Sep 27 2017
From Vienna Bienalle 2017, taking place this week in Austria, comes a new take on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. The head of the project, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, says the update was necessitated by:
…the need for benign intelligent robots and the necessity of cultivating a culture of quality committed to serving the common good!
That sounds a lot like Asimov’s reasoning, but the new laws are certainly worthy of consideration and debate.
Sep 21 2017
If you are an artist, photographer, graphic designer, or web developer, having a firm understanding of colors is a necessity. Key to being able to study and discuss colors is a formal framework for quantizing their properties. Abstract mathematical models called color models do just this, allowing people to discuss the qualities of a color in a consistent manner. These models usually assign tuples of numbers to a color, often either ordered triplets or quartets, where each value represents a property of the color. This post will introduce one the most popular models: the RGB color model.
Jul 16 2017
An arithmetic sequence of numbers, sometimes alternatively called an arithmetic progression, is a sequence of numbers in which the difference between all pairs of consecutive numbers is constant. A very simple arithmetic sequence consists of the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, … where the difference between any number and the number before it is just one. 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, …. is another arithmetic sequence, but in this case the constant difference between elements is four.
A finite portion of an arithmetic sequence like 2, 3, 4 or 7, 11, 15 is called a finite arithmetic progression. To confuse matters, sometimes a finite arithmetic progression, like an arithmetic sequence, is also called an arithmetic progression. To be safe, when a progression is finite, I always say as much.
An arithmetic series is the sum of a finite arithmetic progression. An arithmetic series consisting of the first four natural numbers is 1 + 2 + 3 + 4. The sum, 10, is trivial to compute via simple addition, but for a longer series with larger numbers, having a formula to calculate the sum is indispensable.