For two years now, FLAME Festival has offered a unique experience inside the flow/fire festival world in that we allow our attendees to help us determine our lineup. Last year was our first time trying out this experiment and we learned a lot from doing it--a lot of what worked and a lot of what didn’t work. This year, in an effort to improve upon the system we created last year we set out to take many of those lessons learned and apply them to voting and teacher selection to do our best to assemble the best festival the Southeastern United States has ever seen.

Continuing my series exploring pieces of my poi math paper step-by-step. I've previously gone over the basics of the math and how to use it to model simple flowers and third order motions.

Four months ago, Jon Alvarez asked a seemingly innocuous question on the Poi Chat forum on Facebook that led me to one of the most mammoth undertakings of my adult life: has anybody set down definitions of all the poi moves in one place? The answer is sadly no, but it got me thinking about why that answer was no...beyond whether someone had set up a dictionary or encyclopedia, to the very heart of how we define poi tricks and discuss them online.

Graph theory is surprisingly integral to a lot of patterns that we play with--essentially any time you're dealing with a number of points you're trying to hit in a given sequence and repeat them, you're using graph theory to solve the problem. Here's a little bit of history as to how graph theory came to be and some helpful hints that may help you solve those pesky poi patterns. :)

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A follow-up to last week's poi math video. This one tells us how to determine the size of the hand path for poi when we're graphing out patterns using parametric equations. Includes properties of wavelength and amplitude among other nifty math concepts.

techblog218.mp4

People frequently reference the math behind poi on many forums and groups, but it can seem a little daunting to folks that don't have that kind of background. Here's an attempt to level the playing field. A lot of this will be review for the more mathematically inclined folks out there, but for those who aren't, hopefully this will give you the Cliff's Notes as to some of the math we use to describe flowers and the like and make it a little bit more digestible. If you like this, please leave me feedback as I've got plans in my mind to do a whole series of these kinds of videos :)

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