Bird Mail: 031
Hello again,
I know I missed last week, but I am back with a twist on the usual Bird mail. If you’ve forgotten, Bird Mail is your only-on-Tuesday newsletter that brings you a handful of links from around the internet. If Bird Mail is too much for you and you need a break, you can always unsubscribe.
If you look at nothing else in Bird Mail this week, watch this man solve The Miracle. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Bruce, this is a twenty-five minute long video of a man in front of a computer, solving a sudoku puzzle. There is no way I am watching this.” but I am telling you, it is worth every second. While Simon was clearly elated by his puzzling success, Lisa Piccirillo untangled a famous, decades-old, math knot like it was homework, because she “didn’t consider it to be real math.”
He started yelling, ‘Why aren’t you more excited?’ said Piccirillo, He sort of freaked out.
The talk of sliceness and knots in four-dimensions is very much real math and, admittedly, far beyond my understanding, so I dove into some slightly more tangible knots with The Ashley Book of Knots via Spencer Wright’s fantastic manufacturing newsletter The Prepared.
You might be wondering why I subscribe to a newsletter ostensibly about manufacturing, but I find it delightful to tie together works of genius like these with other areas that overlap my interests. Then I saw these crosshatched shapes by Albert Chamillard and they reminded me of Piccirillo’s knot traces. I love when ideas from all over the internet come together like this.
In Issue 029 I featured this LEGO tensegrity structure. It was the first time I had ever encountered the phenomenon—I studied the humanities instead of math and science if that isn't obvious from my lack of understanding of topology and invariants. In the last two weeks, I’ve come across several more of these design feats, including this one that is so strong, the builder can climb on it. I have watched each of these videos several times and each time I get a spark of wonder in the moment when all the chains snap and the top begins to float.
Until next time, I'll be puzzling about what to weave together in the next issue. If you’ve found things around the internet that you’d like to me to rope into Bird Mail, send it my way and I’ll check it out.
Your friend,
Bruce