Drawing on protocol
June 21st, 2009
Drawing on protocol is a drawing constructed indirectly by its viewers, from the following rules:
- The IP address of each visitor to this page is recorded in the site logs
- The latitude and longitude of each visitor shall be estimated using a public IP look up service
- The route from one visitor to the next in sequence shall be found using a public mapping service
- If the route cannot be calculated from visitor i to visitor i+1, the route shall be attempted to visitor i+2, i+3, … i+n until one can be found
- When a route has been found, it will be drawn freehand on the paper, the page representing a coordinate space of 360°x180°, with 0,0 at the centre
- The hits will be recorded from the date of the first upload of this page, 20th June 2009
- Repeat hits from the same IP address will be ignored
- The drawing will be judged complete on whim, and no more lines shall be added
UPDATE 25th August: more lines added, and deemed complete. Most new entries were repeatedly in the same places – Seattle, California, or different network hubs in the UK and Europe.
UPDATE 2: best to do this sort of thing automatically, rather than with pencil and paper.
A long line of Parisian revolutions and mathematicians
June 14th, 2009
Simulating the Poisson process
May 30th, 2009
A simulation of the Poisson process, built using Processing.
The process models random events occuring in continuous time given that:
- Events occur on their own
- The average rate of events happening remains constant
- Future events have nothing to do with ones which have happened
A process has average rate such as 
per minute. Number of events in t minutes is the discrete random variable X, where 
. The time you have to wait between events follows an exponential distribution 
.
The simulation works by obtaining a waiting time between each event, through making independent observations on the random variable 
. We can do this by solving:
where u is a random observation on the uniform distribution U(0,1). With the exponention distribution this means solving
which ends up with
Each time an event is fired, t is recalculated.
Lost in translation
March 7th, 2009Western brands converted to Arabic in Abu Dhabi
