randform

　”Immer wieder la Wiener! – greetings from a barbiequeuekoo” artwork by Hiro Mourikama

It’s Barbeque season in Fukuoka and apparently even Kyushu University has a barbeque station right off the law building. Usually students gather there and -judging by the smell- grill meat or fish (please see below image).

However given the fact that the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global and especially regarding global warming (please see also this randform post) and given the roaring fish market (partially monitored by the fishinfonet) it would be advisable to understand more, what the main reasons for the barbeque sessions are. Is the smell of meat important or can this eventually be substituted by vegetables? Is the fire an atavistic essential? The combination of the previous with the social aspect?

Up to now according to FAO director-general Jacques Diouf the world only needs 30 billion dollars a year to eradicate the scourge of hunger. But as a matter of fact also if this sum is rather small (like in comparision to the other sums mentioned in the article) it seems to be already now an unmanageable problem to find solutions to distribute food in a balanced way.

Given the upcoming problems due to climate change and overpopulation this wont get easier.(->There was already a link to the Impacts of Climate Change on health chart in death/million of the United Nations Development program in this randform post)

So may be one should now also start thinking about a minimal astronauts diet for the earthly being, consisting of cheaply produceable carbonhydrates with a vitamin and mineral supplement. Hopefully not soylent green.

Just to justify myself I assign the handsonic HPD 10 and the silent violin the status of an underestimated instrument.
the handsonic being on the market for quite a while now is still dead usefull and both are good tools for performing in small japanese flats.

s-isothermic enneper surface by Tim Hoffmann

According to the blog tesselion (via boing boing) which is a blog about the project tesselion (Project Collaboration: Marc Fornes (www.theverymany.net), Adrienne Yancone (www.diecreative.com)) :

Recently the development of planar quadrilateral meshes have become a strong interest in the architectural community due to their potential ease for constructing complex surfaces. A race has begun to develop a system of flat panelization of free form surfaces which would enable large scale, efficient and economic, construction from flat sheet material.

I didnt know that there was an architectural race going on!

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I may be a bit sensitive to this – but the music within shopping centers is usually first just ugly and secondly as it is usually in addition perpetual and repeating it makes me want to run out of the shopping centers right away. (The music in some of the shopping centers over here is actually in my view a torment to the employees and really a case for a health review!).

I know what I am talking about since I worked once in a gardening center in Germany, where the shopping music was also rather terrible which made working there almost unbearable.

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I saw the above version of the syllables kou and tse which sort of make up my last name in Kanji. There seems to be no single TZ. So Tse, which sounds almost like a very short tsy comes rather close. Is this true? Comments appreciated.

Anyways the meaning of the two syllables is NINE SEAS.

Who says all the unsolved math problems are difficult to phrase?
The Collatz conjecture can be phrased as a simple question: Start with a positive number. If the number is even take its half otherwise take 3 times the number plus 1. Now do this over and over again. The (yet unanswered) question is: will this process allways reach the number 1?
(from there the sequence of numbers gets into a boring 1, 4, 2, 1,… cycle)
The conjecture is “yes” and it has been shown to be true for numbers up to 10 * 2⁵⁸, but this is of course no big evidence.
The above image shows the numbers when starting with 353. It takes 125 iterations to reach 1 in this case and the biggest intermediate value is 9232.
There are some nice reformulations of the problem. One can for example state it as a a 2-tag system
The 2-tag sequence for 7 follows below
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The math and science building of Kyushu University is located at Hakosaki Campus which is directly in the entry lane of Fukuoka airport. Probably this is one reason, why the faculty of math will soon move to another bigger and newer campus which is located in the west of Fukuoka. However this campus is quite far out, so nobody really wants to move there. As I understand also other campuses located elsewhere in Fukuoka should go there.

As a matter of fact -may be I am wrong as I didnt really make a statistical analysis of that- but it seems that there is a general tendency to move university campuses, which were usually located in the center of a city to the outskirts of a city. And this is only partially due to the higher needs of space regarding more and more sophisticated experimental setups, people etc – as in principle – also given the usual high real estate costs in a cities center – one could try to find more space within the center of a city (remark: For the case of a particle accelerator this could indeed be difficult, but in general new experimental set-ups are not that big). In short -given that the above observation is true – one could see this as a society’s unwillingness to fund more space for universities in the center of cities – and thus it could display certain priorities of a society.

The above jet flying over Hakosaki campus which looks like tatooed from underneath has such a wild appearance and looked so gaga or silly that I was supposing that it might have been the private jet of a pop group like lets say beastie boys?? (just joking…:))

For no particular reason at all a figure showing all possible 120 permutations of 5 points: permutationsof5.pdf

In the current journal of our new employer, I found the above illustration. allthough I can not read the text around it, it seems to outline the interplay between pure and applied math.

High quality and well designed things are nice. Since these are usually more expensive (but not always!) it is good to know how to deal with bad design and how to live with it.

The previous sentence was meant as a kind of excuse, since I am feeling already bad that I criticise again a design over here (and Japan has actually a high culture of design!), however I feel these things have to be spoken out at one point.

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