Ricky Jay is a legend, and is without a doubt one of my favorite magicians to watch. His shows leave you with a greater appreciation for the magician’s craft, rather than just the immediate illusion they present.

A look into the deep, dark, strangely complicated world of Simpsons mathematics.

I knew that Futurama has a lot of great mathematics involved, but I didn’t realize that it started in the Simpsons.

Magicians, Mafiosos, a Missing Painting, and the Heist of a Lifetime

In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant correctly answered a probability puzzle in her column for Parade Magazine. And then, the world called her an idiot.

I still remember the chaos caused by the Monty Hall problem in our high school math class. Here's my explanation for how it works:

• Your first choice could either be a car or a goat.
1. If you picked the car, you will win the car by not changing your guess.
2. If you picked a goat, the host will reveal the second goat. The last door left will be the car, so you are guaranteed to win if you change your guess.
• You have two possible strategies to win the car:
1. Try to pick the car on your first guess, and don't change the guess.
2. Try to pick a goat on your first guess, and change the guess after the host opens another door.
• The second strategy is better, since picking a goat is twice as easy as picking the car.

The best strategy is to try to pick a goat in round 1. Once the host has revealed the second goat, you are guaranteed the car by switching doors.

Very informative description of how teens and college students use the major social networks

Very cool profile of Scarlett, a professional StarCraftII player

You can trigger an AWS Lambda function to automatically create a thumbnail when an image is uploaded to Amazon S3, verify address updates in an Amazon DynamoDB table, or process click-stream data in an Amazon Kinesis stream, without having to manage any compute infrastructure.

Billing is metered in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

チームラボの猪子氏がTEDxFukuokaで紹介した、日本と西洋での空間認識の違いについての話がとてもおもしろかったので紹介。

マリオはなぜ世界でヒットしたのか？　チームラボ・猪子氏が語る、日本的空間認識とクリエイティビティの関係性

プレゼンテーションの内容を省略すると、

西洋の空間認識だと、パースペクティブを意識する。 よって、絵の登場人物になりきると視点が変わって絵の全体を意識しなくなる。絵の全体の意識が変わる、と言う方が適切なのかもしれない。

日本の空間認識だと、レイヤーで物を見て、重ねて表現する。 絵の登場人物になりきっても、絵の認識が変わらず、絵の全体を意識し続ける。

これが、日本が産んだマリオやドラクエみたいなプラットフォーマーや、トップダウンRPGなどの表現を作ったゲームの原点で、アメリカではもっと登場人物の視点で遊ぶFPSなどが流行りやすい。

とのこと。

ハードのスペックで3Dの表現ができなかったことも大きい、と想像しつつも、とても興味深い話。

Oculus Rift 用に開発中のLucky’s Taleの話を思い出した。

Lucky’s TaleはVR機能を活かした3Dのプラットフォーマーなのだが、自分が主人公になりきるわけではない。キャラクターの視点と自分の視点は完全に別で、自分が3Dの世界の中で、主人公の隣に居るという見せ方。

開発者曰く、たくさんの案をとにかく作りまくっているうちに偶然出来上がったものだったが、少し遊んでみると体験の斬新さに全員が驚いた、とのこと。

上の話に合わせると、VRなのでパースペクティブで入り込むのはほぼ必須として、それでもマリオのようにキャラと空間の全体の絵を意識し続けれるような、全く新しい形になっているような気がする。おそらく実際遊んでみないと体験を想像できないと思うので、リリースが楽しみだ。

My team and I wrote an app that will apply findings from a recent research paper to your Facebook graph. The app won’t post to your wall but it will show you both the shape of your friend network and which of your friends are most mathematically important to your life.

Instead of looking at a metric like the number of friends you have in common, this algorithm takes it a step further. It looks at how well connected your mutual friends are with each other, and suggests that having more diverse mutual friends indicates a stronger, more important relationship.

If everyone at work is connected via Facebook, then you will have many friends in common with your coworkers, but this doesn’t mean that these are your most important relationships. Since all of your common friends are within the same social circle, you know that these relationships are limited in scope.

But if you and a friend’s mutual connections include coworkers, college roommates, and cycling buddies, then you know that your relationship with this person spans many social circles, and they are more likely to be important to you. This also is effective at picking out romantic relationships.

There seemed to be issues with outliers when I tried it because there were a number of people with little or no mutual friends with very high scores, but in general the results were surprisingly accurate.

It’s also fun to look at the graph of your network and see the clusters of different social circles.