BeigeJournal

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number, by Mario Livio, Broadway Books, 2002.

Imagine a line from A to C, with point B somewhere in between. If AC/CB=AB/AC, then both these ratios will be the golden ratio phi, 1.6180339887…, (1+sqrt(5))/2. You might not think that an entire book could be written about this, but Dr. Livio, head of the Science Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute, did.

This number turns up in logarithmic spirals, platonic solids, Penrose tessellations, and is deeply connected to Fibonacci numbers. Oddly, phi is 1.618…, phi^2 is 2.618…, and 1/phi is 0.618… This book is filled with this sort of amazing trivia.

A good part of The Golden Ratio consists of debunking claims that phi was used in the pyramids and other ancient structures and in more recent paintings and other art. Make enough measurements (with big enough error bars) and you can find any number anywhere. The only way to be sure is if the artist said so, and there are a few such examples.

I did feel that it started off a bit dull and got more steadily more interesting as I read it. That may be a quirk of my personal interests. You may wish to skip around a bit if part of it is not of great interest to you. It is probably not a very useful book, but some people (you know who you are) will find it fascinating. I did.

The last Mythbusters, in which an electric car motor was attached to washing machine parts in order to spin a crash test dummy up to high speed, was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen. That was fantastic. The dog-pee collection was fairly hilarious, too. It does go to show just how much effort is required to make a myth that lame (and implausible) interesting, but Adam and Jamie are up to it.

You can search BeigeJournal for more Mythbusters entries.

Now that I’m getting lots of spam with the Habeas haiku in the headers, I do vaguely remember hearing about them a while back. There was brief media attention to the idea, then they dropped out of sight. Now they come back into sight by way of spammers using their headers. In a way, they are providing a useful anti-spam service, in that I have never received anything but spam with their headers, so they serve as a “this is spam, for sure” indicator. I gather it was not supposed to work that way. The notion that people in the fraud business would be afraid of trademark lawsuits does seem a bit unlikely.