Michi’s blog

Inspired by this post over at Making Light, here, have a chart:

First, Second, …

1st, 2nd, …

And, because this chart is kinda tricky to read, here’s the log-scaled version of the same chart:

For the log-chart, I stopped stacking the numbers.

ETA: Changed the log-chart from a line-chart to a bar-chart after feedback from the readership of bOINGbOING. Hello and welcome!

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article2011061.ece

This is a rather atrocious article giving yet another ad hoc “formula” to compute some numeric measurement of something-or-other. In this particular case, it’s about cleavage, and how to avoid showing too much of it, but these “formulae” plague us every time some journalist wants to math up their reporting.

What caught my eye in this particular case was the people they lined up to back up the story.

Mathematician William Hartston, who holds an MA in Maths from Cambridge University, reckons this will save a lot of showbiz blushes on the red carpet.

“A girl can use this formula to see whether her outfit is counted as decent,” says William, author of Drunken Goldfish and Other Irrelevant Scientific Research.

So. He has a Masters in mathematics. Big whoop. Doesn’t seem to make him more able to distinguish nonsense when he sees it.

Based on the extensive discussion at the Secret Blogging Seminar on tools for long-distance collaborations, Scott Morrison writes an introduction to source control with subversion for research collaborators.

In this post, Scott also offers, quite magnanimously, to setup and host subversion repositories for any mathematician who happens to want to start collaborating using subversion.

Which, to my mind, immediately prompts the question: why stop there? I’ve had ideas about setting up a free and easy to use platform for modern communication in the mathematical community before; but they were along the lines of duplicating wordpress.com‘s efforts; which isn’t really something that pays off on your efforts. Reading this, though, raised a new idea.

Why not setup a server – preferably with a university data center as backing – which dispenses free platforms with the following contents:

• Source control. Preferably option on subversion, git, mercurial – or some such selection of modern and wide-spread systems.