Solar System: 5 Things To Know This Week

a language where the words for numbers are based on their prime factorization

Once you start thinking of ‘poet’ as identity, once you start thinking that being a poet is just like being anything else that you are, as being something else that you were born, then you can go about doing the things that poets do, and you can go about that more comfortably. Or at least I think so. Or at least it gives you a rationale for why you’re doing what poets do. Like, ‘Why are you still in the dark, trying to read, at two o’clock in the morning?’ ‘Oh, because I’m a poet.’ ‘Why are you pulling your car over to write a line down and you’re already late to where you’re going?’ ‘Because I’m a poet.’

Jericho Brown, interviewed by Elisa Gonzalez for Washington Square Review (via bostonpoetryslam)

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Lobachevsky (via curiosamathematica)

Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc….but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.

David Foster Wallace, Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (via mindfuckmath)

my writing style could best be described as “probably more commas than is entirely necessary”

Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided that inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron.

Imagine a droplet sitting on a rigid surface spontaneously bouncing up and then continuing to bounce higher after each impact, as if it were on a trampoline. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. There are two key features to making such a trampolining droplet–one is a superhydrophobic surface covered in an array of tiny micropillars and the other is very low air pressure. The low-pressure, low-humidity air around the droplet causes it to vaporize. Inside the micropillar array, this vapor can get trapped by viscosity instead of draining away. The result is an overpressurization beneath the droplet that, if it overcomes the drop’s adhesion, will cause it to leap upward. For more, check out the original research paper or the coverage at Chemistry World.  (Video credit and submission: T. Schutzius et al.)