It’s Interesting How Things Are Made.

Peaceful.

Aldebaran, Venus, Jupiter and Pleiades - Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Image credit: Luis Argerich

I like this, now that’s spirit!

A Skeleton of Found Roots and Tree Limbs Heralds the Beginning of Fall in Italy

… Was a friend

The story behind The Laundress.

I like old maps. How about you?

Wednesday? Map Day! A while back we shared the all the portions of this enormous 1867 map except for the southeast quadrant. So here you go!

We can only provide this massive beast in quarters because the digital map in its entirety is far too large to upload. That being said, you can find the whole thing right here.

I found some leaves. I preserved one, but lost the other. I call the one on the right (in the grass) my elfen leaf.

Koi Pond Coffee Tables // Epoxy Mini Store

If one remembers this particular episode from the popular sitcom ‘Friends’ where Ross is trying to carry a sofa to his apartment, it seems that moving a sofa up the stairs is ridiculously hard.

But life shouldn’t be that hard now should it?

The mathematician Leo Moser posed in 1966 the following curious mathematical problem: what is the shape of largest area in the plane that can be moved around a right-angled corner in a two-dimensional hallway of width 1? This question became known as the moving sofa problem, and is still unsolved fifty years after it was first asked.

The most common shape to move around a tight right angled corner is a square.

And another common shape that would satisfy this criterion is a semi-circle.

But what is the largest area that can be moved around?

Well, it has been conjectured that the shape with the largest area that one can move around a corner is known as “Gerver’s sofa”. And it looks like so:

Wait.. Hang on a second

This sofa would only be effective for right handed turns. One can clearly see that if we have to turn left somewhere we would be kind of in a tough spot.

Prof.Romik from the University of California, Davis has proposed this shape popularly know as Romik’s ambidextrous sofa that solves this problem.

Although Prof.Romik’s sofa may/may not be the not the optimal solution, it is definitely is a breakthrough since this can pave the way for more complex ideas in mathematical analysis and more importantly sofa design.

Have a good one!

A Deranged Building Facade on the Streets of Barcelona by Penao