This week we’re playing “collect what you might have tweeted into a blog.” Here we are:
Last night I had a dream that I dressed as santa clause for halloween
Amazing mace,
How sweet the taste
That saved a dish for three?
It once was husks
But now is ground
Was bland, but now spicy.
HAVING A LOOPHOLE IN A LAW DOES NOT MEAN THE LAW IS BAD OR THAT ALL LAWS ARE BAD OH MY GOD
Charity, research, and content/media creation all have short term vs long term conundrums.
Do you want to do something that’s helpful/useful/popular to the most people in the moment?
Or do something that is less useful/popular in the moment,
but potentially has a much bigger and lasting positive impact?
Luckily we don’t have to stress over the decision,
because long term projects are unfundable.
There was a twitter thread about cylinders and spherinders in which someone pointed out the unhelpfulness of the main image on wikipedia in visualizing the 4-dimensional spherinder:
Spherinder in stereographic projection, by Sylvie Martin
So I made this image to help explain 3d cylinders to 2d beings:
Now I’m wondering what other helpful information can be found in Flatland’s Wikipedia.
I made a video about soup labels. People seem to like it.
Script:
So these soups were on sale and I was trying to figure out how to get the most bang for my buck and I noticed something odd. So I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole to see if there were a SOUP CONSPIRACY.
Now, people look at calories on products for all sorts of reasons; some soups are marketed as Light for people who look at 70 or 80 calories and think, that’s good, I want a low number, while some people think 70 calories is not worth the effort of opening the can.
A savvy consumer will look at the fine print and see that’s per serving, and a serving is one cup, and I don’t know if anyone in the universe opens up a can of soup and carefully pours out just half of it, but assuming you eat the whole thing like a normal adult who eats canned soup by themselves because they can’t cook and have no friends and are home alone with only their microwave for company, of course you eat the whole can which has about two servings. And who doesn’t expect to do a little arithmetic in the grocery store, two times 70 is 140, which if you want a low number, is still pretty low.
It’s kind of funny though because calories per serving means total calories divided by number of servings, so multiplying it by the number of servings is really just undividing it. Or maybe it’s division that should be called unmultiplication?
Anyway maybe you want high numbers, life’s too short and budgets too tight, so they market the rich and hearty soups with 150 calories per serving! Also about 2 servings per can, and 300 calories is a number worth opening a can for.
Funny thing though, both serving sizes are one cup but on the light soup one cup is 236 grams and on the rich hearty soup one cup is 253 grams. Do rich and hearty things weigh more? On the one hand it seems intuitive that yes, rich food is heavier, mm look how rich and gloppy, can you tell this video isn’t a paid sponsorship? But on the other hand fat and oil weigh less than water, foods weigh all sorts of things. Luckily we can look at the net weight of the product and huh, it’s the same for both soups.
So does that mean light food isn’t lighter? I don’t know, maybe there’s more of it in the can. But I do suspect there’s something going on with these serving sizes, meaning we can’t really compare these advertised calorie numbers, and we can’t just double the calories per serving to get the calorie count for the can either, so, so much for arithmetic in the grocery store.
See, for light zesty santa fe style chicken, arithmetic says 236 grams times 2 = 472 grams. Which is clearly not helpful as the total grams is 524, not 427. If we want to figure out how this 524 grams happens, we have to multiply 236 grams by “about 2”. So don’t get distracted by the suggestion of 2-ness, we don’t know what this number is… unless we treat it like any other variable and do algebra to it. So let’s just unmultiply this 236g, which means we unmultiply the other side too, and we get “about 2” equals about 2.22. Which is a very 2-ey number, but definitely not to be confused with actual two. So now that we know how many servings are actually in here, we can multiply this 80 calories by about 2 and get 177.6. So if you were expecting 160 calories you’re cheating by 11%. And if you were expecting 33% fewer calories than a leading competitor that has 140 calories, I have bad news.
But what about rich and hearty chicken pot pie style? One cup is now 253 grams. Times 2 equals 506, but times “about 2” equals 524. So once we unmultiply both sides by the serving size we see that this time about 2 equals 2.07, that really is about 2. and 2.07 times 150 calories is 310.5. So if you were expecting 300 calories you’re getting just 3.5% more than you bargained for.
So about 2 can be more than 2, it could be actually about 2, but what about less than 2? Is this can of black bean soup an organic alternative with the same amount of calories per serving as the non-organic soups? Obviously it’s a smaller can but maybe those organic black beans are really just that much more dense and nutritious. Serving size is still one cup, still “about 2” servings per container.
One cup equals 256 grams, times two equals 512 grams of soup with 300 calories. But 256 times “about 2” = 405 grams. That’s a pretty big difference. This “about 2” equals 1.58. This time, about two servings of 150 calories gets you only 237 calories, that’s 79% of the 300 you might be expecting when you read this label.
So according to this soup company “about 2” can mean anything from 1.58 to 2.22 and I wondered whether that was about the legal range of what’s allowed on the can so I went and read the FDA guidelines for nutrition information and learned lots of interesting things. Now between 2 and 5 servings you have to round to the nearest .5, but somehow numbers less than 2 aren’t accounted for here. Wonder how that loophole got in there.
Other fun marketing details: Light is in a little spoon, rich and hearty is in a big spoon. Organic is definitely an entire bowl that is a meal that is organic. Also the chicken soups are inspected for wholesomeness, but steak and beef is USA inspected and passed like a champ. Good job, soup.
But servings aren’t the only numbers with exploitable rounding rules. According to the guidelines any calorie numbers over 50 get rounded to the nearest 10s place, so this 80 might represent 75, or it might really be 84.9, which * 2.22 is 188 calories. And then again, there’s margins of error for how many grams in the can and in a serving and maybe they round the number of ounces first and then convert that number to grams and round again, which means the number of grams isn’t necessarily accurate to three significant figures, and I’m sure there’s margins of error for everything, basically who knows.
Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the layers here. If all we want to do is know how many calories are in this can of soup, we’ve got four strategies. A quick look at the label gets you an answer of 80 calories. “read the fine print and do basic arithmetic,” which sounds like due diligence to me, gets you 160. “read the finer print and solve an algebraic equation,” as ya do in a grocery store, bumps that to 176, and finally, “read the Department of Health and Human Services plus Food and Drug Administration 132 page guidelines plus do an advanced analysis with fuzzy numbers that even I couldn’t do without a special computer program” gets you to “up to 188+ but nobody knows, and that’s assuming their accounting is both correct and within the guidelines”.
I mean, just imagine you’re this soup company with a 188 calorie can of soup that you want to market as low-calorie as possible. You’re not allowed to round 188 down to 180 and you certainly don’t want to have to round up to 190, but by choosing the right amount of soup and the right serving size you can make sure you get a round-downablenumber of calories, ideally a maximally round-downable number like 84.9, and label it 80. So in one way, your number is accurate within 5 calories which is the rule. But on the other hand, you’ve rounded off those 5 calories more than once. Also use a maximally downroundable number of servings and you can shave an additional 10 to 12 % of calories off and there you go.
And careful number wrangling can trick you with other things too, like this reduced sodium soup that if you read the fine print still has 20% your daily value of sodium, times two is 40, plus algebra is 43% your daily sodium in one soup and that’s the reduced sodium soup.
I don’t know how much it matters if your numbers are a little off, most people are pretty far from the recommended daily values of everything anyway, but I find the math interesting and also the politics, like, if companies go out of their way just to tweak the presentation of some numbers by 10 or 20 percent, that to me is a sign of how successful the DHHS and FDA have been. I like that I can go to a store and pretty much trust that the food I buy probably won’t make me sick and that the labels are roughly accurate, so these agencies are a positive force for both public health and consumer trust, which is like food for economies, and economies are food for federal services, at least when digested properly through an educated tax-paying voting public, and that’s the kind of non-zero-sum feedback loop I like to see, everything gets better for everyone. Unless your feedback loop grows parasites who are too small to understand why cutting off their hosts circulation will kill it.
Ooh I just found a supposedly 50 calorie per serving can of french onion, 524 grams divided by 230 grams per cup means there’s 2.28 servings per can, so busted, that should round up to about 2.5 servings per container for the more accurate informational benefit of anyone who doesn’t want to waste 2/3 of their daily sodium quota on something that barely surpasses instant ramen for food content.
Actually, I take that back. This instant ramen is significantly more food-like than this particular canned soup, and somehow less sodium even with seasoning packet because their “about 2” actually equals 2, wow, I thought ramen was just an excuse to eat textured saltwater but this is something else. Ramen pro-tip, gently drop an egg or two in the boiling noodles for the last about 2 minutes, then it’s definitely food, lookit that protein and calories, and I like to mix it all up in the bowl so that the pot doesn’t need much cleaning. Mmmm. Eggs.
This video not sponsored by top ramen or its parent nissen, also not sponsored by… eggs? Whose parent is… chicken. This video is sponsored by viewers like you through patreon!
Anyway, go check out your products and see if you can find some interesting “about 2s” in your life.
so I noticed this way cool spider web in the corner of my couch and
*its making me have math thoughts*
Lookit the shape, its roundy but also antiroundy and now I’m gonna be stuck staring at this spider while my brain goes all
*spider math*
It reminds me of a wormhole, like, if you get sucked into the web what is on the other side? Besides mandibly death?
It reminds me of a pseudosphere, or maybe a hyperboloid, lookit that negative curvature, right? It’s roundy one way around the funnel but unlike a sphere which would be roundy around the same way it’s roundy around the opposite way at the same time.
it reminds me of this sculpture by Anish Kapoor called Vortex which I guess doesn’t photograph very well but trust me in real life it just sucks your mind into this incalculable void and you’re left standing there staring helplessly with your brain all fuzzy.
It makes me imagine the entire room could get sucked into the roundy vortex of spiderness, or at least the bugs in it, like flies are points in a vector field and the vector field is like choochoochoochoo into the funnel, or maybe it’s a spirally kind of vector field where everything spirals in…
I looked it up it’s a funnel web spider, not to be confused with the australian funnel web spider, and its funnel is more a cozy retreat for the spider to hang out in than a place where bugs get stuck, it’s not even sticky, the bugs can fall on any part of it or even just be near the web and the spider comes out and does noms. So its kinda like the web extends smoothly to become the couch and the rest of the universe…
It makes me think we are all already inside the web we just don’t know it yet because the spider hasn’t come to claim us,
it reminds me of a 4d torus stereographically projected into 3d space, there’s this cool way to divide space into like two infinite donuts, whatdya call it, ooh that’s what I’m talking about, thank you Jason, so you think you’ve got a regular donut but it starts growing cuz spiders and soon it’s infinitely big inside and everything is spider territory and there’s this funnel web spider hole but actually surprise, the rest of space that isn’t the donut is actually also a donut that belongs to reverse-spiders or antispiders or something.
I know that’s probably not what the spider had in mind when it made this web in the corner of my couch buuuuut I can’t help wonder when presented with such a shapey shape.
*it’s making me have math thoughts*
Ok postscript, no joke, I went to see if that Anish Kapoor sculpture was still on display at sfmoma and
the 5th floor sculpture gallery is now entirely full of spiders. By Louise Bourgeois because she knows what’s up. So here’s some free promotion for sfmoma, go do art to your brain its good for you bye.
This video is funded by my patrons on patreon, so thank you all of you, and if you want a tau is greater than pi shirt you’ve got one more day before we put in the order.
So some months back Grant Sanderson of the channel 3blue1brown invited me to take part in a collaboration where various science and math youtubers attempt a twist on a classic puzzle where the original goes like this: There’s three houses and three utility stations: gas, water and power. Connect every house to every utility, simple enough, except oh no if you cross two utilities they explode so do it with no crossings. People usually manage pretty well up to line 7 or 8 but number 9 seems impossible.
The timing didn’t work out for me to take part in the original collab, where the same puzzle is printed on a mug, but I finally saw the video, and I was surprised to find that my answer was different from anyone else’s. You see, I wanted to leave room for future infrastructure, so, sure we need to untangle everyone’s gas water and power but we also want internet that connect every house to every other house, and a separate secure network that connects every utility station to every other utility station.
So if you don’t know the original puzzle try that first, and if you do know it then you might want to check out the mug variation first, and if you’ve already figured that one out then you might want to pause and see if you can figure out the Vi Hart Infrastructure Special and make everything connect to everything, that’s 15 lines, three each for gas, water, power, social network, and secure network, without any of them crossing. But on a mug.
And one more thing before we start. The official version of this mug is sold on mathsgear and comes with a dry erase marker so you can make mistakes, but I’m a sharpie person and a lover of beautiful solutions so we need something that makes enough sense that I can draw in all 15 lines using permanent marker without worrying about making a mistake.
Ok so here’s the thought process.
First I look at the puzzle and see what associations come up. If you’re a science or math person you might think, oh, this has to do with graph theory, there’s lines connecting vertices and that’s like the definition of a graph.
For the mug variation, you might think, oh, maybe it has to do with topology, because there’s that joke about how a topologist thinks a mug is the same as a donut because topologically you can transform one into the other, as seen in this piece by Henry Segerman and Keenan Crane.
So the main associations come up, and depending on how much you know about them these secondary associations might come up, or maybe you just start trying things out, or maybe your biggest association is “hey, that’s the classic impossible utilities puzzle,” which might stop you from looking further than that.
The classic puzzle is supposed to frustrate you with your inability to get that last line in there until you either mathematically prove it’s impossible or come up with some other creative answer like that the last line goes through a house, or over a bridge, or through a hole in the notebook paper and around the back, which is kind of what the torus will allow us to do. I mean, mug handle.
So I know I can solve the original three utilities problem if I can solve the four utilities problem. And I’d know it’s possible to connect all six into what we call a “complete” graph if it’s possible to connect seven into a complete graph on the torus. And maybe this bridge of reasoning can land somewhere near the four-color map theorem which is connected to the seven color map theorem for toruses,
And I just happen to have a seven color torus right here to demonstrate. Every color section of this torus touches all six other colors, this is by Susan Goldstine and I’ll link a tutorial in case you’re into mathematical beadwork.
Ok so now we just need to connect the bridge. Each color area here touches every other area, see, it’s like… well we’d better bagel it,
So take the orange area, it touches yellow on one side, red on the other, then next to yellow is green which touches the orange part over here, and then purple, well let’s do pink, yeah so all the colors have two neighbors on their sides and they touch two other colors on one end and two other others on the other end so they all touch all six other colors.
Maybe next time we’ll use colored frosting and do a bundt cake.
Anyway then I just take the dual, which means I make every area a vertex and then I can connect them all to each other, so it’s really handy that I know a lot about dual graphs. And there we go, I can connect 7 dots to each other without crossing, which means I could ignore one vertex to get 6, and then delete the extra lines until we’ve solved the original mug puzzle.
So this went through my head within seconds of seeing the mug because all this math stuff is close to the surface of my brain, I have experience using these facts and making them accessible, but it’s not yet a solution, it’s a sketch of a proof and a method of finding a solution, but we don’t want just any solution but a pretty one that’s simple to draw. And that means I want to take advantage of symmetry.
So when I wanna put six points with symmetry on a torus I’ve got some options, we want something reminiscent of the original puzzle even though on the mug they’re all squashed together. But I’ll keep the idea of having three on top and three on bottom, and with something like this I can see the symmetry and triangulation, we connect these to each other and then we connect the top ones to the bottom, so that’d be like everything is squares if we unwrapped it, and then just do triangles to it, all symmetric like so it’s easy to visualize, every square is the same, I mean it gets squished when you do topology to it but I can visualize it as a pattern that’s all the same, and now we have more than enough lines to connect the utilities to all the houses.
If the mug had the little icons printed around the handle maybe it’d be more obvious how to start mapping it back on, or maybe if the icons were spaced around the mug and if the inside of the mug actually had a hole in the bottom so you could loop through that way, and then we wouldn’t even need the handle. But from here we can scoot over to the handle and see just one more interesting thing that the more common solutions don’t take advantage of and that we’ll need more colors to make clear, so let’s go ahead and do this.
Ok, we’ll start with internet because that’s important and it’s just two straight lines that circle around the mug. Then we’ll triangle up our other utilities between them, and now it’s just three lines left and we’ll just pretend they’re looping through the cup so they’re nice and organized, and then scoot them over to the handle, And now here’s the funnest part.
If just one line is going over the handle it might as well be a flat bridge. But we’ve got three lines, and notice that they don’t match up. On a flat bridge you’d have to worry they’d block each other from connecting, But our solution uses all of the 3d roundiness of the handle by rotating around it so the lines come out apparently in a different order on the other side.
So there’s my answer to the three utilities mug puzzle, and also the four utilities puzzle, see if you can rediscover it yourself without looking, and if you need another mug challenge try adding a fourth house.
Susan has also collected a page of other artistic renditions of the 7-color torus and links to instructions for beadwork, fiber arts, and other further reading: http://faculty.smcm.edu/sgoldstine/torus7.html
I’m going to do a very special Tau Day video this year and break the 4th wall a bit. If you’re a fan worried I might ruin the Vi Hart Brandsperience this video is especially for you. Now, a youtuber’s brand is this delicate thing sustained through collaboration between the artist and audience. If I started younger I probably would have been more into the social vloggy youtubery aspect where we have a community with a name and we do tags and form an identity, not because that’s what younger people do but because that’s the norm, that’s the top ten tips for success on youtube, and at that point I wouldn’t have known what I want from life well enough to know that’s not the direction I want to go in.
Some of our inside jokes and vihart lingo would be purposefully created, but some of it would just kinda happen, like, we’ve all got our hands on the little ouija board triangle thingy but no one feels like they’re directing it when all of a sudden we all agree that cats are the waste product of a particularly complicated multidimensional robot. hmm, kinda makes sense when you think about it. And now that’s the truth, or at least its canon, and after a while what’s the difference.
We would be such a good cult. We have so much amazing cult potential, it takes effort to not accidentally become a cult.
Anyway. Suspension of disbelief is an interesting thing with many varieties. Take the doodling in math class series.
“Say you’re me and you’re in math class and…”
This is standard suspension of disbelief where I write straight up fiction and you enjoy the story. You don’t have to think about it very long to realize I’m not talking to myself in a real math class as I draw in real time. It has scripted narration on top of heavily edited film.
However, youtube has some features that traditional film did not, which can lead to a sort of communal extended suspension of disbelief.
Sometimes I get comments asking about what my math teacher thought or did I get in trouble, responding to the character I play in the video rather than to actual me. I assume a lot of these comments are from folks consciously enjoying taking part in the fiction. And some are probably from folks in that fuzzy suspension of disbelief state where you’re going along with a story without really thinking about it, I mean if they stopped to think about it they’d know I’m not really in my math class but they’re enjoying a youtube binge in an extended suspension of disbelief state so they don’t stop to think about it, that would ruin the experience.
Overactive suspension-of-disbelief is common and encouraged in children but even as adults its normal to have knee-jerk emotions based on fiction. Like, you have a gut reaction against a stranger on the street and then you realize they look just like the actor who played the villain in a show you used to watch. Our brains are just really good at giving us fast first impressions based on fictional depictions of people, and then logic catches up and we either set ourselves straight or rationalize.
Sometimes our instinct is to idolize someone that we know we don’t actually know, and sometimes there’s a bit of a blurred line, say with vloggers with branded personalities where you feel a bit like you know them even though you know you’re getting a highly curated view of their life, and there can be some beautiful and worthwhile things in that connection if it isn’t abused.
See, YouTube is a giant cross-temporal ouija board with an algorithmic triangly thingy that collaborates with viewers to create the stories you want to hear without you feeling like you’re moving the triangle thingy even though of course you are, along with a million other people. So the triangly thingy, ok let’s actually look this up because I’m sure there’s a word for it, the Planchette. Recommendation Algorithms are a giant Million-person Cross-temporal Planchette. Yeah I was hoping for a funner word. Maybe we could use the English translation which is… Planky. The internet is a universal planky that points us to what we want to believe without us feeling like it’s our fault.
The intended use case of the algorithmic planky is a smooth user experience, I can keep on being a pair of hands doodling in real time in my gradeschool math class for as long as you want and you never have to see my other kinds of videos or think about the fact that these things take me weeks and I’m a professional in my 30s with a face before off you go to some other story, hopefully one with advertisements cuz planky is hungry.
So. I’ve been making videos where the story is that I hate Pi for 8 years, starting with the viral success “Pi is (still) Wrong” and most recently with “Alternative Pi”. But I don’t hate Pi. I mean, I do honestly think the circle constant should have been Tau, but I think pi is fine, there’s plenty of unfortunate notational choices that make math confusing and pi certainly isn’t the worst of them, I think celebrating pi day is a good thing to do even if Tau day is twice as good, and so I celebrate Pi day loudly and publicly every year with another installment in this manufactured controversy.
Anyone who stops to think about it, who stops suspending their disbelief, will realize I’m not a student in algebra class who hates Pi, I’m an artist enjoying engaging an audience with a passionate mathematical experience, but if you’re just browsing around you might not think about it much and move on to something else thinking “wow there’s some chick who really hates pi” instead of applying your media literacy skills to every single youtube video you consume ever. I mean, if you’re not continuously suspending your disbelief while you watch youtube it kind of ruins the experience as you realize how much of it is just product placement and sponsorships and shallow clickbait meant to take advantage of the stories we’re collaborating with the algorithms to tell. What I mean is: we’re not just listening to the stories already there, we’re telling stories to ourselves through our searches and clicks and views, and the more shallow the content, the easier we can fit it into our story instead of listening to someone else’s. Which is why I try to not be shallow so you can’t take my story from me,
Anyway I’d originally heard that pi is wrong from the mathematician John Conway through word of mouth and I found some other things people had written about it through the years but there just wasn’t enough righteous anger in these math facts to make a good story, so that was my contribution to humanity, and others joined in, first people I knew and then people I didn’t, and now instead of me telling the story planky can help you do it in whichever way best serves all our secret desires.
Our secret desire to be told we’re smart and know better than those Pi people, if you’re on the Tau side, or better than those Tau people, if you start on the Pi side, or better because we accept both or don’t care. Same story. We all want to suspend our disbelief and take part in a fiction where we’re better than other people, what safer, better outlet for that than this fun little controversy about Tau vs Pi? We enjoy arguing and engaging with mathematical discourse in a way that harms no one and that I hope makes people a bit more conscious of the mechanisms of manufactured controversy.
BUT IF I WERE EVIL. Or maybe just if I got too wrapped up in myself and didn’t know better. Here’s how to ruin everything.
Step 1: create a group identity around a shared belief.
For us of course it’s that Tau rules Pi drools, we got that down, but it doesn’t really matter what it is. It can start as something simple, innocent, enjoyable to argue about without it really mattering. It can even start as an opinion. We’ll pivot to bigger and stronger beliefs in phase 2. But first:
Step 2: create a body of rhetoric that the group can repeat to defend their belief.
We know our talking points. Simpler equations, easier to understand, we’ve got rebuttals to their talking points too. As the group evolves beyond just being about Tau vs Pi we will expand our talking points to be that it was never really about pi vs tau, it’s about revolutionizing education, or maybe it’s about how only truly smart triangles are reasonable and open minded enough to accept new truths like Tau but also including the bigger beliefs of phase 2.
Having multiple layers of rhetoric is good because you can switch whenever one isn’t working. Whatabouts and its-really-abouts are such good friends.
Step 3: spread the word / start beef
It’s all in good fun, at least, in phase 1, the phase 2 version is start beef. But you’ve got to send your people out there to argue and act independently of you.
First I’ll send out the Tauists to merely inform and link Pi people to some Tau information. It’s educational and just sharing something we love. In this step we’ll even recruit more tauists who want to join the fun and who think the math is interesting, and successful conversions make us look legit.
As we get into the habit of taubombing people it’s inevitable that at some point someone will go a little over the line. At this point one might realize that being a leader comes with some responsibility, but you must resist that urge, you can’t control other people’s actions, and anyway if some random person is upset about being called a loser for liking Pi, it’s just because they don’t get the joke, they should come join us, not get mad about it. We’ll all share a laugh over it so that everyone knows they have permission within the group to make mistakes and go a little overboard, it’s not a big deal.
You might recruit some folks but the goal of this step is to gain enemies, eventually someone is bound to overreact even to the lightest teasing. But in stage 1, even someone pretending to be an enemy for fun will do, because we’ll pressure them to either admit they’re not really against us, which is a win for us, or to become a true enemy, which is a win for me, because now I can move on to:
Step 4: Make your group members feel like the scum of the earth and that everyone hates them.
It might seem counterintuitive, also unethical, but this step is so important.
I need to constantly put my followers down by using other people’s worst words about them, and luckily we’ve manufactured some enemies, don’t worry about whether your enemies are actually causing real world harm to anyone, that’s not the point. You just want to make your followers feel attacked and disrespected. Think of it as if your enemies words are swords, and its not your fault if it hurts your followers when you show them those swords. In the face. Don’t get distracted by wondering if those swords were actually hurting anyone before you picked them up. Yeah, this metaphor is really working.
As our actions escalate in phase 2 the responses will too so I can play on my followers’ insecurities and wear down their self-worth until they actually feel hated. I mean we’re talking about humans here, we can convince ourselves someone’s mad at us if we send a message and don’t get a reply in 5 minutes, so this step is easy. To ruin everything, first I must ruin my follower’s lives by making sure they know they are scum. At least, outside of our little group. I understand them. I love them. I need them. And I’m the only one who ever will.
I’ve got to get them feeling really and truly hurt by everyone but us because that’s when we can:
Step 5: Escalate.
We’ve got to get our group in a story where they are so wrapped up in the fun idea of righteous retaliation that they suspend their disbelief well past when they start to actually cause harm to other people and real actions feel rhetorical.
Of course, it’s not my fault if someone I’ve radicalized goes overboard and does something radical, but when the pi people unfairly blame me that just gives my followers more reasons to righteously defend me. They have to defend me, I’m all they got.
As our actions escalate our fake enemies become real enemies, confirming everything I drilled into my follower’s heads about how universally hated they are while still keeping the flavor that we are unfairly prosecuted.
Step 6: The enemy’s beliefs and feelings can be completely dismissed.
Make up a catchy story about how the outsiders don’t actually even really believe their own beliefs. Fake intellectuals pretend to like pi to sound smart. They’re just copying what they’re told, or are just being Pi-litically correct, and if they stopped being lazy and learned some math they’d agree with us.
The extreme of this is to make your followers believe that others don’t even feel what they claim to feel. They are just pretending to feel wronged for sympathy, they’re trying to look good to other Pi people, or feel pressured to conform, they might be paid actors, but they definitely don’t feel what they say they do. Shed some crocodile tears of your own just to make it clear that we don’t have to believe them any more than they believe us.
It’s not about whether your dismissive rhetoric is true, so don’t get distracted by trying to find out if they’re actually being paid or would actually agree with you if they knew more math. That’s not the point, the point is to give your followers tools to justify thinking they know better than random strangers about those random stranger’s own inner life. And in fiction, you can know other people’s feelings better than they do, because they’re not real people, they’re characters in our story. This is a big important step past the line into dehumanizing others.
Step 7: Benevolent Dictatorship
It’s not just about pi vs tau anymore, it’s about right vs wrong and who’s going to run things when clearly certain folks can’t even be honest with themselves about how terrible pi is, and honestly it’s pretty magnanimous of us to do this for them considering how much they hate us and how ungrateful they are but we forgive them and will send them to reeducation camps to learn about tau, yes it’s a joke at first but watch how we get used to the idea.
Soon everyone will forget how to drop the rhetoric and just look at the actual actions people are doing and the results of those actions in reality.
You know what step we don’t need? Leverage the algorithms. You’re already doing it. If you’re a space on the ouija board that some group’s collective worst instincts hopes their planky will land on, whether to agree with you or make you a villain, systems exist to find you and add you to their story. Which is great because your story relies on being other people’s villain and planky’s got it covered! It’s no one’s fault, we just all secretly asked for permission to hate each other and somehow all signs point to yes. Did you move it? I didn’t move it.
Anyway. That’s my 7 steps to ruining everything. Now don’t forget to apply your media literacy skills. How much do these steps really apply to everything? Did I kinda just make em up? But maybe I’m really good at makin up true stuff cuz thats a mathematician’s job description. Or maybe I’m just trying to sell shirts.
Actually, I should totally sell shirts, yep, they’re real now, proclaim your loyalty in fun summer styles, available for pre-order for just the next few days and they’ll ship mid-july. What better conversation starter about the joy of mathematics and how to radicalize a following to create global chaos. The green one has it printed on the back so you can pop on a blazer in the evening for a more formal look. All proceeds go to the supreme triangle who loves us.
So happy Tau Day, it’s not just me that loves you, the world is full of people who love you and want you to be happy, whether or not you’ve found them yet. Admittedly it might be a little harder to find those people if you’re ok with hurting others to get what you want but no one said life is easy.
Enjoy your Tau Day, I hope it is double good! Tau is greater than pi! It’s not political if it’s a fact, right? wait what now?
Here’s what I’ve been working on for the past 10 weeks:
It’s a spherical video in a mathematically triplified space with symmetry in space-time, in collaboration with mathematician Henry Segerman. You can learn more about that in our very cool making-of video:
The spherical video was SO DIFFICULT to get working, with all the editing and sound stuff. But the making-of was so much fun because I was back in my wheelhouse, explaining the very cool concepts that made us so determined to do this project.
I mean check out this hand-made space-time diagram made by sewing together video frames in stereographic projection:
I am SO INTO space/time symmetries, something I’ve only lightly touched on in videos before (see “Folding Space-Time”, and of course “Doodle Music”, oh and “Möbius Music Box”), but I’ve done quite a bit of research on the topic (one of my first math papers was classifying symmetry groups in musical space-time, as distinct from the set of groups in 2 dimensions of space, and though it never made it into a paper I did a bunch of followup work on 3 and 4d space-time groups, especially as applied to video and dance, so I was SO READY for this when Henry suggested a triplified piano piece).
Doing a video or series that goes deeper into these sorts of topics has been somewhere on my to-do list for 10 years. Of course videos take time and the list is always growing, but when Henry visited two years ago and showed me his spherical video tripling technique and we tried it on the piano, I knew we had to do this!
I haven’t focused exclusively on a “long” project like this in a while (yes, 10 weeks is long in internet time), and I’ll admit I was a little nervous doing this while newly crowdfunding and still a little underfunded. Me and Henry know it’s interesting, but will the coolness of the math come through to others? What if the video just doesn’t come out good, or everything explodes last minute? Either way, will my patrons think it was worth 10 weeks of their support?
I trusted on average they would, but the part of me still traumatized by having been a starving artist and then having funding promised and pulled away so many times by so many people over so many years still says “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
…To which the first part of me replies “Fine, I’ll show you, people have your back!” So, let me be the first to tell myself “I told you so.”
It’s awesome not depending on any one person’s tastes, and also not on everyone’s tastes on the entire internet, but a large group of folks who all care for their own individual reasons. This means it’s ok if people come and go as their interest waxes and wanes; this means a new kind of audience creates itself around my work instead of me speaking to a pre-existing one defined by other institutions. Evolving work (and thus evolving audience) is essential for my mission to lift the human spirit by expanding our ability to think, see, and feel.
It also helps that my Patrons are so kind and enthusiastic :)
So, things are going pretty well. Come check out the Patreon if you haven’t already: https://www.patreon.com/vihart Thank you for making all of this possible, and for all your trust and patience :D
I was having difficulty deciding whether to give myself the day off for MLK day, so I decided to take off from my usual work and write about some of my favourite books and authors instead.
Let me tell you how much I love Helen Oyeyemi, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison.
How is it that three of my very favourite authors in the entire universe are black women? I don’t know. It seems statistically unlikely, but there you have it, and it’s in theme with MLK day so here we go!
1. Helen Oyeyemi
Let’s start with “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours” by Helen Oyeyemi. In 2015 I tweeted it as my book of the year, and within the limits of twitter described it as “weird literary intersectional feminist magical realist intertwined tales.”
Oyeyemi gives a mature voice to experiences and sensibilities that feel young, with a literary style that she has developed over 7 books and is just so soooo good. I love me some literary magical realism but this was a step above and felt effortless. It was like nothing I’d ever read, and I read a lot of strange books. Beautiful and different and so casually progressive. I felt a glimpse of literature ahead of its time.
Let me tell you how much I loved this book and how unique I found Oyeyemi’s voice. I immediately searched out another Oyeyemi book and read that, and then another, and another, until I had read every book she’s published within two weeks.
…and then I started searching out short stories in collections. And stories in online publications. And anything I could find. That is how good Oyeyemi is.
I will note that Oyeyemi isn’t necessarily easy or casual reading. If you want something a bit more straightforward, start with The Icarus Girl. If you dream of houses with too many rooms, try Opposite House. if you… well, just read her.
2. Octavia Butler
I love scifi and feel positively betrayed that I wasn’t introduced to Butler sooner. She’s awesome classic genre-defining scifi that holds up to the modern reader, indeed, seems more relevant that ever.
I mean, read Parable of the Sower and tell me you don’t get chills. It’s dark and prescient and gripping and I tore through it in an evening.
I love all the other classic scifi authors, I read piles of their books as a teen. But I never felt the need to read all of them from any one author. A lot of those books don’t hold up so well to the modern reader, and so much of classic scifi is embarrassingly clumsy with regards to women.
But let me tell you how much I love Octavia Butler because she is something else entirely. Her books hold up to the modern reader and to the adult reader. They have a depth of understanding, are not merely clever but also human. They’re great and you should read her. Parable, and Kindred, and Wild Seed, and etc.
And as with Oyeyemi, I have read everything Butler has ever published (except the one she disavowed later even though I WANT TO but I’m trying to respect her disavowal… I’ll break eventually but TODAY IS NOT THAT DAY).
3. Toni Morrison
Considered one of the literary greats, Toni Morrison in my opinion is one of the literary greatests. The book that made me want to read everything Toni Morrison has ever written: “Beloved.” I mean, Beloved started as a great book, and then it became surreal and weird and amazing in exactly the way I like and it became VERY GREAT.
There’s lots written on the internet about why Toni Morrison is so great and I am running out of writing time so I’ll leave it there. Oh except to mention that “Sula” is relatively short if you’re looking for a quick literary read this evening.
I HAVE NOT YET read everything Toni Morrison has ever written. Which is why she’s #3 on my list. Her books tend to be heavier than the above authors so gotta space them out because feelings. I might get there by the end of the year though.
Conclusion
Books are great and reading is great.
Also since there’s a vague MLK-day theme of black authors I could mention other classics I think are great, like The Color Purple, Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But those books are great like lots of great books are great. And then there’s lots of great recent work by amazing black authors but none so good as Oyeyemi IN MY OPINION. Aaaah there are so many great books in the world it makes me so happy!!!!
I made a new page to collect all the Christmas and Winter Holiday stuff I’ve done over the years: vihart.com/christmas
This includes documentation I just took yesterday of a 2014 Christmas project called Child:
And, because I might as well as long as I’m making time for this stuff, here’s documentation of the 2015 Christmas project Snowplace, an experiment in movement and collision design, which will never work in VR again but is explained here using a browser version:
Documenting and organizing all my stuff is getting tricky, as it has become spread across so many sites and subjects. So organizing by theme was fun… my Christmas/Winter-themed work includes videos, VR work, music, crafts, and crossovers between each. Someday I dream of all my stuff being organized and accessible on this website but we’ll start with Christmas and call it a win, for now.
I wrote extensively about Child in a new post over on Patreon, if you’re curious to hear more about my art game and the music and sound behind it: patreon.com/posts/16029905
A hexaflexaflakes video has been on the list since I made Snowflakes, Starflakes, and Swirlflakes in December 2012. But first I followed up with Sphereflakes in January 2013, and then I started working on Twelve Tones and the holidays were over.
While I worked on Twelve Tones for the next six months, I continued the symmetry series in more musical directions with Folding Space-Time and Sound Braid, and before the next snowflake season came around I went off and became a Principal Investigator and did research for the next four years. Hexaflexaflakes was never a priority because at that point I hadn’t worked on it enough to get any meat into the video, so to speak.
But now I’m crowdfunded, and most of my patrons are interested in funding videos, so I can make time for some of those old ideas and see what the years have given to them.
In Hexaflexaflakes I saw an opening for a conversation about the relationship between mathematics and the real world, hands-on learning, and experience vs theory in general. Some drafts tried to go deep into those ideas, but I think that’s a different video. The draft that worked kept it light, fun, and personal, with a rant that has the feel of narrator-Vi being unable to help but throw some shade at someone specific narrator-Vi has recently argued with.
What I’m really looking for with these past several videos is to get back into the conditions that allowed a video like Twelve Tones. That means getting settled back into good working-from-home habits with a good setup, getting back into video-making, and maybe some slightly superstitious things like “make a fun holiday craft video”, possibly to be followed up by an “internet comments” video, which Hexaflexaflakes sets up for.
First and foremost, though, is that making work like Twelve Tones is an all-consuming full-time activity. Some other work may leak out alongside it, but that other work can’t ever be a priority. And it takes a long time, longer than most people expect or want to pay for.
In early 2013 I had few distractions, lots of autonomy, and I felt secure enough with my financial support from Khan Academy (where I’d been for over a year at that point) that I was able to put everything else aside and just work. Very few people have that opportunity. Good work takes time, and it also takes many years to develop the skill of making work better by spending more time on it.
It was also really, really hard. It’s only 5 years (!) later that I’m willing to think about attempting big projects again, that I can think about the months spent working on Twelve Tones without feeling heavy heavy heavy. This time I’d like to take it a little slower with fewer side-projects and maybe not burn out forever.
But of course the #1 key is feeling financially stress-free enough to focus on the project knowing that I won’t be doing a lot of crowd-pleasers in the mean time, so if you’d like to help with that, here’s my crowdfunding page: patreon.com/vihart
Oh also books! It is very important to read a lot of very good books!
So I’m a full-time Vi Hart now, with most of my income coming through crowdfunding on Patreon! The Patreon is almost at the level of sustainability for me, though not quite, so I decided to do something new and sell shirts this month. Turns out it’s a good time to sell shirts because it’s Black Friday, and the entire store is 20% off! Many sizes/styles already sold out so if you’re interested go here: https://store.dftba.com/collections/vi-hart
I’m super excited about these shirts because I finally came up with a shirt idea that I’m happy with, something fun and useful that can help spread the joy of math. I could never bring myself to sell some boring branded shirt that I don’t feel adds more to the world than any other random shirt, and I also wouldn’t want to do it unless I could have shirts available for a range of body types, which isn’t generally the economic thing to do. But we’re proving that well-thought-out ladies and kids shirts can sell! In fact, some of the sizes only have a handful left in stock.
So it’s all very exciting, and between that and the Patreon I’m doing fine, and thanks to people hopping on board my Amazon wish list I’m re-stocked with the supplies and equipment I need for my December projects!
My goal for December is to not feel pressured to release more than 1 video, because 3 was definitely too many, even though they were all “easy” videos where I’d already done most of the script/concept work previously. And I’ve got other projects I’d like to spend time on! And maybe I will take some days off for the holidays! My piano is getting tuned tomorrow and I have new microphones to learn to work with and music music music :D
Oh and I just realized I neglected to post the new Calculus video to this blog. Here it is:
This video was a Math Improv in that I sat down and filmed for about four hours without any script or detailed plan… I knew I wanted to hot glue them into polyhedra or something but the twist classification and woven polylink were arrived at through play. I’d wondered about color frequency and the Smartie Sandwichability Problem before and probably didn’t represent them as neatly as I would’ve if I went script-first, but that’s the kind of thing that makes videos take a long time to make! I think about all the things all the time, and have thought a lot about Smarties in my life.
In a way, I’ve been working on this video for 7 years. Back in 2010 I blogged some Smarties platonic solids:
…as well as Smartie Skeleton…
…as part of a series of Halloween math candy blogposts that also included candy corn Sierpinski triangles (which showed up as a video some number of Halloweens ago). It’s faster to blog photos than to make videos, so I’m still catching up video-wise on work I did many years ago. On the other hand, I’m much better at it now! I’ve been wanting to do a smartie video of some sort for a long time, and thanks to going full-time on Patreon it was a good time to finally do it.
The voiceover was written based on the footage I’d shot, and then the footage edited to the voiceover. So not quite my usual process, but same editing process in the end.
It’s another way in which video can be used as a tool for thought… I capture one aspect of a thought-process as I film, and then use the footage as a scaffold to write out a clearer version of the thought-process, and finally put the two together to hopefully capture and communicate what’s going on in my head a bit more effectively than conventional communication can. I capture thinking with my hands, not just with my brain, which is evident in things like feeling the clockwiseness or widdershinsness of a twist.
Some parts of math are easier to feel than to think, especially with practice. We need a curriculum for getting an embodied understanding of mathematical concepts, beyond just “hands-on learning”. I’ve got to start keeping a list.
Oh, one more thing: did you know that while regular polyhedra have been around FOREVER (like thousands of years), regular polylinks were discovered relatively recently and are still being explored? Check out Alan Holden’s 1980 paper on them.
The first polylink I tried to make in the Smarties video was of 6 squares. I’ve made it out of balloons and other things through the years:
Regular polylinks are in my repertoire of go-to shapes at almost the same level as polyhedra, fractals, lattices, and other canonical mathematical forms.
The polylink of 4 triangles, despite being one of the simplest ones by number and sides, is quite difficult to weave correctly. A balloon version from 2008 or 2009:
…which reminds me, mathematical balloon twisting is another thing I’m many years past due on making a video about!
That’s it for now.
Vi
P.S. Here’s my new video studio, now with camera arm and hyperbolic planes! Really half the reason I made the smarties video was to play with my new setup.
