Remember that billowing cloud of ash from Iceland that floated over Britain and other parts of northern Europe this past spring, shutting down airspace from London to Hamburg and filling airports with fuming travellers? It wasn’t all bad, I discovered yesterday. In fact if you were an archaeologist, particularly a British archaeologist, that plume of […]
crop circles
Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s. A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.” They seem to have no larger meaning, […]