Happy Pi Day!!

Happy Pi Day!!

I was watching Matt Parker's old pi videos and he mentioned a method of calculating pi using the prime numbers, so I figured that'd be a fun thing to do for this blog

I'm not sure how accurate it'll end up getting, so I'm just gonna leave it running for the rest of the day and give an update whenever I call it done. So far, it's gotten 4 digits but idk if it'll be able to do more

Code and video I mentioned below the cut

Constructive critisism on the code isn't discouraged. I don't plan on making money with my programs, but it would be nice to be able to get better at it

He talks about the method I'm doing at 1:38

So turns out the coordinate math behind hexagonal chess is... Simple I think? If we just agree not to use the directions I've labeled as x and z all we have to do is generate regular chess moves in 3D (a solved problem by yours truly) and then take whatever is in the y-coordinate and add it to both the x and z coordinates. Then we just drop the y coordinate and we should get something 2D that a computer can store into an array. The non-squareness of the board is going to be interesting to deal with but I expected this to be... Well more interesting. I'm kind of disappointed tbh

As a side note I threw this through an AI art style transfer called Prisma because I'd like to post more handwritten notes, but I also want them to be a bit prettier. Interesting experiment on two fronts

Bat-to-Man

The possibility of viruses spreading from bats to humans has taken on very real significance to us all in the last few years. Different species of lyssavirus, a family that includes the rabies virus, are carried by bats and there have been cases of cross-species transmission to other mammals. Researchers examined the mechanisms and transmission of 10 different lyssavirus species in mice. They developed a new pathogenicity index, ranking the viral incubation times and impact on survival. They found notable variation between species, and even found some to have higher rankings than rabies virus samples. Further investigation revealed that lyssavirus species (green in the mouse brain section pictured) are capable of infecting not only neurons (blue) but other brain cells called astrocytes (green) as well, revealing new details about how lyssaviruses affect animals, which could help equip us to handle potential virus outbreaks in the future.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Antonia Klein and colleagues

Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI), Federal Research Institute for Animal Health, Greifswald-Insel Riems, Germany

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, January 2022

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If I became god and could reshape the universe with a thought, the first change I'd make to improve the world is simple:

More polygons can tile the plane.

I mean, only three regular tilings of the plane? (squares, triangles, hexagon)

Ridiculous. We need more.

Hunts Mesa, Utah by Jeroen Fransen