Home of the Mathemaniac

Surfing around the web randomly, you occasionally stumble upon some decent timewasters. This time, I stumbled upon something that was a bit better than that. GOOD COPY BAD COPY is “a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture”, released for free to the Internet by its Danish creators.

I had begun to write a small description of it myself, but I located this in the source code of the official site, commented out, and after reviewing what I’d written myself, I prefer this, so here it is:

Good Copy Bad Copy explores the state of limbo the world is in when it comes to copyright.

Western media conglomerates and rights owners desire one world order, while ‘pirates’ and cultural movements in the third world invent their own rules. Rules that even the West might have to play along with.

In a Pittsburgh living room, DJ and producer Girl Talk composes catchy pop hits on his laptop. In the span of 30 seconds he samples Elton John, Notorious B.I.G and Destiny’s Child into a new song. But, who owns the music? Who owns the artists? Piracy is booming all over the world – from Nigeria to Brazil, while Hollywood and the record industry fight to stem the tide.

Directors:
Andreas Johnsen
Ralf Christensen
Henrik Moltke

I strongly urge you to click the link and go watch GOOD COPY BAD COPY, as it is very well put together and an excellent documentary overall.

So, I was surfing through recently added articles on Digg (as I usually do), and I came upon something called “10 Reasons Why you Should Not Download FireFox“.

Now, being quite a fan of Firefox, I decided to read through this.

This read will not help you stop fighting with your lover over who’s doing the washing up but there will not be any questions left concerning which is the best web browser in the world. To avoid being accused of subjectivity I will give you some points that NOBODY will be able to argue with because everything in this article will be true and verifiable.

So be it, I thought, I’ll go check out those errors. For these tests, I will be using the latest version of Firefox (3.0.1) and Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 to compare. [...]

Seeing that I am a student of mathematics, I was very pleased to see this on Digg:

Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot is an internationally acknowledged and recognized mathematician. He originated the field of fractal geometry, and showed how fractals occur in many diverse places, both in nature and mathematics.

Dr. Mandebrot published The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982), recognized by The American Scientist as one of the most influential science books of the 20th Century.

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY was privileged to spend time with Dr. Mandelbrot. He discusses

• How fractal geometry help explain the problems of today
• Examples of fractals in nature and in engineering
• “Mathematical pictures”
• The relationship between fractal geometry and human nature
• The relationship of fractal patterns to human archetypes

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY – Energy, Environment, Cancer Research, Nanotechnology » Fractal Geometry – Mathematics and Nature

Nothing too mathematically complex, but still a nice bit of talk about fractals, their uses and his inspiration.

If you have an externally hosted blog (at, say, Blogger, LiveJournal, …), you might miss the ability to have a shortcut icon, or a favicon, as it’s often called.

Favicons in action

I’ve been fiddling a bit with jQuery for a small project of mine,^*A clone of Funny Farm, if you must know. and ended up needing to position an element somewhere on the screen. This gets fiddly in CSS when you don’t know the exact size of the element, but in jQuery, it’s a breeze. At least with my little plugin. [...]

Video streaming has become hugely popular online, with tonnes of sites like YouTube, DailyMotion and Viddler serving video for just about every need. As an experienced user of these sites, I have a few tips you might not know of, however.

[...]

So, I suppose after having started off my blog with some actual original content, it’s alright for me to share a website I was recommended once, and found myself liking, but sadly lost the address of.

I have found it again and will now share with you the site that is popurls.