Whimsical Camera Flowers by André Feliciano
Striking photographs capture the fiery beginnings of indoor explosions
Explosions [Bafa Foto via Job’s Wife via Ian Brooks]
![The first 4,000,000 digits of Pi, visualized in a single image
Pi is what’s known as an irrational number, which means that its decimal representation is both infinite and non-repeating.
We’ve been using computers to calculate the digits of Pi for decades. In 1949, John von Neumann and his colleagues used ENIAC — the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer — to calculate Pi to the 2,037th digit. We surpassed the million-digit milestone in 1973. And on October 17, 2011, after 371 days of computing, Shigeru Kondo finished calculating Pi to 10 trillion decimal places.
The picture up top is adapted from a rather simple but effective piece of data visualization, created by the folks at design studio TWO-N, which represents the first four-million digits of Pi in a brilliant mess of interactive pointillism.
Each digit, from 0-9, was assigned a color based on the legend pictured here, and then rendered as a single, 1x1 pixel. Line the pixels up in the order designated by Pi, confine them to a 4-millon pixel image, and you get this interactive applet here, which lets you soar around the entire image, inspecting 500,000-digit sections at a clip. There’s even an interesting search function that lets you probe the mathematical mosaic for number up to eight digits in length. [TWO-N via information aesthetics]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m30hs5FwG31qbkzabo1_500.jpg)
The first 4,000,000 digits of Pi, visualized in a single image
Pi is what’s known as an irrational number, which means that its decimal representation is both infinite and non-repeating.
We’ve been using computers to calculate the digits of Pi for decades. In 1949, John von Neumann and his colleagues used ENIAC — the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer — to calculate Pi to the 2,037th digit. We surpassed the million-digit milestone in 1973. And on October 17, 2011, after 371 days of computing, Shigeru Kondo finished calculating Pi to 10 trillion decimal places.
The picture up top is adapted from a rather simple but effective piece of data visualization, created by the folks at design studio TWO-N, which represents the first four-million digits of Pi in a brilliant mess of interactive pointillism.
Each digit, from 0-9, was assigned a color based on the legend pictured here, and then rendered as a single, 1x1 pixel. Line the pixels up in the order designated by Pi, confine them to a 4-millon pixel image, and you get this interactive applet here, which lets you soar around the entire image, inspecting 500,000-digit sections at a clip. There’s even an interesting search function that lets you probe the mathematical mosaic for number up to eight digits in length. [TWO-N via information aesthetics]
Minimalist posters explain complex philosophical concepts with basic shapes
When it comes to explaining philosophy, sometimes less is more — and we think this arresting collection of minimalist posters encompasses that idea perfectly.
Existentialism.
Individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, dealing with his or her conditions, emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts.
Idealism.
Experience is ultimately based on mental activity. It is contrasted with realism, in which the external world is said to have an apparent absolute existence. The only things which can be directly known for certain are just ideas.
Realism.
Reality exists independently of observers. In ethics, moral realism takes the view that there are objective moral values. Representative realism claims that humans cannot perceive the external world directly.
Empiricism.
Knowledge arises from evidence gathered via sense experience. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition.
(Source: io9.com)
