Science

Everyone sure knows fractals, the beautiful mathematical organic drawings. Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. Natural objects that are approximated by fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines or snow flakes. The most famous one is the Mandelbrot set, named to the French mathematician.

Programs like Fractint or its successor Xaos make fractal exploring within everyones reach. However, knowing where to zoom in, makes the difference between boring and exciting fractals. Here's a visual guide to fractal exploring, making you feel like Alice in Wonderland.

Michael Paukner is a graphic designer from Vienna and publishes on his Flickr photo stream several nice visualizations ranging from the list of oldest trees on earth to ancient Hebrew cosmology. Very informative and beautifully visualized.

Is your knowledge of science getting a bit rusty ? Having troubles following your kids with their matrix multiplications ? Head over to the Khan Academy and brush things up, ranging from chemistry over biology to linear algebra.

Aardbeving gevoeld, maar u bent niet zeker ? Check out de website van seismologie.be, waar u de recentste aardbevingen & hun impact in Belgie kan nakijken.

I just thought about this :

The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be decribed by the following formula :

pi zz a

Isn't math fun ;)

Tired of searching for the solution in yet-another-integer-sequence ? Really wanna know x in the following series ?

10,11,12,13,15,16,17,20,22,24,31,100,x,10000

Head over to the encyclopedia of integer sequences, and let the web find it out for you.

It's official : the typical smell of rain after a long period of drought, is C₁₂H₂₂O or also called geosmin, and produced by mass dying bacteria.

Onlangs een pedometer gekregen, u weet wel, zo'n dingetje dat je voetstappen per dag telt. Ik heb het eens meegenomen tijdens een normale werkdag, en ik moet zeggen dat de resultaten nogal verrassend zijn :
Op een ganse werkdag (van 6h t/m 18h) heb ik zo'n 4459 stappen gezet, wat neerkomt op 2.67 km en -hou u vast- slechts een energiewaarde verbruikt van 161.2 kcal, wat niet eens 10% is van een normaal energieverbruik. Dat ik mijn gewicht nog redelijk onder controle heb, is bij deze uiterst meegenomen !

I allways wanted to know what the result is of mixing coins and 100000 ampere.

Now that everyone and his cat is talking about the Large Hadron Collidor, and whether it will destroy the earth, few people seem to realize what the CERN scientists are looking for. The Higgs Boson, or God particle, is the prey scientists are hunting already for decades, and has become the Holy Grail of physics. Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet 100 dollars that the LHC won't find the Higgs Boson.

Elementary particle physics was one of my favorite classes back in university. The particle adventure is a nice walk through this fascinating world of quantum dynamics.