Thursday, October 23, 2008

Imagining the 4th dimension

Ever since I was little, well fairly little, inspired by the writings of A.A. Attanasio, I have tried to imagine higher-dimensional shapes. Shapes like the lovely hypercube:



Dimensions is a lovely project which takes you through the maths of higher dimensional shapes, without overwhelming you with detail. It's all done through animation, and you can watch it online. Don't be a flatlander. JFDI!

Agnostic buses

The two things that you need to know about the atheist bus campaign (to which I've dutifully added my tenner) :
  1. They were hoping to make £5,500, but have in fact made over £75,000 in the first couple of days.
  2. The CiF comment thread now has 1739 comments on it. More than I've ever seen on a CiF thread.
Yay atheists!

The buses are actually agnostic, apparently because Transport for London advertising rules don't allow people to be definite in their unbelief for fear of causing offence to religious people. Considering the enthusiastic response to the campaign, there are obviously a lot of atheists out there who might be offended by those adverts which definitely proclaim their belief.

I'm not overly bothered about this, being a bit of a 6 myself on the Dawkins Scale, although it would have been nice to have slogans that were a bit more 'in your face'. Maybe next time.

Bryan Appleyard doesn't like it though.