Jan 11 2025

My Favorite WikiMedia Images Of 2024

I read a lot of Wikipedia. Doesn’t everyone? I like to look at pictures, especially of rare things, historical things, and illustrations of abstract mathematical concepts.

Each time I come across an image I like, I watch it on WikiMedia. This is all the images I watched in 2024.

There are a lot of images in this collection that are fun. There are are some that are shocking. I learn about our past so I can improve our future.

Images link to their Wikimedia page, please see for copyright and other information. Images are in alphabetical order. Hover over to colorize, or on mobile I think you can click the shaded border around the image since the images are links to wiki.

Trigger warning: death, war, slavery, racism, optical illusions, moving images

Kaleidocycle unfolded as chain of 6 tetrahedra↗

Challenge vs. skill, showing 'flow' region.↗

The General MIDI logo↗

Depiction of aurochs, horses and deer - Lascaux Cave Painting, 17-20,000 years ago↗

Photo of an Olmec Jade Mask taken at the museum of Anthropology of Xalapa Vera Cruz, 1200 - 400 BCE↗

Picture of a CD plastic cover between a polarizer and a flat screen monitor. The flat screen light is polarized, so the birefringence of the plastic layer shows colored fringes after the polarizer. Also called Photoelasticimetry or Photoelasticity.↗

Saltwater Crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) This is Maximo, a 15'+ crocodile at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm.↗

Self-similarity in the Mandelbrot set shown by zooming in on a round feature while panning in the negative-x direction.↗

Started with random pixels. Simulated annealing by swapping pairs of pixels, fast cooling (was probably actually just steepest decent...) Similar colour pixels attract at short range, repel at slightly less short range.↗

Started with random pixels. Simulated annealing by swapping pairs of pixels, slow cooling Similar colour pixels attract at short range, repel at slightly less short range.↗

A recreation of the interleaved random and pleasing pattern of a Thinking Machines CM-5 computer 16x32 LED panel. The pattern alternates vertically between 4 rows moving to the left and 4 rows moving to the right. The probability for an LED to be on is 25%. This kind of light pattern was also seen in Jurassic Park (1993) where a CM-5 was installed in the park's control room.↗

Photos of the Weavers during the Ruby Ridge Siege which would leave 3 dead, two of the Weavers and one U.S. Marshall. Due to the mishandling of this situation, the American Militia Movement would rise, leading to the 90s wave of domestic extremism. (1992). This photo was taken about an hour before the shoot-out and was filed as a court record in U.S. v. Weaver.↗

Frequency dispersion of surface gravity waves on deep water. The red square moves with the phase velocity, and the green circles propagate with the group velocity. In this deep-water case, the phase velocity is twice the group velocity. The red square overtakes two green circles, when moving from the left to the right of the figure.↗

Gaussian quantum wave packet superposition in 1D.↗