Escher fountain

This fountain has an Escher-inspired illusion: the water appears to flow uphill!
Check out Makezine for details of construction.

Mandelbrot teddy bear

Via Boing Boing.

Geek alphabet

Having visited E. last weekend, I know that we will both be quite busy for the rest of the semester. But we might have some readers out there, and there are always RSS subscribers happily surprised by our eccentric posts. So, for the next n days, we'll be featuring a letter from the Geek Alphabet (don't click it! then these posts will be superfluous!), possibly with some commentary from fontes or efontes.
Via MetaFilter.

Nested glass Klein bottles

If we have any readers out there who are not yet subscribed to Boing Boing, let them know:When I grow up, I want to be a glassblower. A mathematician-glassblower. And Ernie will be a time-traveling geometer. (Is "geometer" a job? Are there non-academic jobs where one simply does geometry all day? Maybe he'll be a member of a time-traveling a cappella group. Any gig, anywhere, any time -- we can make your event truly special! Add dinosaurs for only a small fee!)

Rubik's cube cereal

The Smallest Integer

A quick summary of The Incredible Hulk:

You wouldn't like me when I'm... hungry. Don't make me hungry... Do you remember when we were at Harvard and we participated in those induced hallucination experiments? It was like that, only a thousand times more intense... I want to get rid of it, not control it... They want to make it a weapon... You don't understand, something very bad is going to happen... If I am off by even the smallest integer, this could go drastically wrong...

Things that can happen if you are off by even the smallest integer:

1. Nothing. By absolute value, zero is the smallest integer. Additive identities have a habit of not doing much... under addition!
2. Immediate death. It just sometimes happens. A doctor said so. Reference.
3. Partial credit.
4. Off-by-one errors. (If you are not convinced that zero is smaller than one.)
5. Wouldn't 'The Smallest Integer' be a great name for a rock band?
6. Bad dialogue (cf. 2, above).
7. One is the loneliest number that you ever knew...
8. The other integers feel slighted. You won't get invited to their parties any more. Good job. Working in unary sucks, doesn't it?

Lego Escher, various Rubik's

This seemed cut out for fontesefontes. Via boingboing.

e music

Ever wonder what e sounds like? It has been unimaginatively set as music here.

I remember when Noam Elkies wrote a piece of piano music based on the digits of pi for March 14th one year. He allowed some additional notes according to certain rules, which made it much more pleasing to hear.

Mathematics itself is on fire

So says this article in the New York Times. I find it rather interesting, not least because I love mathematics; also, the author maintains a playful tone throughout, including these phrases:

Referring to certain philosophy of science claims: "Those are still fighting words." (I picture bearded physicists throwing down clipboards and wrestling on top of a million-dollar piece of equipment.)

"Plato is really dead."

Describing someone as "a physicist and quantum trickster."

"In this case there is meta law — one law or equation, perhaps printable on a T-shirt — to rule them all."

The article comes to no conclusions about whether the scientific enterprise is independently valid, or rests on a fundamental faith in an orderly universe. It does present the theory that universes "spawn" with different features each time, which I think naturally lends itself to a video game. It could even be semi-educational, teaching players about physics. Of course, they would have to invent their own experiments. The game could dynamically change rules that they haven't discovered yet so that (with some small probability) each experiment contradicts the theory that the player has formed thus far. Thus does science baffle and entice we hapless scientists. Everything is so complexified.