Centripetal Notion: category

His explanation traces the seemingly erratic nature of fundamental particles to the symmetries of E8, a simplified representation of an even more complex 248-dimensional object. “My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” he told New Scientist, recalling when he first made the connection between his theories and the shape of E8. “I thought: ‘Holy crap, that’s it!’” Thus far all the particle interactions predicted by his model correspond with observations in the real world. (…)

(video)

Vulcan point in Crater Lake on Vulcano Island in Lake Taal on Luzon, Philippines. It only gets easier from here.

“Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia (as of 26th May 2007) are analysed (…) to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart (…). The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.”

After letting Last.fm track his music listening habits for over a year, Lee Byron took the data generated and through some clever math and plotting, produced this beautiful, organic representation of his history. Artists ebb and flow as the seasons and his preferences change.

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“At first glance, the manuscript appears to be a medieval Christian prayer book.

But on the same pages as the prayers, experts using a high-tech imaging system have discovered commentary likely written in the third century A.D. on a work written around 350 B.C. by the Greek philosopher Aristotle.”

(images)

Essentially, if I understand it correctly, it’s like a 2-D shadow of a 248-D sphere, an object so symmetrical you could theoretically rotate it in any direction in up to 248 dimensions and it still appear the same.

Scientists Chi-Wing Fu and Andrew Hanson develop a model for visualizing the degrees of scale between different functional levels of matter formation, ranging from the observable universe as a whole to one Planck length.

Two professors and a graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill formulate a new model that superimposes over the Big Bang theory (…)

(…) the recently launched CoRoT satellite, combined with ground-based observatories, will soon be able to estimate density of extrasolar planets, thus allowing us to locate long-theorized ocean planets (…)