Since my by-hand attempt at archiving a Twitter conversation, I was told about Storify by the folks at Chatterblast Media who are helping the Math Forum learn their way around social media.

Anyway, Storify saved me tons of time capturing screen shots of tweets and made it easy to annotate the conversation. I wish it didn’t have to be quite so linear (I ended up re-ordering some tweets and breaking my one picture into two stories). But I guess stories tend to be linear.

Here is the finished product: http://storify.com/maxmathforum/the-three-acts-of-an-anyqs

If you are ever engaged in a Twitter conversation you think would interest others, or want to refer back to, just favorite the Tweets. Then whenever you get a chance, log in to Storify and search for your favorited tweets. They’ll be there waiting for you, and you can easily drag them into a story, re-order them, and annotate. Storify also collects Facebook posts, RSS feed items… all of the ephemera of the web. It’s pretty awesome!

I so thoroughly enjoyed James Tanton’s videos on new breakthroughs in partitions that I inspired to play around with my own patterns in the partitions. In particular, I’m pretty familiar with the dragon fractal but hadn’t seen the way you can generate it until Tanton showed the binary representation of the dragon fractal (in Video 4).

I started to play around with coloring bits of the partitions that appeared “self-similar.” I can see know how they are quite a bit more complex than the dragon fractal, and I see some intriguing patterns. I wonder if I play around long enough if I’ll recreate Euler’s method for generating the number of unordered partitions?

What’s gotten me hooked, I think, is that Ono’s work (Ono is the guy who came up with an explicit formula for the number of partitions of N) was inspired by visualization and partitions are so visualizable, and so I would like to see what the partition numbers look like to him. I don’t know anything about -adic spaces (or whatever they are called) but I do know some things about fractals and primes… I wonder if there is some representation that would allow me to see the fractal structure in the partition numbers.

I’ve wondered how one might do that before, and then in the middle of a really interesting conversation with Greg (@sarcasymptote), Dan (@ddmeyer), Dave (@dcox21), and John (@thescamdog) Greg requested that someone archive the conversation. It was a sprawling conversation with no hashtags, so I took a very rudimentary stab at flowcharting it.

Next blog post will be my thoughts on the content, but for now I’m intrigued by the format of the archive itself. Click the thumbnail image below for a “full-size” copy, and then zoom in to read when you have the lay of the land.