Archive of posts with tag 'Mathematics'

Weekend Reading: Universe Sandbox, Mapping Math, and Japanese Companies

February 15, 2020 • #

🌌 Universe Sandbox

This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.

🧮 The Map of Mathematics

A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.

🇯🇵 Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies are in Japan

In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000. Osaka-based construction giant Takenaka was founded in 1610, while even some global Japanese brands like Suntory and Nintendo have unexpectedly long histories stretching back to the 1800s.

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Weekend Reading: Neutrinos and Math, Waymo Progress, and Freemium in SaaS

December 14, 2019 • #

🧮 Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math

As long as you consider linear algebra and eigenvectors “basic math”:

They’d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called “eigenvectors,” describing, in this case, the ways that neutrinos propagate through matter, were equal to combinations of terms called “eigenvalues,” which are far easier to compute. Moreover, they realized that the relationship between eigenvectors and eigenvalues — ubiquitous objects in math, physics and engineering that have been studied since the 18th century — seemed to hold more generally.

🚙 Waymo celebrates first year of self-driving taxi service

Progress here seems positive:

The Google-backed service has delivered more than 100,000 trips to more than 1,500 monthly riders in the Phoenix area, according to a blog post. The number of weekly rides has tripled since its first full month of service in January 2019.

🆓 The Three Rules of Freemium

I’ve been reading more lately about freemium models in SaaS, where they work, where they don’t, risks vs. upsides. This is a good one from Christoph Janz on the basics.

Unlike most other enterprise software, which traditionally used to be chosen by the IT department, Dropbox is typically adopted by individual employees from various departments, who then lobby management into switching. As I noted in my piece, Dropbox was one of the early champions of the ‘consumerization of enterprise software’ movement, which was one of the strongest drivers of SaaS success in the last ten years.

But not every SaaS company can be a Dropbox or a Typeform. Done wrong, freemium can end up cannibalizing your paid user base while also draining your company’s precious engineering and customer support resources. So how do you know if launching a freemium product is the right move for your company?

IT consumerization is one of those secular shifts that’s changing many factors in the software space. The key to getting freemium right (assuming your product and market are conducive to it in the first place) seems to be a willingness to experiment with where the boundaries should be between what’s free and what isn’t.

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Weekend Reading: tracejson, Euclid, and Designing at Scale

August 24, 2019 • #

🛰 tracejson

An extension to the GeoJSON format for storing GPS track data, including timestamps. GPX has been long in the tooth for a long time, but it works and is supported by everything. This approach could have some legs if application developers are interested in a new, more efficient, way of doing things. I know I’d like to explore it for Fulcrum’s GPS-based video capability. Right now we do GPX and our own basic JSON format for storing the geo and elapsed time data to match up video frames with location. This could be a better way.

🔷 Byrne’s Euclid

This is a gorgeous web recreation of Oliver Byrne’s take on Euclid’s Elements. A true work of art.

🎨 Design Tooling at Scale

This post from the Dropbox design team dives into how a large team with a complex product created a design system for a consistent language. It goes into how they organize the stack of design elements and structures using Figma for collaboration.

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Weekend Reading: Tissot's Indicatrix, National Park Fonts, and Starlink

June 8, 2019 • #

🌐 Tissot’s Indicatrix

This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot’s indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points:

Nicolas Auguste Tissot published his classic analysis on the distortion on maps in 1859 and 1881. The basic idea is that the intersection of any two lines on the Earth is represented on the flat map with an intersection at the same or a different angle. He proved that at almost every point on the Earth, there’s a right angle intersection of two lines in some direction which are also shown at right angles on the map. All the other intersections at that point will not intersect at the same angle on the map, unless the map is conformal, at least at that point.

🏞 National Park Typeface

A typeface designed to mimic the National Park Service signs that are carved using a router bit.

Perfect timing on finding this one. I’ve been working on a cartography project to simulate a USGS-style topographic map in QGIS, and this could work perfectly in that design. Excellent work from the Design Outside Studio.

🛰 Starlink

SpaceX is developing a space-based broadband internet system of 24 satellites. The design of this hardware looks incredible. I hope it gets traction and sparks a consumerization of this sort of tech. Between projects like this and the work of Planet and others with microsatellites, that industry seems like it’s on the cusp of some big things.

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