Khan Academy subtitles

Thanks to sharing knowledge and open-community I discovered a very badly page ranked website called Khan Academy. Of course if I had followed TED more carefully I would have known about it before.

I mentioned open-community because it was Melodie, friend from Couch Surfing, who showed me the Academy. Moreover, we found it in a paperback Creative Commons magazine... just saying that I was there because of ECOOP 2011 (programming conference) makes me dizzy. Too much knowledge sharing! I will write a summary of ECOOP soon, but let me get back to Khan Academy now.

The Academy is simply a great place to learn. One teacher, good teacher, trying to explain the magic of math, physics, biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, astronomy, economics, banking and more in a very approachable... especially math. I realize that many people know about it, but I didn't so I'm still under its influence. By now I have gained around 130,000 energy points, and 67 badges! What a great way to make humans want to learn. Shame that I cannot share my rank using some kind of a widget.

As I finished a degree in computer science, I must say that the way this guy explains math is just awesome. Anyway... there are subtitles. Everything is subtitled in English, which is a base language for others. I translated first video to Polish! I was shocked when I saw that this is the first video translated to Polish on the Academy. Ever!

We Polish people need this Academy for our kids! It should be subtitled in Polish to terminate the stagnation of our education system! OK... I don't believe in that, but it can start something, can't it? Why didn't I have a teacher like that when I was in high-school? Or better, why the hell didn't my teachers know about it? It is already 5 years old!

I think I'll write a petition to students' governments of English Philology departments around Poland. Who knows, maybe together we can translate it in one term, cause by myself I'd need 46 years to finish...

Polacy, do roboty! :)

Croissant equation and Prolog.

Computacional geometry and computer graphics are subjects I rarely play with, but I like their connection with the real matter. Today in CosmoCaixa museum I found mathematical equation for a croissant. That was quite amazing - full exhibition devoted for math and equations describing natural shapes. I see croissants often in Spain and I have to admit that I never thought about their shape as a mathematical expression.


This can be ordered like that:


This can be expressed as:



and be calculated with use of:
I wouldn't recommend to find solutions for this equation in Ruby, so the example is in ECLiPSe CLP. It is a great tool (environment) for solving contraint logic problems. It's also fun. For me.