.social avatar

This is a very niche post, but anyone that has an interest in printing technology and typographic history should fill out this short survey on the future of the Type Archive in London which shut down and is now under the Science Museum Group:

https://www.cphc.org.uk/updates/2024/4/12/the-monotype-collection-the-next-chapter

cc @typographica @okay @typeoff @kupfers

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@onpaperwings The fact is that the Type Archive never managed to get itself "off the ground" in Kennington. It was not very easily accessible. I remember visiting around 2001 when there were plans to get the architects Marks Barfield to create a museum for the TA. It could well be that the outcome of all this is to make the collections more readily available.

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Looks like the Google Chart API has dropped its support for latex expressions (or it's temporarily out of action) which means my blog is now packed solid full of broken links. I did start the process of making more stable versions of some of the articles as PDFs here: https://github.com/dpiponi/StableBlog Luckily I wrote a lot of that stuff with my own homebrew markup that can be translated to LaTeX somewhat mechanically.

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@dingc @dpiponi For what it's worth, many blog platforms can be made to use MathJax to render math. There's an old but comprehensive guide by @christianp https://checkmyworking.com/2012/01/how-to-get-beautifully-typeset-maths-on-your-blog/. This is the way, IMO

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@christianp The instructions still work for Tumblr, and possibly some other platforms.

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

My new novel MORPHOTROPHIC will be published on 9 April.

Amazon is now accepting preorders for the ebook; other venues will follow soon.

There will also be print-on-demand editions from Amazon available on 9 April, but they can't be pre-ordered.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CZ46L396

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@Wen Preordering is a thing. It's part of the event, and part of the excitement and anticipation of publication. I can't even figure out what you are trying to say with your second sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-order

vga256, to random
@vga256@dialup.cafe avatar

is the answer pepsi

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@vga256 partial credit!

timrichards, (edited ) to melbourne
@timrichards@aus.social avatar

We have some lovely "iron lace" decorating terrace houses in inner-city Melbourne - these Fitzroy ones have a dash of patterned-brick flair as well.

Interestingly, there's not a lot of this decorative cast-iron left in the UK, because it was donated in WWI to be used for ammunition. Or so I've heard.

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@timrichards https://www.londongardenstrust.org/features/railings3.htm

fractalkitty, to pnw
@fractalkitty@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I prototyped a font for slugs - I give you Sluggly:

https://codepen.io/fractalkitty/live/eYxLbqK

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@fractalkitty This reminds me of the guy who set out to design a font based on the shapes made by eels, but seemingly gave up and ended up just releasing a video instead https://www.abyme.net/catalogue/anguille/

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

New Blog Post!
Interpolating Color Image Histograms Using Sliced Optimal Transport
Includes 300 lines of plain, commented C++ implementation.
https://blog.demofox.org/2023/11/25/interpolating-color-image-histograms-using-sliced-optimal-transport/

image/png

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@demofox Is this effectively https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histogram_matching?

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@demofox I know that it's an exercise in optimal transport, but the end result seems like histogram matching, given that pixels are ordered by intensity (and that order shouldn't change noticeably?)

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@demofox What I meant is that inherently, the intensity of pixels is an order, or at least a local, partial order. You don't want to cause what this paper calls "gradient reversal", which is a big constraint. https://people.csail.mit.edu/soonmin/photolook/

yaxu, to random
@yaxu@post.lurk.org avatar

What exactly does Musk mean by the word 'white' when he says that Jewish people hate white people? It's some definition that doesn't include any Jewish people, and I don't see how you get there. Is this a normal distinction to make in the US?
With X being guided by this level of moronic antisemitism, how can anyone justify engaging with it at all?

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@yaxu @acb I'd be a bit careful here. In legal terms Irish, and Jewish people in the US have been considered white since at least the Naturalization Act of 1790.

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

The ornithopters were the best thing in the movie. And my birthday's next week...

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/dune-atreides-royal-ornithopter-10327

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@robryk Most concept artists don't know what a flexure/compliant joint is. The director almost certainly doesn't, nor does the majority of the audience...

yaxu, to random
@yaxu@post.lurk.org avatar

A photo from 10 years ago today.. I'm still doing the same old these days.. Maybe I should do something new !

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@yaxu As far as the interface goes, have you seen these Haskell puzzles which involve reorganizing tokens? They're a bit like "Parsons problems". I wonder if it's viable to create a livecoding interface like that.

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

"Religious community and video game developer" isn't a phrase you read every day. I feel like this is a significant chapter in video game history that I somehow missed despite it being widely reported in tabloids and on TV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Sisterhood

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@mcc @dpiponi In case the idiom isn't clear, it means "whizz [quantity] copies of The Secret of St Bride's to me by post"

djlink, to random
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar
theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@jbqueru @djlink It's obviously OK to compare floats if you know what you're doing. There is a certain amount of FUD around floating point numbers.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/7366183/14768587

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

A thing I like to do is read sentences containing the abbreviation "IRL" and imagine that they are actually talking about Ireland

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@mcc The letters "ROI" are often used by UK companies as an abbreviation for Republic of Ireland, but also, of course, for Return on Investment and Region of Interest.

yaxu, to haskell
@yaxu@post.lurk.org avatar

Haskell seems to work against the idea that there can be different ways of combining things, where a monad only has one bind. If you want different behaviour you have to define a whole different type (e.g. ZipList).
I'm trying to work around this by adding an extra field to a datatype that says how the bind should work. Hopefully this isn't breaking any monad laws..
https://github.com/tidalcycles/Tidal/blob/7eb10834c62bbed65bb276fd13dee883a8c761b6/tidal-core/src/Sound/Tidal/Signal.hs#L17
I did have to define applicative using a single bind which seems non-standard..
https://github.com/tidalcycles/Tidal/blob/7eb10834c62bbed65bb276fd13dee883a8c761b6/tidal-core/src/Sound/Tidal/Signal.hs#L25
I don't really know what I'm doing but it seems to work!

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@yaxu I'd say this would make good fodder for https://discourse.haskell.org/.

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

A small thing on monad strength I put on github years ago but should have put on my blog.

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2023/08/what-does-it-mean-for-monad-to-be-strong.html

BTW I was reminded of this by doing lots of C++ programming - C++ makes very explicit when you're capturing variables and so the "strength" in C++, in some sense, is also made very explicit.

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@MartinEscardo @dpiponi @BartoszMilewski Somebody on Hacker News (sorry, Dan's blog post was discussed there) posted the following comment, which seems to imply that a functor is strong if fmap can be expressed internally to the category in question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37216741

So, setting aside the peculiar strength function which exemplifies the property, is it true that a functor is strong if and only if this lifting of morphisms is possible? Because that would begin to explain the terminology.

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I was working out the details of functions like sqrt, atan and log for my implementation of the Levi-Civita field.

I thought I'd mention a technique that's available for these quantities that doesn't work as well for ordinary reals. For my example this isn't meant to be the most efficient method, just an illustration of the approach.

Consider f(x)=1/√(1+x) for infinitesimal x. We could just use the Taylor series. For infinitesimal x it will always converge in the Levi-Civita field. (We can also use Newton-Raphson and I think there's also a direct back substitution method.)

Here's another way:

We have f'(x)=-(1+x)^(-3/2)/2 = -f(x)^2/2. This is an ODE for f. We can rewrite this as an integral equation:

f(x) = 1-(1/2)∫f(x)^3 dx where the integral is on [0,1].

This looks useless, but...

When working in Haskell I make the elements of the LC field streams of (power,coefficient) pairs. Haskell is happy for you to write a circular definition of a stream as long as when you evaluate the nth element you only use the first n-1 elements. It looks like recursion but for an infinite stream there's no base case so technically it's a corecursion.

Now define a linear partial function on the Levi-Civita field "∫" that maps ε^n to ε^(n+1)/(n+1).

This has the property that if a is real and b is finite, computing the nth element of a+∫b requires looking at only the first n-1 elements of b. So the equation

f(x) = 1-(1/2)∫f(x)^3 dx

can be translated directly into Haskell.

Many interesting functions have ODEs, and hence integral equations that can be exploited like this.

FWIW the actual line of code I tested was:

y = 1 +∫ ((-1 / 2) * d v * y * y * y)

where "+∫" (and d) are functions I define elsewhere.

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@dpiponi Wait, you're on mathstodon.xyz but not taking advantage of TeX math formatting? I thought it was the main selling point.

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez @dpiponi It's worth noting that @christianp gave the world an excellent guide to rendering maths on unexpected blog platforms over a decade ago: https://checkmyworking.com/2012/01/how-to-get-beautifully-typeset-maths-on-your-blog/

Given the existence of Chrome extensions such "TeX All The Things" and "Math Anywhere", and if somehow the pragmatics of the Mathstodon TeX patch don't quite work out, it feels that there might be a solution to this involving a different approach.

rygorous, to random
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I think Unicode is a good thing for the world but it's very instructive to read the original pitch to see how it started. https://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf

Section 2.1 (pp. 4-5) is especially "fun", not just because we know how that turned out (and how much hubris was involved), but also because of the way all of it is phrased

theohonohan,
@theohonohan@graphics.social avatar

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I_in_computing for a tricky case which Unicode doesn't even get right.

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