Vasilis Vassalos
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376 followers
Vasilis's posts
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http://simplybattycal.blogspot.gr/2014/07/new-places-familiar-faces.html?spref=fb
It was indeed great having , Karen and family visit us! ﻿
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Ελπιζω να το αποτρεψουμε αυτο το αίσχος﻿
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Which airport is closest to you?

The dots in this graphic by Jason Davies show the major airports of the world. Each region consists of the points that are closer to a particular airport than to any other. For example, the irregular pentagonal light green area containing Iceland (near the top of the picture) shows all the places for which Reykjavik is the nearest major airport.

Jason Davies' website (https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/airports/) has an interactive version of this map, in which the airports are labelled. The globe can be spun and twisted, and you can zoom in and out.

The furthest place in the world from a major airport is in Antarctica, which is perhaps not a surprise given that there are no large airports on that continent. It lies 5173.7km from each of the three nearest airports.

Mathematicians call a picture like this a Voronoi diagram. The individual regions are called Voronoi cells, and the points (airports in this case) are often called sites. Wikipedia has a nice page on Voronoi diagrams here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram).

(Seen via .)

#mathematics﻿
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For all those who think that a conference publication (or even a journal publication) is a proof of correctness :)

1980: Mical+Vazirani $O(m\sqrt{n})$ algorithm for matching in general graphs
1994: Vazirani "journal version" of above result
2014: Vazirani "correct version" of above result. ﻿
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Thought provoking﻿
The meanings of life - Parents often say: ‘I just want my children to be happy.’ It is unusual to hear: ‘I just want my children’s lives to be meaningful,’ yet that’s what most of us seem to want for ourselves. We fear meaninglessness. We fret about the ‘nihilism’ of this or that aspect of our culture. When we lose [...]The post The meanings of life appeared first on Aeon Magazine. http://ow.ly/2zVMCP﻿
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For Yannis Papakonstantinou ﻿
Is this life real? - Our species is not going to last forever. One way or another, humanity will vanish from the Universe, but before it does, it might summon together sufficient computing power to emulate human experience, in all of its rich detail. Some philosophers and physicists have begun to wonder if we’re already there. Maybe we are in [...]The post Is this life real? appeared first on Aeon Magazine. http://ow.ly/2D7lcG﻿
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I could have written a much shorter (and not so witty) but similar letter to the Portuguese PM when I moved to the US after my Edinburgh PhD in 1982. Change seems really hard in Iberia... (ht  )﻿
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Autoawesome. Got to try this soon﻿
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A surprisingly persuasive argument for why a college education should be completely 100% free. Bonus: a scheme to fund it.﻿