The past 6 months I was involved in a student software project at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University of the applied sciences). The project is called MIMIRIX. It is going to be presented today at the school in building G Room 007 around 1.30 pm. As you may know there is currently the filmfestival Berlinale in Berlin, hence there are many wellknown actors in Berlin. So actually the latest gossip here was that Angelina Jolie comes together with Shah Rukh Khan to the MIMIRIX presentation. But these are of course blatant lies. More about MIMIRIX later.
supplement 11.2.12:
Short comment to the above logo:
The term MIMIRIX was coined by Martin Bilsing,
the logo was designed by Igne Degutyte
using the font Petita by Manfred Klein.
“HirniKoppic”, Copic Markers on paper, by artist “nettwürg” on the occasion of the rumors about the possibility of closing the Medizinhistorisches Museum (Berlin Medical Historical Museum) of the Charité.
Using Digital Holographic Microscopy (DHM) researchers of EPFL gathered quite some interesting images from inside the brain:
This post is like the previous post a comment to the discussion about human-machine hybrids in the recently uploaded game-scheme article.
In a passage from human to a human-machine hybrid the tolerance towards body modifications plays an important role.
There was recently an interesting interview in the english newspaper “The Guardian” wether cosmetic surgery does help or damage people.
The interview however didn’t really touch the issue of how strongly plastic surgery (and other body modifications) is influenced by cultural predispositions (which are of course often influenced by economic considerations, but not only by these). In particular it also didn’t touch upon the question in how far the design of the human outer appearance via cosmetic surgery (especially its current boom) etc. might be seen as a step in a human-machine-hybrid transition.
In the blogpost on the return of investments I proposed to use games for testing new economical scenarious. I currently try to make an article out of that.
In the draft I sofar have given an overview about games and roughly motivated why I think that it may be a good idea to introduce new economical schemes. In particular I talk about the limitations of this planet, design and in particular about something that I dubbed “recycling-run-away effect”.
Amongst others I also try to line out why I think that the nuclear waste problem may be a worse problem than the safety of reactors (see also the first post on Fukushima).
Comments are appreciated, here is the draft: update (06072015) :
It currently looks as if an article format is rather not suited for the writings and findings made within the context of the game draft article. It is also still not clear wether this project will ever be finished and if in which form. You may though still find on and off some informations in this context, likethis blog post is an example.
update (06072011) : This blog post is now used as a referrer URL for the game scheme article, thus newer versions of the article and comments will be uploaded more or less regularily. Please note that this offer to our randform readers costs our private money. Since randform is currently purely financed by Tim Hoffmanns income as a math professor, we may eventually be forced to reduce or close this offer, depending on download rate, inflation, etc. Most of the content of the article is also spread on the Azimuth project like the section about the Game environment. The Azimuth updates are usually more current.
In the mid-October of 2009, Prof. Thurston showed us the detail drawings of the “8 Geometry Link models as Metaphor of the Universe” They inspired us to make the collection based on them, accompanying design study with rope and toile. Considering the body itself as the Universe, we have added our own interpretation of beauty to them. The new perception of the body shared by all the members of the team resulted in the discoveries of new lines and forms, which were then applied to textile, color and detail studies. Thus the new collection has taken shape steadily, revealing its whole picture eventually. To sum up the exchange with Prof. Thurston led us to find a completely new kind of beauty and embody it in clothing. This mission was, as it were, an odyssee to explore the Universe with infinite imaginations.
The geometrization conjecture roughly says (I am not an expert on this) that a three dimensional volume form without boundary (a two dimensional analog of such a form would be for example the surface form (i.e. the “skin”) of a ball or the surface form of a doughnut) can be decomposed into “pieces” which have one of 8 characteristic “geometric structures”, which means roughly that in a small neighbourhood of any such “piece” there is – out of only 8 characteristic ways – one specific way to measure length. A theorem states that any three dimensional (oriented) volume form without boundary can be obtained by cutting a “thick” (that is instead of a rope take a ribbon) link out of a three dimensional sphere. Thus you can characterize special types of three dimensional volume forms (here: “the pieces”) by assigning a link to them. This is – by what I understood sofar- why there are 8 links (or link models) on the poster – they characterize the 8 types of possible “pieces”, which built up three dimensional volume forms without boundary.
Why do they call these 8 links “Metaphor of the Universe”? I can only make wild guesses, which sound rather like science fiction than science: Maybe if you imagine the space of the universe to be eventually such a three dimensional volume then by cutting it into pieces (may be along black hole horizons huh?!) and “measuring distances” (determine a metric) one could make deductions about the actual form of the universe? Or – reversely by making assumptions about the form of the universe (like e.g. that its space is a three sphere) one may get informations about what could be inside black holes…given that one finds all black holes…(this is just a funny joke).
But joking aside – I think they call it Metaphor of the Universe because these simple 8 links may be used to describe quite complicated things.
The program in Oxford was very packed however I fastly managed to sneak into a museum. Thus before I go to Goettingen I fastly post some recommendation for a fantastic exhibition which is currently at the Ashmolean in Oxford called the “Lost world of Old Europe”.
If you are so interested in new input devices – so why don’t you report on the new iPad?
answer: First of all I think there had already been quite some media coverage about the Apple iPad thus I dont really think that testing the iPad on randform is really needed. And in order to be fair one would need also to report on other similar tablet computers or tablet PCs. Moreover I haven’t seen the iPad yet, apart from displays in in-depth video demonstrations. Tim is a bit skeptical about it, since you can’t run a programming language on the iPad, so he couldn’t e.g. install his string-rewriter jsymbol on the iPad. So he is rather waiting, like there is e.g. a Berlin company called neofonie, which produces a similar pad, called wePad (wikipedia site (sofar only in german)) which is announced to run like with an Android-like-OS that is it is some Linux, but able to run with Android applications (and rumor has it, that google is also about to release an android powered pad), furthermore Adobe Air is available on the wePad, thus Flash would run on it (i am not such a fan of flash though). However the webpage of the wePad isn’t really overly informative. On the wePad’s facebook site (in german) one can at least read (in german) that more information in particular regarding price etc. is to be released tomorrow.
It is also that I am getting more and more reluctant to promote new technologies which make people want to consume more.
On the other hand its not that randform is totally uninterested. Tim has meanwhile some new programs, which would run nicely on an iPad-like pad. The above short clip displays his program jboard (under development) for using an electronic board. I was asking him to implement something like stickers (on the right side of the board) where you can store little pieces of text and graphics, which you can freely move and copy to other pages. The stickers are automatically “tagged” with parts of what the sticker holds, but one can also tag them also with any other self-designed icon/text. So for example if you have a table you are constantly referring to throughout a lecture then you can get that table from the sidebar by clicking on your icon. We forgot to display the highlight feature in the clip.
update 13.04.10 – I forgot to mention: Tim is not sure wether jBoard will be GPL, LGPL or something similar, in any case jBoard will be open. There will also no ridiculous patents be filed (like for the stickers). Further development of jBoard will be rather slow, in particular next week the semester starts again and Tim will mutate again into a teaching machine.
“End of Liberty”, artist: Endengelman John Glonnriff”
Vlad Alexeev had created a website called Impossible World which collects “impossible figures”, from Vlad Alexeev’s website:
Since some time I became interested in such artworks and figures that look usual at a first sight, but there is something wrong with them if you look at them more attentively. For me, the most interesting such figures are “impossible figures” which make an impression that they cannot exist in a real world.
I wanted to know more and tried to find some information about these figures in the Internet. I found numerous sites containing three or four different impossible figures, but there was no site devoted exclusively to the study of impossible figures. During this pursuit I made the acquaintance of impossible figures of Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd and images of Dutch artist M.C. Escher.
