Daily Archives: October 25, 2005

Scary Mathematical Symbols

NOTE: This article was begun on October 25th, 2005, slightly less than one month AFTER Dr. Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (c. 2003, W. W. Norton & Company) came into my posession.

Although I believe the basic concept advanced herein was uniquely conceived by me under no influence from this or other sources, I have since become aware that Dr. Watts’ much earlier publication utilizes a very similar (if less elaborate) categorization scheme in its “Further Reading” section and I must acknowledge such precedence and the possibility that I might have been influenced by, and subsequently forgotten, or unconciously picked up on the basic concept.

Either way, whether this represents a coincident re-invention on my part or an unconscious borrowing, I believe there is much to be gained through the use of such markers to alert readers to the intellectual ‘terrain’ ahead. I also feel that the addition of optional subsets of symbols adding an additional degree of detail to the basic glyphs with minimal added complexity, contributes to the utility of the concept as a whole.

Scary Math - Green Circle.jpg = WARNING Contains Basic Mathematics: Arithmetic

Scary Math - Blue Square Algebra.jpg = WARNING Contains Intermediate Mathematics: Algebra

Scary Math - Blue Square Trig copy.jpg = WARNING Contains Intermediate Mathematics: Trigonometry

Scary Math - Black Diamond Blank.jpg = WARNING Contains Advanced Mathematics: Unspecified or Various

Scary Math - Black Diamond Stat.jpg = WARNING Contains Advanced Mathematics: Statistics

Scary Math - Black Diamond Calc copy.jpg = WARNING Contains Advanced Mathematics: Calculus

Scary Math - Black Diamond Calc II.jpg = WARNING Contains Advanced Mathematics: Extreme Calculus

Scary Math - Black Diamond DiffEQ copy.jpg = WARNING Contains Advanced Mathematics: Differential Equations

Smaller versions could be used in-line with references:

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Repeated symbols convey increasing levels of difficulty:

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Sounds too good to be true

…but then again, I’ve often wondered if there wasn’t a solution like this sitting out there somewhere waiting for someone to find it:

A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was developed by an Israeli company. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. When it becomes commercial in a few years time, the system will be incorporated into cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run, and will be completely emission free.

From reading the full article, it sounds as though the car will actually require two fuel sources — water and a very heavy metal coil which enables the production of free hydrogen by producing metal oxide (what folks like us call rust, one presumes) as the by-product of running the engine. Apparently the driver would need to put water in the tank on a par with putting gas into the fuel tank of a conventional vehicle. How long the coil lasts is not stated, but seeing as it weighs 100 Kg, one would hope that the driver won’t need to go sticking in a new one every week.

231005_Hybrid_Car.jpg

Via Kurzweil AI.

UPDATE: Plenty of healthy skepticism about this over at SlashDot, where I got the link to the cover story of the latest New Scientist — Metal: The Fuel of the Future.