Vessel Finder is a map showing the current location of container ships, cruise ships, fishing boats, and other nautical vessels. It aggregates data from automatic identification systems which all sufficiently large boats are required to be fitted with.
This website was all over the news this week because of the ship stuck in the Suez Canal.
The length distribution of tweets has shifted in response to raised character limits, but it’s still the case that a disproportionate number of tweets use all the characters they’re given.
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This construction is made out of five copies of That Simple Unit (TSU), an origami module attributed to Charles Esseltine. I found this a little tricky to fold and put together, but the end result was very structurally sound.
“General particulars” is an excellent phrase that deserves to catch on more widely than its current context of legally-mandated notices on boats.
(Boats are required by international law to have a wheelhouse poster listing their “general particulars”, i.e., a list of statistics, properties, and other bits of information necessary to get a basic view of the vessel.)
The head of a sunflower is actually hundreds of smaller flowers working together to attract pollinators. Each large yellow petal is its own individual flower, and the bits in the middle are tiny five-pointed flowers if you look closely.
Sunflowers share this property with the rest of the family Asteraceae, including daisies, dahlias, dandilions, and dozens of “damned yellow composites“. The heads of these plants can be called inflorescences, or flower clusters.
Pokémon Gold and Silver‘s roaming legendary beasts move randomly from route to route instead of sticking to a fixed habitat. By analyzing their behaviour using the math of random walks on graphs, I can finally answer a question that’s bugged me since childhood: what’s the best strategy to find a roaming Pokémon as quickly as possible?
(more…)Not all 26 letters of the alphabet appear on BC license plates. Six are missing — and the reason goes all the way back to 1970, when BC switched from issuing sequential plate numbers to an alphanumeric system.
(more…)One [story] is that the stamps used by employees of the MVB for compiling licensing documents in 1960s only had enough space for ten (10) characters.
The other is that when the province upgraded the machinery at the Oakalla Plate Shop in the mid-1950s, it was designed to accommodate a maximum row of ten (10) different dies for each of the six columns that might be used in the license plate’s serial.
Regardless of which, if any of these stories is the correct one, the alphabet was broken into two blocks of ten letters with the first block comprising A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, and K with “I” excluded as it too closely resembled the number one.
Christopher Garrish
This polyhedron is made from eight triangles and six squares made according to patterns by Fuse Tomoko. The construction relies on inserts to connect the faces and did not last long in Diggy’s paws!
This polyhedron is based on a pattern in the book Kusudama Origami by Ekaterina Lukasheva.
This polyhedron was made from thirty copies of the Penultimate Module with 108˚ angles. I used rather heavy square paper rather than the recommended 4:3 paper; as a result, the creases are thicker and the edges show some separation between the folded layers.
This polyhedron is based on the “Vortex Dodecahedron” pattern in the book Exquisite Modular Origami. It is built from thirty identical modules, which I made from basic one-sided red origami paper.
Brick pavements and tatami mats are traditionally laid out so that no four meet at a single point to form a ┼ shape. Only a few ┼-free patterns can be made using 1×1 and 1×2 tiles, but the addition of 2×2 tiles provides a lot more creative flexibility.
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This polyhedron was one of my first modular origami creations, and the pattern is my go-to option to share with others. It is made from thirty Sonobe modules, although if you get bored partway through you can make a triakis octahedron out of just twelve units.
Although I’ve left academia, Bojan Mohar and I have published a new paper in the proceedings of SODA exploring the “perimeter” measure that plays a key role in my doctoral research. It is mostly based on Chapter 4 of my PhD thesis.
Mount Baker was named by George Vancouver after his third lieutenant, who was the first on his ship to see it.
Although the name is better than a few others in the Pacific Northwest, being the first person to see a giant mountain isn’t a particularly notable claim to fame. Especially when you have to ignore not only tens of thousands of people who lived there but also the Spaniards who had gotten there the year prior.
(more…)😖 + 👻 = 🤧
I love the dry humour in cricket commentary. This episode describes what happened when bees swarmed the pitch in South Africa’s third ODI against Sri Lanka.
At first they deployed a man with a stick. The groundsman approached one buzzing batch, decided his mode of attack would not work, and returned defeated.
Eventually a professional was summoned. One man lived out what must be the dreams of many aspiring beekeepers in South Africa, when he walked to the middle of a packed Wanderers stadium in his trademark baggy whites, nervelessly placed down his plastic box full of honeycomb, and masterfully opened up the lid. Before long he had ensnared his quarry, probably to wild cheers and fans offering to give him their numbers.
All up, the bees had spent about 65 minutes in the middle, which many noted, was more time than some Sri Lanka batsmen had managed.
Andrew Fidel Fernando
I have succesfully defended my PhD thesis! It’s “packed” with results on graph immersions with parity restrictions, and “covers” odd edge-connectivity, totally odd clique immersions, and a new submodular measure that’s intimately connected with both.
I am grateful to NSERC for funding my degree with a Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship, and to my supervisor Bojan Mohar.
(more…)US CONSTITUTION: No person except a natural born citizen shall be eligible for president.
MACDUFF: 😢
Urban planning oddities in Pokémon: