For St. Patrick's Day, Dancing Hungarians!

Turn to me for your seasonal Magyar/Hibernian connections. I mention the item below purely because I love it. But if you imagine the dancing figures in the video not as folk dancers from Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, performing a Hungarian dance, but rather as Irish country cloggers, you can make this seem wholly relevant to St. Patrick's Day. 

What I love is that this is simultaneously preposterous and erudite. It's an accurate-while-ridiculous animation of the way the computer algorithm known as "quicksort" works. The logic behind quicksort is to put a list of items into order through a recursive series of "greater than / less than" tests. You could read all about it here or here. Or you could just watch the video. 

I also love this comment on the YouTube version: "It would have been cool if it was multithreaded." That's true -- you would have had dancers on both sides doing simultaneous "pivot tests" after the first partition --  but it's a full success as is. My admiration goes to whoever had the weird imagination to think this was worth the effort. It was.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/-1Kj64Is_P8/story01.htm