Play Pac-Man on Google Maps

Yes, really: You can now use maps in Google Maps to play Pac-Man. I approve!

In case you're interested, you can try a map near Somerville College in Oxford (and also necessarily near the Mathematical Institute). Or perhaps catching Pokémon is more aligned with your tastes?

Or, if you prefer, you can play a live-action version with smartphones.

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Update: Here is the post from Google's product manager about the new feature. (Tip of the cap to Mary Radcliffe for this link. Apparently, her husband is the person at Google who created this particular gem.) Ah, I love it when April 1st comes along. :)

Update (4/01/15): the article on CNN.com shows several example mazes from different parts of the world.

Update (4/08/15): Wired.com now has an article about this, which is affectionately called "Pac-Maps". Also, here are the "top" places (which are isolated to just a few cities) to play Pac-Maps. Harvard Square is insane.

Financial Resources and Publishing in Scientific Reports?

As some of you know, I am not exactly the biggest fan of the journal Scientific Reports, which is brought to us by the Nature Publishing Group.

I won't get into my specific grievances here, though the journal now appears to have hit a new low with their pay-to-play peer-review activities (e.g., with authors allowed to pay for a fast-track peer review that uses a different and third party peer-review service rather than normal peer review). As discussed here and here, one editor has already resigned. Good! I hope many other Scientific Reports editors follow suit, and some of my peeps from the complex-systems community are also fighting back: they have sent a letter to the Powers That Be at Scientific Reports. I am sharing this letter with permission.

I hope more editors from Scientific Reports resign and that that forces them to either go under or, better yet, to change to have more reasonable policies on such things. (Ideally, they would also improve other epically bad aspects of their venue, but that is a story for another day.)

Ant Fight Club

In my latest post for the Improbable Research blog, I discuss modeling of combat in ants.

One of the reasons I chose to write about this paper is that it also allowed me to introduce modeling issues (e.g., the choice of a differential-equation model versus an agent-based model).

Next time, maybe I'll even use a Mortal Kombat reference. Finish him!

Interactive Twitter Network from NetSci 2014

I just found Marc Smith's interactive Twitter network from NetSci 2014. Here is a brief description of the network:

"The graph represents a network of 57 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained "netsci", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 18,000 tweets. The network was obtained from Twitter on Friday, 06 June 2014 at 15:22 UTC."

You can find additional descriptions and some basic calculations about the graph on the site to which I linked. You can also download the network data. Apparently, I contributed to this network, especially with my snark. :)

"Gerrymandering Mishap Leaves Nation Without Any Borders Whatsoever"

Yup, The Onion wins again! I approve!

John Nash and Louis Nirenberg Share 2015 Abel Prize

John Nash and Louis Nirenberg have been jointly awarded the 2015 Abel Prize for their work on partial differential equations.

(Tip of the cap to Physics Today for their post on Facebook.)

Learn Anatomy from Dissected Knit Creatures

Here's another really cool thing: knitted versions of dissected creatures.

Now that is sweet!

(Tip of the cap to Leslie Porter.)

Update: Of course, for several years, people have been able to experience the joys of plush microbes (these are especially awesome), plush subatomic particles, and even plush statistical distributions.

Update (3/31/15): I now have a post about this on the Improbable Research blog.

Turning Coffee Into Art

Yes, really. So awesome!

(Tip of the cap to Yves van Gennip.)

How Long Would It Take to Fall Through the Earth?

There is a new paper on estimating how long it would take to fall through the Earth that does better than the standard crude approximation. I think this is very cool, and I definitely suggest taking a look at the other side of the link.

And I am again reminded that I should have found a way to take the course "Order of Magnitude Physics" at Caltech when I had a chance. (But, thankfully, I often get to think that way for my research.) I just did some googling, and I found the material from the 1995 and 1997 versions of the class.

But I still have one question: How can I make sure that I take the correct turn at Albuquerque?

(Tip of the cap to Physics Today for their post on Facebook.)

Skin-Texture-Changing Frogs

This blurb from IFLS describes frogs whose skin can change texture --- not just color! --- based on their surroundings. Now that is damn cool!

The title of the article claims that this is a "shape-shifting" frog, which to me seems like a highly misleading characterization.

Pronouncing Words in the United Kingdom

This poem from a 1906 anthology says it all.

(Tip of the cap to Jonathan Adams.)

Update: Here is another poem on pronunciation in the English language. (Tip of the cap to Martin Gould.)

Google Celebrates Emmy Noether's 133rd Birthday

Mathematician Emmy Noether is the subject of today's Google doodle. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to several people.)

Post-Punk Icons Reimagined as Marvel Superheroes

Several post-punk icons have been reimagined as Marvel superheroes. This is pretty damn cool!

(Tip of the cap to Leslie Porter.)

A Fine-Scale, Historically Awesome, Genetic Map of the U.K.

A new genetic map of the U.K., which is the product of several-years-long collaboration between geneticists, historians, and others. This looks really neat, and I recommend looking at the map at the other end of the link.

The first line of the news article articulates how cool this is: A remarkable new map of Britain shows how the nation was forged by successive waves of immigration from continental Europe over 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.

Again quoting the article: Geneticists and historians collaborated closely on the 10-years project and have been astonished to find that patterns in the DNA of Britons living today reflect historical events going back centuries, and in some cases millennia. Take a look in the news article for some specific examples.

I am sure that there is a ton more than one can do with the data---and of course, I wonder how much one can improve on the analysis (and, without having looked with seriousness at the Nature article, naturally I have no scientific opinion on its correctness). Many of the coauthors are my colleagues at Oxford, so maybe I will eventually have a chance to play with the data? :)

Update: Taking a quick look at the paper, one could certainly try to use more sophisticated clustering methods. Whether that would have any effect on the qualitative conclusions remains to be seen.

NFL Offensive Lineman by Day, Spectral Graph Theorist by Night

John Urschel is not your ordinary professional football player.

He may be an NFL offensive lineman by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His most recent paper, called "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians", has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that it had been officially accepted for publication. (Based on my googling, the published version of the paper hasn't yet appeared in the journal.)

You can read a draft of Urschel's paper on the arXiv preprint server. I just wish that he used his current affiliation on the paper. That would have been fantastic.

(Tip of the cap to Francis Su.)

Update: Looking at Urschel's academic website, I see that he has prior publications. His website gives the reference for a paper on celestial mechanics. I also checked Mathematical Reviews (to find an upper bound on his Erdős Number, of course), and I see that he also has at least one more paper on spectral graph theory. (This paper isn't listed on Urschel's Penn State website, which I suppose he is no longer updating.)

Update (3/21/15): I wrote a blurb on Urschel for the Improbable Research blog.

Some Awesome Passive-Aggressive Notes

Here are some awesome passive-aggressive notes.

There is, naturally, an entire web page dedicated to such things.

We also do passive-aggressive notes pretty well in Oxford applied math. For example, take a look here, here, and here.

(Tip of the cap to George Takei.)

Upcoming Movie: "Pixels"

I just saw a trailer for the movie Pixels, in which "real life" video game characters attack the Earth.

The movie looks cheesy and probably deserves its own drinking game (and I could easily see this being horrible), but am I am so going to geek out and watch this! Bring it on!

The movie has a chance to be awesome, but if nothing else it will at least be "awesome".

Star Trekkin' Across the Journal Publications

That's write: The Firm's song "Star Trekkin'" may well be the most quoted song in scholarly journals. I certainly hope it is, because that would be awesome!

And if you are unfamiliar with this song, then you owe it to yourself to watch the music video on the other side of the link.

Over on the blog entry to which I linked above, reader JimBob points to Spock's quote about Organians: "Fascinating. Pure energy. Pure thought. Totally incorporeal. Not life as we know it at all."

And that is really awesome! Because that brings us back to music: "pure energy" is sampled in the song "What's on Your Mind" by Information Society. I didn't realize that that came from the same line as the modified version in "Star Trekkin'".

Visualizations of π

Several of these visualizations of π are absolutely stunning.

Happy epic Pi Day! It is epic because the year is 2015 (so 3/14/15 in US reckoning), so there are two particular times to celebrate: in the morning and evening at 9:26:535....

(Tip of the cap to Andy Sudol for the website with the visualizations.)

Turning Urine to Electricity Using Microbes

Yes, really.

(Tip of the cap to IFLS.)