hroman

YOUR RELATIONSHIP STATUS IN FIVE STAGES as represented by the nets (unfolded) of the five platonic solids of geometry ADDENDUM (for those unfamiliar with the Platonic Solids)

With ambigrams and magic squares fresh on my mind, I stumbled upon this bit of brilliance at Greg Ross’s Futility Closet: It’s both a visual ambigram and a magic square: the rows, columns and diagonals sum to 179 (and maintain this property when flipped upside down).

the letter “r” hidden inside the letter “h” forming my initials

In high school I read a small novel by a (then unknown to me) Scottish author, Iain Banks, called “The Wasp Factory.” It was… deliciously grotesque. I would later learn that Banks, under the name “Iain M. Banks,” also wrote science fiction. His science fiction works were set in the universe of the Culture: “a fictional interstellar anarchist Utopian society.” It sounds awesome because it is awesome. His Culture novel […]

Matchstick puzzles are a set of visual puzzles that require you to re-arrange an arrangement of matchsticks into some new formation. The re-arrangement is bound by certain rules or limits and (usually) requires some lateral thinking to arrive at the solution. When I was a teenager, my uncle, who was visiting us from France at the time, introduced me to my first matchstick puzzle. Having heard of my love of […]

Clifford A. Pickover’s book, “Wonders of Numbers,” was dedicated not to a person but rather to “an amusing mathematical wonder” The Apocalyptic Magic Square is a 6 x 6 square grid of prime numbers where each row, column, diagonal, and broken diagonal sum to 666

“At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen” -Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

My answer to that ubiquitous question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was always “a Doctor or Martin Gardner” (with the usual follow up “you know, the famous puzzler, mathematician, essayist, magician, and writer extraordinaire??”) David Suzuki once did a “Nature of Things” documentary on Martin Gardner entitled “Mathe-magic.” The 1 hour special was fascinating beyond my imagination, with discussions about the mathematics of juggling, John […]

THE THREE SPHINXES OF BIKINI, by Salvador Dali (1947)1 Between the years of 1946 and 1958 (after World War II), the United States conducted 23 nuclear tests at the Micronesian atoll, Bikini. The tests caused the radioactive contamination of the entire system of islands. The (roughly) two hundred Micronesians who inhabited the islands were relocated by the US before the tests, and eventually brought back in 1968. The US lost […]

On one of my sporadic trips to the outskirts of the interweb, I learned of the striking similarities between Disney’s 1994 The Lion King and Tezuka’s 1965 anime series Kimba the White Lion. The so-called “controversy” is was chronicled here (kimbawlion) and touched upon here (wikipedia), with the most striking similarity being the whole dead-father-appears-in-clouds-to-console-son scene. Admittedly, much of the evidence is at times anecdotal. Still, there is enough material […]

Definition: Antisocial Personality Disorder. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Antisocial Personality Disorder (AKA being a sociopath) is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others. This may be characterized by: (a) Failure To Conform To Social Norms (b) Repeatedly Performing Acts That Are Grounds For Immorality (c) Impulsiveness And A Failure To Plan Ahead, Financially (d) Irritability And Aggressiveness (e) […]

Last night I finally got around to watching Ben Wright’s documentary, “Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual.” (Though I wouldn’t call it a documentary; it was more a 90 minute unscripted and tangential Zizek lecture.) Who is Slavoj, you ask? Why, he’s only the preeminent Slovenian orthodox Lacanian Stalinist, of course! It’s not that I’m actively furthering my characterization as dork incarnate; usually I keep these sorts of things […]

Kurt Godel was a logician who lived from 1906 to 1978. He is best known for his two Incompleteness Theorems that show the inherent limitations of axiomatic systems. Pretty standard water-cooler-discussion material, I know. Godel is also the subject of one of my favourite books by Douglas Hofstadter: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid I spent years in university trying to fully grasp Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and its […]