randform

Today I went to watch the community art project “Wir im Quartier” in the shopping mall “helle Mitte”.

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Engineers at Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability in Darmstadt, Germany apparently have found a way to cancel out environmental noise using the very windows that normally amplify it.

via pruned

A recommendation for the book “illusive – Contemporary Illustration And Its Context”. Die Gestalten Verlag. ISBN: 3-89955-085-4 2nd printing, 2006 (version 2005)

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A constant nuisance when vacuum cleaning are cables (see above image) since they easily get tangled up and catch dust. I always wondered, why there is no widely available system of e.g. adapters hooked directly to consumer electronics in order to avoid too much “cable spaghetti” – analogous to the solution of a computer blade.
People from IBM made this instructive video in order to display that blades could still include in principle a noble solution.

water on the rocks

This is a belated easter post in which the making of an eastereggsearchtart will be under display.
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With a grant from the Clay Math Institute Libraries without walls have scanned notebooks of Felix Klein (at the moment they are still labeled Fritz Klein protokolls there, but it seems obvious that they meant Felix Klein). The protokolls cover the mathematical colloquia he held at Göttingen, Erlangen, Munich and Leipzig and they are truly beautifull documents: You will find handwritten abstracts of many famous mathematicians of that time (the protocols are not course notes taken by a listener but short summaries of the lecures by the speakers themselves).

Whereto would you like to drag the vertical object?

The idea to the above applet was formed by thinking about salience and 3D user interfaces in conjunction with two coils (a sort of 3D Moiré ).

(Closing the lose ends to two coils and sending an electrical current through one of the coils enables in principle inductance. However, observe that in this perpendicular arrangement of the two coils this gives only a very faint current in the second coil. For a stronger current the coils need to be aligned.)

Bad hair – do or day?

When looking at my unkempt twirls in the morning this rather scary variation of Rapunzel came to my mind.

Rest of an Überraschungsei used for a pendulum

It is an interesting question how to approach big challenges. There exists the socalled Top-down and bottom-up design paradigma which is prevalent in computer programming but not only there. It appears also in math, where for example people study special examples (bottom-up)(like e.g. certain differential equations) as well as conceptional questions (top-down)(like e.g. construction of the number system via set theory). It is not only in programming useful to use both approaches. The top-down approach has often the advantage to detect conceptional connections, whereas the bottom-up approach has usually a better connection to applied problems. However sometimes also within the bottom-up approach unexpected connections may appear.

A funny connection between two more-or-less special applications is for example the fact that a discrete pendulum (a mathematical pendulum seen with a strobe light (and the classical counterpart of the quantum pendulum) can be identified with the movement of a ball in a billard with an elliptic shape (via certain coordinates, proof in my Ph.D. thesis). An ellipse is a generalized circle.

Another funny artistic mixture of these two concepts is the Oval with pendulum by Gabriel Orozco. (see also interview on pbs). I think I saw his elliptic billard table at the MAC in 2001, but I don’t remember wether it was part of a temporal exhibition or not and I couldn’t find too much information on the MAC online.

Currently Gabriel Orozco is busy with an equally interesting project. He and photographers Adam Broomberg + Oliver Chanarin and film maker Dustin Lynn are working on the first of several ‘mini missions’ to ‘ARTiculate™ some of the world’s most environmentally trashed regions with the end goal of then presenting work in response to their findings. (article on treehugger, the adventureecology website is a flash site so I cant link the information directly)

Last not least there exist of course the well-known connection between an ellipsoid or egg (3 dim analog of an ellipse) and a pendulum (see above image or e.g. this application for dowsing), but funnily a similar mixture of elliptic shapes and pendulum seems also to appear in astronomy. (?)

A link to a site which organizes art around the G8 summit in May in Heiligendamm.

From the website “art-goes-heiligendamm”:

The supporting institutions in Rostock hope that the art interventions will have a de-escalating effect. An alliance of around 30 NGO’s have called for an alternative summit. ■ ART GOES HEILIGENDAMM is cooperating, through lectures and Multitude e.V., with the G8 coordination group, who have invited many prominent speakers such as the Nobel prize winners Wangari Mathai and Vandana Shiva; Jean Ziegler; Étienne Balibar; Madjiguène Cissé – a speaker from the Sans-Papiers organisation in France; John Holloway, author of “Change the world without seizing the power” and many more.