10 ms·
Burning Man's Mathematical Underbelly
- tibbon 8y ago> you can get everybody onto the same page by talking about the complex plane in terms of the layout of Black Rock City: the Man is at zero, Center Camp (Esplanade and 6:00) is at i, the main entrance is around - 2i, the 3:00 and 9:00 plazas are at ± 1, and the Temple (a nondenominational, pan-belief, transient, and intentionally flammable structure) is at + i. While this is accurate, after seven years of attending Burning Man this is the first time that I've heard anyone describe the city layout - even after spending a pretty significant amount of time at self-identifying geek camps like The Institute.
- tlrobinson 8y agoI read that paragraph as a joke, but sometimes it's hard to know what's a joke out there...
- bonniemuffin 8y agoHm, I think there's a typo in the article: center camp would be at -i, not i. Anyway, it seems a bit strange to me to use the burning man map (a polar coordinate system) to describe a Cartesian-style grid like the complex plane.
- pouta 8y agoWow, what a great read. Thanks for sharing!
- mkstowegnv 8y agoA nice article for someone who knows nothing about Burning Man. If you've been, you will learn little that you don't already know. Burners choose to play in a difficult, often uncomfortable environment. They have a higher than average desire to be challenged - by everything from esoteric math and physics discussions to learning (as novices) moderately advanced contradancing (a radically inclusive danceform [1] that has been analyzed with matrices [2], disclaimer - my camp). 1 http://www.burningmancontradance.com/home/contraintro http://www.burningmancontradance.com/home/contraintro 2 https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10166/679/422.pdf?sequence=1 https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10166/679/4...
- elcinr 8y ago>They have a higher than average desire to be challenged A lot of them also take a lot of MDMA and drink a lot of alcoholic beverages. There's something for everyone at BM.
- lifthearth 8y agoHangovers are hell in that environment. If you got to burning man for the free drinks you're an idiot and won't come back. MDMA is fun to make a night of but not the drug of choice out there.
- DrHuman 8y agoWhat's the drug of choice out there?
- pstuart 8y agoAlcohol is #1.
- lifthearth 8y agoSleep deprivation, bicycling, lots of water and downtempo electronica.
- bonniemuffin 8y agoI generally recommend the playa shandy: lukewarm Tecate with a scoop of gatorade powder mixed into it. Hydrating, requires no refrigeration, and it's got what plants crave: it's got electrolytes.
- marssaxman 8y agoAll of the above, and some you've never heard of before.
- resu_nimda 8y agoPerhaps there's some kind of correlation there? The science/math/tech world is rife with users of amphetamines (including the ones that are prescribed for use by medical professionals, e.g. Adderall, Vyvanse, etc.). Mathemetician Paul Erdos famously championed them. Maybe you can explain why you felt the need to point this out with such disdain?
- bberenberg 8y agoI met Spencer in NY. Super cool guy, does really interesting research outside of BM.
- edm0nd 8y ago1 drug + 2 drugs = 3 drugs
- api_or_ipa 8y agoI encourage you to think constructively how your commentary can further a discussion which, by both the article and other comments, has proceeded well beyond infantile jokes and worn-out stereotypes.
- steve76 8y agoFlip the script. The landscape of most modern math really does amount to just a drunken homosexual orgy.
- steve76 8y agoAnd to add to that comment, so much of modern life is due to that. In the problem of Theodicy, I blame the drunken sex glutton, not nature.
- QML 8y agoWe weren’t always so lucky. One year, before we’d even finished setting up the booth, a cadre of MIT undergraduate physicists stumped us with ‘Soap bubbles physically solve minimal surface problems. Are there any other physical phenomena that quickly solve NP-type problems?’ Anyone have more resources on this? I could only find a brief overview by Scott Aaronson [1]. [1]. https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf
- westoncb 8y agoThe main thing I wonder about this is whether it's misleading to say the soap bubble is 'solving' a problem of high computational complexity. If we were to form a description of its state evolving, framed as a computation, then that computation would be in such and such a complexity class—sure. But if you want to go ahead and say that soap bubble is literally computing in the same sense, you're making a number of implicit philosophical commitments that I have yet to see a justification for when this subject is brought up. Edit: to clarify, what I'm getting at is whether we're using it to solve what is a problem for us, or whether it literally has to 'find a solution' in order to get into the state it gets into, so that principles of computational complexity etc. would be somehow applicable to what it's doing.
- guest2143 8y agoMy grad school professor was at a bar with a consultant friend who was trying to find the optimal wiring paths for routing expensive electric cables. My professor asked for the change in his pocket: they went to the hardware store and got plexiglass, dowel and drill. In the hotel room, the put together a model of the points to connect between the plexiglass sides and dunked it in the soapy hotel tub. the pattern the soap bubbles formed was the shortest path between the electrical tower model.
- zawerf 8y agoI know this as the Euclidean Steiner Tree problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steiner_tree_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steiner_tree_problem There are some videos doing exactly what you described: https://youtu.be/dAyDi1aa40E?t=95 https://youtu.be/dAyDi1aa40E?t=95
- sevensor 8y agoI had to read the headline three times before it would parse correctly. Guess I should have just clicked on the link. I read "Man's Mathematical Underbelly" as the object of "Burning".