Best Of MetaFilter

"What am I ever going to use math for?" kids often ask. How about for triangulating where an air cannon is being used, as shown in this post by mpark. Now get off my lawn!

Skiing slope of flour by biernackip (cc by)

Do you want kaiju? Because this is how you get kaiju. Mefites discuss the finer details of turning Lake Superior into bread.

Image from page 148 of "The Phynodderree, and other legends of the Isle of Man" (1882) by Internet Archive Book Images

"I already do Set, Wordle, Guess My Word, Worldle, and Spelling Bee ... Math, logic, word-based: I love them all. What else might I like?" DrGail asks Give me your daily puzzles!

18th century school workbook doodle via The Museum of English Rural Life

I think what I like best is that it reminds me of my own school maths book, except my handwriting was rubbish and the doodles were of my scruffy Jack Russell rather than sporty rabbit chasing dogs.

Richard Beale was my great great great grandfather ... It's been very weird to see my ancestor's doodles going viral: Mefi's own intensitymultiply on encountering the MERL's popular twitter thread about an 18th century teen's mathematics workbook

I hear you by Gustav Klim (cc by)

Warrnambool's wombat; NESS not NEZ; Commensalist Lorax; HAMMACHER SCHLEMMER!; Beano of Dundee; Painswick nibbles, pub butty & more; Fox Amoore Stitches; Feierabend, et al; Chicken Diapers; Dada à la Dupré; Epithelial Scutoids; Imperiled Achoques.

seanmpuckett tells the story of how he wrote a BASIC program to play a Merlin-like game which made it into Compute! magazine and was later the subject of an article in Mathematics Magazine.

Heat Pump Field Installation by Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M (cc by)

MeFite larkery explains some of the data you have to assess when considering whether a heat pump is worth the expense.

In conclusion: it's really hard to work out whether heat pumps are a good idea or not - you need a lot of different data to get a good result, and some of those data are hard to come by.

Sondra Eklund's prime factorization sweater.

This is a nice little find from Metafilter user Foci for Analysis this morning: a sweater which expresss the prime factors of the first hundred integers graphically. In base ten, and base eight on the back, and bases two and three on the sleeves while you're at it because why the heck not. The creator, Sondra Eklund, explains the visual methodology on her blog, and discusses the visual order in the colors and shapes:

The patterns are wonderful and fascinating. You’ll quickly notice that the yellows and the blues line up, because 5 and 2 are factors of 10. You also might notice that all perfect squares are symmetrical. Multiples of 11 go in a lovely pink diagonal across the sweater. There are hundreds more patterns.