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BUDAPEST, Hungary—In the United States, nobody listens to Jared Taylor. Despite his Ivy League education and polite manners, few people working in politics take him seriously. That’s because he is a white supremacist, although he would prefer to be called a “racial realist.” When he tries to organize a meeting for his publication, American Renaissance, it is typically banned from hotels and conference rooms as soon as the proprietors find out about its racist mission. His ideas obviously hold little sway with established political parties or institutions. Which explains why Taylor traveled to Hungary last month to organize an international conference of white supremacists and anti-immigrant nationalists from more than 10 countries with the express purpose of making common cause with Europe’s own burgeoning far-right political movements. The conference was blandly dubbed “The Future of Europe.”

Everybody knows Pixar employs some of the most talented storytellers in the business. But the company employs some wonderfully sharp mathematicians, too. In fact, without those mathematicians working fastidiously behind the scenes, many of your favorite Pixar stories would not have gotten told — at least not in the adorable way we've come to love.

One such math wiz in Pixar's employ is Tony DeRose, Senior Scientist and Lead of the Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios. With a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley, DeRose spent a decade teaching at the University of Washington before joining Pixar to work on the Academy Award-winning animated short Geri's Game. (You may remember it as the one where the old man from Toy Story 2 plays chess.)

As DeRose explains in the video above, his particular focus at Pixar is in geometric modeling, which is a fancy way of saying that he's paid to make shapes. And as it turns out, making shapes is one of the most foundational jobs in any Pixar film since, as DeRose notes, many of the company's characters are made up of complicated shapes. What DeRose needed to do, then, was to develop shapes that both artists and computers could deal with quickly.

Before DeRose came on the scene, animators relied on polygons to create 3D objects. But polygons proved problematic to otherwise seamless animation, as Tim Carmody notes at The Verge: "The problem with polygons is that at close detail, you can see every one of them — a fatal problem when the illusion depends on ignoring individual frames and pixels." What DeRose did, says Carmody, was find "new ways of quickly generating smooth curves with high fidelity."

So how'd he do it? Basically, he used very simple geometric formulas to split a line into midpoints, and then to keep doing that until he got the shape he wanted.

Take a look at the video above, made by Numberphile, to see what we mean.

Countries have national anthems, national dishes, even national dances but the Swedes have taken their cultural identity one step further by creating their own typeface, one inspired by Swedish signs of the 1950s and named Sweden Sans.

The brief was to replace the various fonts used by different Swedish government ministries, agencies and corporations with one integrated visual brand identity that would represent the country to the world in a fresh and dynamic way.

According to a study of the 2010 World Cup, facial width to height ratio (FWHR) predicts a player's aggressiveness in soccer. 

...midfielders, who play both offense and defense, and forwards, who lead the offense, with higher FWHRs were more likely to commit fouls. Forwards with higher FWHRs also were more likely to score goals or make assists.

The Central Japan Railway Company has invited members of the public to take test rides on its new magnetically levitated train, which goes over 300 mph. Visit the link to watch a video of happy riders. If Halliburton and Goldman Sachs hadn't taken all our money, we could have neat toys like this, too.

Lava claims first home in Pahoa [USGS]

Civil defense officials in Hawaii went door-to-door last night handing out evacuation notices to residents in the immediate downslope path of the Puna lava flow. Read the rest

I went on up to the big ol' sky...

My son is 27 and if I were his age, I would probably sell the island and buy a Ferrari. But I am 56 years old, and I want to enjoy everything I have

My father wasnt a king, he was a taxi driver, but I am a prince Prince Renato II, of the country Pontinha, an island fort on Funchal harbour. Its in Madeira, Portugal, where I grew up. It was discovered in 1419; Captain James Cook has been here, and there are paintings of his visit.

In 1903, the Portuguese government didnt have enough money to build a harbour port, so the king sold the land to a wealthy British family, the Blandys, who make Madeira wine. Fourteen years ago the family decided to sell it for just 25,000 (£19,500). It was of no use to them. But nobody else wanted to buy it either. I met Blandy at a party, and he told me about Pontinha. He asked if Id like to buy the island. Of course I said yes, but I have no money I am just an art teacher.

Dortmund poised to introduce 50% gender quota for traffic-light icons, but move is as much about road safety as feminism

With the German governments plans to introduce quotas for women in company boardrooms seemingly stalled, equality of the sexes could first make advances on the streets: in Dortmund, politicians are debating the introduction of a 50% gender quota for traffic-light icons.

In a joint application to the city council, local politicians from the Social Democratic and Green parties argued that since we give equal treatment to men and women, it would be consistent to partially modify traffic-light men to traffic-light women.

From the 10th World Wushu Championships in Toronto (2009).

The martial art is Duilian, also known as Wushu. Based on this Wiki page, the spear she's slicing the air to shreds with is the Qiang, a flexible spear with red horsehair at the head.

Their screaming alone scares the hell out me. [via]

Waze is a smartphone app that offers real-time smart route alternatives to help drivers avoid congested freeways. In Los Angeles, Waze often directs drivers to side streets through upscale neighborhoods, so surface streets in neighborhoods also become congested with traffic. Read the rest

With the release of the Alan Turing biopic "The Imitation Game," interest in the Enigma cipher used by the Axis powers and broken by Turing and the exiled Polish mathematicians at Bletchley Park has been revived. Read the rest

Image by Avi Solomon, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.

It's pretty predictable that a list of the world's "100 strangest" foods would be mostly entrails and arthropods, but the digger wasp-crackers of Omachi, Japan are curiously appetizing (YMMV). (more…)

The Bible garnered 37% of public vote, while On the Origin of Species received 35%, followed by works by Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein and George Orwell

One lays out how In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the other saw Christianity shaken to its roots as Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Together, the Bible and On the Origin of Species are the two most valuable books for humanity, according to a survey of the British public, with the religious text narrowly edging out one of the most important works in the history of science.

The Folio Societys survey of 2,044 British adults, conducted by YouGov, asked members of the public to name the books of most significance for the modern world. The Bible took 37% of the vote, with Darwins masterwork coming in second, with 35%.

Pupils in London do better at school than the rest of the country, but why? Sam Freedman, a former adviser to Michael Gove and now head of an education charity, has called this the biggest question in education policy. According to my own research for the Centre for Market and Public Organisation, a big part of the answer almost all in fact lies in the ethnic composition of Londons pupils. And that is down to higher pupil aspiration, ambition and engagement among migrants.

There is nothing inherently different in the educational performance of pupils from different ethnic backgrounds, but the children of relatively recent immigrants typically have greater hopes and expectations of education and are, on average, more likely to be engaged with their school work. This is not by chance, of course; a key part of the London effect is the capitals attraction to migrants and those aspiring to a better life.

At the other end of the Airbnb helpline in Colorado, Casey sounded incredulous. You have how many Facebook friends? she drawled. Er about 50, I replied. Long pause. Well, you dont have enough for us to verify you. Youd need at least 100.

But, I squeaked, I post every now and again Im on Facebook most days to check on my friends and relations. This, however, was not enough to convince Airbnb I existed. And, as I didnt exist, I could not book a room.

Stockholm agency designs modern geometric typeface inspired by 1950s signs to be used by government and corporations

• Which font best describes where you live?
  

Countries have national anthems, national dishes, even national dances but the Swedes have taken their cultural identity one step further by creating their own typeface, one inspired by Swedish signs of the 1950s and named Sweden Sans.

The brief was to replace the various fonts used by different Swedish government ministries, agencies and corporations with one integrated visual brand identity that would represent the country to the world in a fresh and dynamic way.

@SomeChrisTweets via thisisnthappiness.com

Kevin Kelly says: "The Nakasendo is an old road in Japan that connects Kyoto to Tokyo. It was once a major foot highway, but today small sections retain some of its historical feel.

So says a report from The Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, an NGO that singles out the Rio police for "abusive use of lethal force." Read the rest

And those things aren't true, according to an Ipsos-Mori poll that put the USA second-from-the-top in the race to see who's the most ignorant, preceded only by Italians. Read the rest

I am going to be a little late On Wed Jan the office of the most interesting and I will be there for a while I wrote a good wtfriday about flight 666 to hell that did not have to go to bed at night and day out of the box and the other keeps going to be a little late On Wed Jan the office of the most interesting and I will be there for a while I wrote a good wtfriday about flight 666 to hell that did not have to go to bed at night and day out of the box and the other keeps going to be a little late On Wed Jan the office of the most interesting and I will be there for a while I wrote a good wtfriday about flight 666 to hell that did not have to go to bed at night and day out of the box and the other keeps going to be—

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Seven natural disaster specialists had previously been convicted of manslaughter for not being emphatic enough about the 2009 quake, which killed 309 people, but that conviction's been overturned by an appeals court. Read the rest

From Hotelclub, a wonderful series of figures of speech from around the world illustrated by Matt Lindley.

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