In “Nature by Numbers,” filmmaker Cristobal Vila presents a series of animations illustrating various mathematic principles, beginning with a breathtaking animation of the Fibonacci sequence. Then it moves on to the Golden and Angle Ratios, the Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations. This would be math-class gold, and it’s awfully sweet even if math class is years behind you. - via www.boingboing.net
Wish I was better at maths. Maths is awesome.

If you haven’t heard of the 2012 doomsday prediction then you have probably had better things to do with your time than browse youTube or talk to stoned couch monkeys (no dis-respect to the stoned couch monkeys intended). But this is probably the largest “end of the world” prediction for a while. These predictions usually just make a few authors a bunch of money, the prediction is proved wrong and we all continue with our lives. But I came across a worrying web site, www.instituteforhumancontinuity.org, that goes further than just promoting the prediction, and actually presents itself in an intelligent and composed way. They claim to be ex-political figures who will help your chances of survival after the 2012 “event“, and of course there’s a lottery to improve your chances…
I think it’s worrying how many people seem to be buying into it, and there are 3 years left for it all to gain momentum. How far will it go? Below is a great video showing Neil de Grasse Tyson, who is a respected astrophysicist, killing this prediction right where it stands…

Duncan Forgan’s research which estimated that there are at least 361 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy and as many as 38,000 was published in The International Journal of Astrobiology. This estimate comes from his simulations based on mathematical probabilities, and recent discoveries of planets with similarities to our own in neighbouring solar systems. (Full BBC article here). There are about 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, most have planets orbiting them, so there are likely more than 100 billion planets in our galaxy! only a certain amount of course are likely holding life and then only a fraction of those likely host ‘intelligent’ life forms. This is sound maths!

The article goes on to say that contact between these civilizations would be near impossible (due to the distance between them). You always hear experts explain that it is unlikely any intelligent aliens could travel the galaxy, this often irritates me because they are (fairly & rightly) basing this assumption on ‘our science’ (which states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light). ‘Our’ modern science is roughly 250 years old. 100 years ago the Wright brothers flew the first airplane, today we have space shuttles completing an orbiting space station, that progress was made in 100 years. What kind of progress will humans have made in 1,000 years? How different will our understanding of science be in 10,000 years? The universe is 14 billion years old, there could be an intelligent species out there that flew its first airplane 1,000,000 years ago. It’s fair to say their understanding of science compared to ours would be un-recognizably advanced, its fair I believe to at least factor in the chance that a civilization such as this would have found a way to travel between star systems…