{"id":4081,"date":"2010-02-14T15:42:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-14T23:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=4081"},"modified":"2010-02-14T15:42:27","modified_gmt":"2010-02-14T23:42:27","slug":"nothing-says-i-love-you-like-a-non-orientable-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/14\/nothing-says-i-love-you-like-a-non-orientable-surface\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing Says \u201cI Love You\u201d Like a Non-Orientable Surface"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Feeling like Valentine&#8217;s Day is a little too cutesy for an intellectual heavyweight such as yourself?  Nonsense; the heart may have its reasons, but reason can certainly figure them out, given sufficient grant funding and some diligent graduate students.  <a href=\"http:\/\/twistedphysics.typepad.com\/cocktail_party_physics\/2010\/02\/all-you-need-is.html\">Jennifer Ouellette<\/a> points to a talk by Mary Roach that is safe for TED but arguably not safe for work, and shares some brain scans to prove that love is really blind.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2010\/02\/6a00d8341c9c1053ef0120a89d40b8970b-500wi.gif\" alt=\"6a00d8341c9c1053ef0120a89d40b8970b-500wi\" width=\"426\" height=\"237\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-4083\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2010\/02\/fourthheartcurve.gif\" alt=\"fourthheartcurve\" width=\"172\" height=\"182\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4086\" \/>If all that biology is a bit too squishy, <a href=\"http:\/\/individual.utoronto.ca\/sck\/vday.html\">Sarah Kavassalis does the math<\/a>.  Here you will find the right functions to use to draw hearts &#8212; my favorite is the fourth heart curve from <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolframalpha.com\/2010\/02\/12\/computing-valentines-day-with-wolframalpha\/\">Wolfram|Alpha<\/a>, shown at right &#8212; and how to construct topologically nontrivial versions out of construction paper and scissors.  Who says mathematicians aren&#8217;t practical?  Nor are they above venturing into the realm of the literary.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Roses are red.<br \/>\n                             Violets are approximately blue.<br \/>\n                     A paracompact manifold with a Lorentzian metric,<br \/>\n            can be a spacetime, if it has dimension greater than or equal to two.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Shakespeare, maybe not. But the course of true science never did run smooth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Feeling like Valentine&#8217;s Day is a little too cutesy for an intellectual heavyweight such as yourself? Nonsense; the heart may have its reasons, but reason can certainly figure them out, given sufficient grant funding and some diligent graduate students. Jennifer Ouellette points to a talk by Mary Roach that is safe for TED but arguably [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}