August 14, 2010
August 13, 2010
Unusual Geometric Shapes
This animated image shows a structure called a hyperboloid of one sheet. It is a curved form made up of only straight lines and is one of several strucutre discussed in this blog post by “Miss Cellania” (via boingboing).
June 1, 2010
Giant Hole in Guatemala City
This photo was taken from the Guatemalan Government’s Flickr feed and shows a “massive, spontaneous sinkhole (“hundimiento”) that appeared today in Zone 2 of Guatemala City, after overwhelming saturation of rains from tropical storm Agatha.”
More at boingboing
April 8, 2010
Tania Kovats – Tree
Here’s a video documenting the production of Tania Kovats’ artwork Tree made for the Natural History Museum in London.
The artwork is a slice cut from the centre of a real oak tree and was inspired by the work of Charles Darwin.
March 11, 2010
Concrete Cast of Enormous Ant Colony
“A giant ant colony pumped full of cement,and then excavated reveals one of Mother Nature’s marvellous wonders.
We’ve seen what these giant ant mounds look like above ground but this is an incredible view of what the structures looks like underground – which some have called a wonder of the world.”
February 16, 2010
3d Printing with Paper
There is an Irish company called Mcor Technologies who have developed a machine for 3d printing using layers of ordinary paper and PVA glue. The Models shown here were created entirely by the machine. Below is a video from the late late show.
January 30, 2010
Slime Mould Imitates Tokyo Rail System
“The researchers decided to task the slime mold with a problem human designers had already tackled. They placed oat flakes (a slime mold favorite) on agar plates in a pattern that mimicked the locations of cities around Tokyo and impregnated the plates with P. polycephalum at the point representing Tokyo itself. They then watched the slime mold grow for 26 hours, creating tendrils that interconnected the food supplies. Different plates exhibited a range of solutions, but the visual similarity to the Tokyo rail system was striking in many of them”
June 14, 2009
A Geometry of the Pitted, Pocked, and Broken Up
This quote from James Gleick’s book Chaos refers to the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who is considered the “father of fractal geometry”. I think its interesting to think about in relation to contemporary sculpture.
Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying, Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in straight lines. the new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. it is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined. The understanding of nature’s complexity awaiting a suspicion that the complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of lightning was not its direction, but rather the distribution of zigs and zags. Mandelbrot’s work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the key to the essence of a thing.
June 13, 2009
D’arcy Wentworth Thompson
These illustrations by D’Arcy Wenworth Thompson show the shapes made by drops of ink in water (left) and the tentacles of a jellyfish (right). They are taken from a book called Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable by James Gleick.
April 5, 2009
The Drunkard’s Walk
Ì have just finished reading a book about randomness called “The Drunkard’s Walk” by Leonard Mlodinow. The book aims to explain us the role of chance in everyday life.
One of the interesting facts in the book is that people are not capable of making up a sequence of numbers that pass mathematical tests for randomness. For certain mathematical calculations strings of random numbers are required. In 1947 scientists at the RAND corporation created a system using electronic noise to generate random numbers. They did not succeed in generating a string of numbers that was entirely free of regularites but did produce results which were random enough to be useful. The numbers were published in 1955 as A Million Random Digits (which sounds like an avant garde novel or piece of early conceptual art).
I looked up the RAND book on Amazon.co.uk and found a strange user review :
This is surely the most depressing book I have ever read. I am an amateur historian, who has spent many years analysing history and watching it repeat itself… or at least that is what I thought. After reading this book it is obvious that what I perceived to be recurring patterns, were if fact just random events being repeated randomly.
As a result, I no longer read history with the same enthusiasm. On the bright side, this book is a wonderful testament to man’s ability to think the unthinkable. It also questions my sanity that I tried to read it in the first place!
Here is another from Amazon.com:
I took a class in statistics in college. I used this book to help me select random phone numbers for a poll I was conducting for my class project. (The most popular household cleanser in the greater Siouxland area is Bon Ami, by the way.) One of those phone calls was answered by the woman who is now my wife. We’ve been happily married for ten years! Thank you, RAND.
Below are three graphs from Mlodinow’s books which I also found interesting:
They show an example of ‘normal distibution’. To explain this idea Mlodinow writes about an experiment in which 300 students were each asked to guess heads or tails in a series of ten coin tosses. When these results are presented in a graph they form a bell-shaped curve centred on 5 correct guesses. The curve drops to about two thirds of its maximum height between 3 and 4 correct guesses and between 6 and 7 correct guesses and tapers off in a bell shape with 0 and 10 correct guesses having the lowest heights. This type of curve is know as ‘normal distribution’.
The graphs below chart the number in rows of pascal’s triangle – a chart which can be used to show the number of possible combinations of given set of elements eg the number of ways 100 people can be seated at 10 tables.
