Crocuses signal Spring is coming!

Graphing fourier series to get square waves and sawtooth waves on Google.

Did you know that Google will graph functions for you.  I played around with fourier series to make sawtooth waves and square waves just to see what it looked like.

Sawtooth - just copy and paste into google search.
2/pi(sin(x)+sin(2x)/2+sin(3x)/3+sin(4x)/4+sin(5x)/5+sin(6x)/6+sin(7x)/7+sin(8x)/8+sin(9x)/9+sin(10x)/10+sin(11x)/11+sin(12x)/12)

Square Wave- just copy and paste into google search
4/pi(sin(2x)+sin(6x)/3+sin(10x)/5+sin(14x)/7+sin(18x)/9+sin(22x)/11+sin(26x)/13+sin(30x)/15+sin(34x)/17+sin(38x)/19)

Fun with graphing.

Yes we do need more books!

From the delightful exploding dog.



Books!

We Descend - a hypertext book

A little expensive for a hypertext book (or is it?), but I would like to read We Descend by Bill Bly.  It seems interesting.

http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/WeDescend.html

It looks science-fictional and appears to be about a post-apocalyptic civilization remembering or mis-remembering its past.  Perhaps I will take the plunge and purchase it.

The path that got me to find this book was tortuous. Googling Valenstein got me some images of hearts looking like Frankenstein's monster and a few other images that were interesting.  One of which led to the Woodchipper analysis of Mary Shellley's Frankenstein, which led to me wondering who would build such an interesting piece of software, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), who also curate donated collections of some artists/authors work who have Bill Bly's papers and electronic material because he was a pioneer in writing hypertext novels and wrote We Descend.

Deconstructing texts with a Woodchipper!

Woodchipper is a tool that apparently deconstructs texts, decomposes the text into relatively orthogonal concepts and then plots them together to look for commonality.  Has anybody else ever hear of this Woodchipper tool?  It has an alpha test going, but it seem that you need to be affiliated with an institution to sign up and I just wanted to play with it.



This author has decronstructed and compared several gothic texts using the tool.  The plot above has these tantilizingly interesting yet unlabelled axes.

http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/deconstructing-the-male-and-female-gothic-using-woodchipper/

Here the tool is described at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)

http://mith.umd.edu/corporacamp/tool.php

This link is the signup for the alpha test.
http://mith.umd.edu/corporacamp/signup.php

Surprise alternate endings to Groundhog Day

It is well known that I love the movie Groundhog Day.  Here are some surprise endings you never would have expected.

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Camera pulls back revealing Phil in a coma from the traffic accident when he tried to leave Punxitawney during his misforecast snowstorm.  Rita bites back tears as she reads a book of 19th century French poetry to him hoping that eventually he will awaken.

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The view dissolves into green Matrix style lettering as Rita (codenamed Winter) and Larry (codenamed Eyeball) disconnect Phil (codenamed Groundhog) from the Matrix, pulling the long black connector from the back of his head.  They tell him he's been caught in a glitch in the Matrix and they freed him but they have to get moving because the Sentinels are coming.

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After Phil falls asleep a crowd of roadies rush in to reset everything for the next day.  A montage reveals activity all over Punxetawney as the crew resets television's most popular reality show for 10 years, "Groundhog's Day" whose centerpiece is a kidnapped, completely unaware weatherman from Pittsburgh, forced to repeat the same day over and over.

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Al appears to tell Sam (as Phil) that something is wrong with the leap and that Gushi doesn't know what's wrong.  No matter how many things Sam (as Phil) does in Punxetawney he doesn't seem to put the things right that once went wrong and leap out of there. He just leaps to the same day.  Sam's (as Phil) Swiss cheese memory means he doesn't remember who he really is just the repeating days.

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On the last day the view switches to the groundhog himself who finally sees his shadow, rescues a little girl from a burning house, leads home a lost little boy, finally woos the girl groundhog he loves and unites the community of woodland creatures in the meadows outside of town.  It was the groundhog repeating the days over and over again until he learned to be a better groundhog, Phil the weatherman was just caught in the psychic backlash.

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Happy Groundhog's Day!

Predicting the outcome of the NFL playoffs

It's the time of the year to power up the simulations and attempt to predict the course of the NFL playoffs.  As in year's past I have used the Sagarin ratings and a standard deviation of about two touchdowns to build a monte carlo simulation of the playoff games.  The results are shown in the plot below.

On the AFC side, Denver and New England are the most likely teams to make it to the Superbowl at 44% and 41%, while the other teams are also-rans and make up the last 20% or so of simulations.  The AFC is more spread out.  With San Francisco, Atlanta at 37% and 28%, with Seattle and Green bay picking up some more of the possibilities at 17% and 11%.

Since the goal of this simulation is to try to win the RKB playoff fantasy football pool we also care about how many games each team plays and what players score the most points.  The plot below shows the number of games each team plays in the playoffs, teams with a bye can only play a maximum of three teams, the others can play four if they make it to the final game.  The top plot is the simulation, compared to the bottom plot where the win probabilities are strictly 50/50.

MIN, WAS, CIN and IND have a disproportionate chance of losing there first playoff game so players from those teams will only have a single game to earn points.  One team with a bye, Seattle, seems to hold its own and play through to the Superbowl a good number of times, and certainly high scoring players from that team will have two or three games worth of chances to score points.  As reflected in the pie charts above, NE and DEN play three games in many simulations.

Next step picking the right players given the expectations of which teams will play.

The World's Greatest Chrysanthemums

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving we saw the end of the Chrysanthemum festival at Longwood Gardens. 

That is more than 1000 chrysanthemums trained into this globe shape.  They said they make two of them each year just in case.  It takes 17 months to grow it.

It was at the entrance to the gardens.

 I snuck in a picture of this bird of paradise, they are always in such perfect shape.

Obviously my favorite ones were purple.

Egyptian artifacts and mummies at the University of Pennsylvania

Mayan Artifacts at the University of Pennsylvania