Animated Factorisation Diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Animated Factorisation Diagrams

datapointed.net

325 pointslelf72 comments

That appears to work like a denial of service attack on my brain - I was sitting here quite hypnotized until a colleague asked me what on earth I was doing.

"Is that the InfoSheet Generator you've been working on!?!?!?!"

"...no..." :(

omg I know! I was ready to leave multiple times but something prevented me from moving my mouse and I starred at it for five minutes. It is number porn.

I can imagine using it to trap geeks in the same way that the cat gets trapped by mirrors in red dwarf.

LOL

It would be an extremely bad idea to match that with the open riff to Gangnam Style :-)

Obligatory http://xkcd.com/356/

Can we stop the trend of calling everything "porn"?

Eventually.

Fun has fashion, just like everything else.

The porn analogy: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/04/porn-analogy.html

Wow, what a terrible article. The disingenuity is astounding.

>Pornography is fake.

True, but that's not why the analogy is used. Pornography is a visual media that conveys some of the pleasure of an act without the viewer actually going through the effort of doing it.

>Pornography's aim is to sexually excite the viewer. Are geeks sexually excited by the eBay data?…

>pleasure comes from many things that are non-sexual such as eating…

>So let's swap 'geek porn' for a 'geek feast'.

But why isn't "feast" defined symmetrically? A feast's aim is to gastronomically excite the user. Are geeks gastronomically excited by the eBay data?

The whole rant is semantic nonsense, defining words in a way that begs the question. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good rant. I just like my rants to make sense.

The real reason not to use the Porn Analogy is stuffed in the last paragraph: "Many people are uncomfortable with pornography and don't want pornography analogies in professional work."

>Wow, what a terrible article. The disingenuity is astounding.

Be aware that the person youre replying to is the person who wrote the article.

I do think you're right though, and I'd be interested to hear jgc's response.

It wasn't my intention when writing it to be disingenuous, but I do think there's validity in his/her criticism of the article. Not my finest blog post.

I don't mean to accuse you of being disingenuous, rather I agreed with his general point.

See also my 'Make your own prime factorization diagram' blog post: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/04/make-your-own-prime-factorizatio...

Here is another fascinating visualization that I'm sure will ring a bell for some of you. For those that haven't seen this type of explanation, it's really neat. Eduardo's explanation both easy-to-read--hey, he's a writer--and detailed.

http://www.sievesofchaos.com/

How can I make this my screensaver?

Seconded. I would love to have this as a screensaver.

Thirded... this would be an awesome screensaver/desktop.

If you have a mac, you can use this:

http://www.sandwichlab.net/websaver/

For those saying it breaks or ends at 10000. It doesn't if you append infinity like so http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization...

I also like how you can enable turbo by pressing the fast-forward button several times...

Before I click, is this safe for work or not? Thanks.

Yes, completely safe

Unless you've got some work you need to do instead of staring blankly at your screen for 10 minutes, of course.

If you're at work you shouldn't be reading this anyways.

This should be made into a ballet.

Dalek ballet.

At least, that's how my brain feels now.

That was beautiful. It puts my prime number elevator thing [1] to shame.

[1] http://cautery.blogspot.com/2012/05/animated-prime-number-ma...

I went up a level to http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/ and was thoroughly disappointed to be 403'd. Are there more available?

You gave up much too quickly! Going up another level to http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/ offers a variety of creations.

I like it a lot. Would be nice if I could fill in my own number...

See also You Can Count on Monsters [1] which presents the same kind of factorization diagrams but with each number accompanied by an illustration of a 'monster'. The approach, targeting an elementary-school audience, is a little trippy but it anchors the idea of the number in a unique visual. I've given the book to a few of my nieces & nephews.

[1] http://www.richardevanschwartz.com/monsters.html

I teach math, and I am definitely showing this to my class today! I am pretty sure this will help some students make sense of prime numbers for the first time in their lives.

Really nice. What rendering engine or library do you use?

This looks homegrown. The source code [1] is fairly readable.

New dots seem to enter the world in the position of the last dot placed but below them. Position and size seem to follow a simple linear movement between frames.

I wonder though, why is this done with canvas instead of SVG. Just to cut down on the number of DOM elements?

[1] http://www.datapointed.net/media/2012/10/factor_min.js

It's canvas. SVG would still need to insert DOM elements and would probably start displaying performance problems at 5000 elements or so.

I don't know why an experiment like this would be minified. It would be much more interesting with well-commented source.

d3.js ?

Incredible compression scheme for a class of drawings :)

Definitely pretty cool, though it's hard to look at for more than 18 minutes with it on fast forward.

I think it's reprogramming my brain.

Hypnotic. I'll show it to kids, so that they visualize numbers. Edit: Thank you awesome job! I am not closing that tab.

Pardon if I'm missing something obvious, but what is the significance of the colors?

To look pretty.

I really love the n sequences following n! Those are some of the most beautiful in the lot, I think. Try 121-126 or 421-427 to see what I mean.

Have you considered using parenthesis, or showing powers instead of repeating numbers?

IE 250 = (5 x 5) x (2 x 2 x 2) 250 = 2^3 x 5^2

You could always display both

I was disappointed to see it end (at 10000). :(

I capped it at 10000 to prevent someone from accidentally leaving it on fast-forward and wedging their browser. Try this if you want to go farther:

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization...

Brilliant!

Feature request: audio track speaking the numbers as they appear

UPDATE: 'Popcorn', the electronic pop instrumental, might do too, with the counting synched to the beat

Not Kraftwerk's Numbers? :)

Or perhaps Boards Of Canada's Aquarius, I wonder what the factorization of sixty-ten looks like :)

Awesome! Now I would love to be able to zoom in... any plans on adding this?

Feature request: single step. The only way I can slow it down enough to explain it to my kids is to stop it, and it stops in random (usually mangled) states. I wish I could single step it.

breaks at 10000

I like how the div that contains the whole thing is called enchilada.

Wow. Really impressed, I got stuck on it for a good 5 minutes !

I want a digital clock with dots instead of numbers.

Hypnotic. I kept staring at it for no reason!

3^n generates the Sierpinski gasket.

108 is the coolest diagram ever ( http://zeldawiki.org/Triforce )

I want a clock with that !!!

Totally hypnotic! Perfect :)

TIL Prime numbers form circles (or maybe I knew that, but it's been 15 years since high school math)

A "circle" could be formed with any number of dots.

Dare you to make a circle with 2 dots.

It won't be a perfect circle. You could only create a perfect circle with infinitely many dots, no less.

Draw a circle that intersects both dots. Done.

Before you say that it should be just a line, let me say that it doesn't break the rules that say you can "draw" a circle with 100 or 12 or 7 dots. The dots don't form a circle but rather fall on the line of a circle your mind draws. Since there is nothing truly between the dots, the "true" shape could jut out and form a corner or any other shape, just like it could be a line between the two dots. The circle isn't really there in any circle of n points, so n=2 (and n=1 for that matter) work just fine.

The original post used the term "formed," and I used "make," both with the intent of using only dots to create a circle. I would say you have "included" two dots in your circle, with this new line being the main element. With all due respect.

Actually, I can make any circle with 2 dots (points):

From Wikipedia:

A circle can be defined as the curve traced out by a point that moves so that its distance from a given point is constant.

not quite - you can't make a circle with diameter smaller than the distance between the two dots. and for any given radius, at most two circles (two centre positions) are possible.

3^n gets you a Sierpinski gasket and 4^n Cantor's dust

Super awesome

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