Monthly Archives: June 2010

Monday, June 28, 2010, marked the 12,000th day of the Voyager 2 mission. Since 1977, Voyager 2 (along with its companion Voyager 1) has been exploring the solar system and pushing the envelope of the extent of our exploration of the universe. How far these probes have gone, and how far humanity has ventured away [...]

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about why we shouldn’t follow Jane Jacobs entirely blindly, and might want to curb our hero worship a bit: Her views have now been broadly adopted and it is conventional wisdom in planning circles that participatory neighborhood planning is best, that preservation of old buildings is essential, [...]

There’s some news surrounding my Milky Way Transit Authority subway map: Harvard Magazine has written a nice article about the map A high-quality poster of the map is now being sold at ThinkGeek Enjoy!

The first self-replicating creature has been discovered in the Game of Life. No, not the board game from Hasbro, the cellular automaton developed by John Horton Conway. If you’re not familiar with Life, go download Golly, a great simulator, and play.

My graduate school advisor, Steven Strogatz (known for his recent New York Times column about math) wrote an extremely well-regarded foundational textbook on nonlinear dynamics and chaos, called appropriately, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Back when I was in grad school, Steve had a screen shot from Spider-Man 2, where visible on the the shelf above [...]