Verna recently bought this interesting cactus at Lowe’s garden shop. She took this picture of it shortly after we got it home. When I looked at it just a few minutes ago, I noticed that you can clearly see the Fibonacci spirals in the pattern the spiny nodes make.
Being the nerd that I am, I try and visit Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoon daily on the web. Today, I was surprised by the new website format featuring a color comic strip and other interactive features. Formerly, they only published a color strip on Sunday.
This is today’s screenshot from www.dilbert.com:
Verna took this photo of our Devil’s Tongue barrel cactus in the back yard today. I couldn’t help but notice the patterns of the ribs and spines – they fit in with the mathematical topic of a post I wrote on the other blog about the Fibonacci series called Spiral Seashell. The number of ribs on the cactus and the direction and twists of the spines are all related to Fibonacci numbers. When the blooms come this summer, I’ll try and get a picture of the patterns on the flowers too.
Click on the image for a closer look.
During my career in aerospace and also as a pilot and flight instructor, I have been using the quantity PI (approximately equal to 3.14159265). As explained in the article excerpt below, PI is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Also in the article below is the notion that you can approximate the value of PI by throwing needles or frozen hot dogs.
From SpaceWeather.com
HAPPY PI DAY: March 14th (3.14) is PI day and all around the world mathematicians are celebrating this compelling and mysterious constant of Nature. PI appears in equations describing the orbits of planets, the colors of auroras, the structure of DNA. It’s everywhere.
Humans have been struggling to calculate PI for thousands of years. Divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter; the ratio is PI. Sounds simple, but the devil is in the digits. While the value of PI is finite (a smidgen more than 3), the decimal number is infinitely long:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795
02884197169399375105820974944592307
81640628620899862803482534211706…moreSupercomputers have succeeded in calculating PI to more than 200 billion digits and they’re still crunching. The weirdest way to compute PI: throw needles at a table or frozen hot dogs on the floor. Party time!
I wrote a universal triangle calculator using PI and other constants.
I like Google Earth® and Google Maps, but Virtual Earth has a feature that allows you to view selected locations from a “bird’s eye” perspective. I got a screen-capture of beautiful Point Fermin Lighthouse as seen from above.
According the the Natural Sciences Department at Cal State University Long Beach, this is a translational landslide. Slides like this move pretty slow. This one, in particular, has moved about 600 feet over the past 50 years. The motion is enough, however, to keep the road builders and line painters busy along this stretch of Palos Verdes Drive South. After a few months movement, however, it looks as it does in this shot taken by Verna last week.
