randform

Manicone is a new work by Tim and me (daytar). It is a sketch of a humanoid form in fourdimensional space. It is also a sketch in the sense that we kept the technical realization as simple as possible, i.e. with the application there comes (sofar) no Wii remote or wand, no 3D glasses, no virtual cave like environment etc. – just mouse pointer and sliders.

The modularity of the underlying software jreality however allows in principle for all these extensions (even if Open GL doesn’t have the same transparency capabilities as Tims software viewer). A real 3D immersion in e.g. a cave-like environment with a nice input device may lead to a more direct perceptional access however it is not necessarily allways needed.

An advantage of the simplicity of the application is that it allows for putting Manicone as a Java applet or webstart application on our website (which we will do soon).

Further technical extensions are then a question of the given architectural, technical etc. circumstances. Manicone is a sketch – in any aspect but the work it took to do it.

->10 min. video description of Manicone on youtube

Together with collegues from London and Tokyo neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes did an experiment (however up to now only with 21 test persons as it seems), where a person had to choose wether he/she wanted either to add or to substract two numbers. And even before the test persons saw the numbers and before they started to compute it was possible – by using a MRI brain scan – to tell with a 70% chance, what kind of desicion the person was going to make, or in other words: using the MRI the scientists could “read the mind” of the test persons (with a 70% chance). Freely chosen decisions are usually happening in the prefrontal cortex.

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update 22.02.2011: the above image is a mashup of a photoshopped poster for the below referenced film starring at theatre Houdin from an unknown author and some fotoshopped rainbow colors from some astrophysics film.

In 1896 Georges Méliès produced with “Le manoir du diable” the first horror movie in film history. And even more this 2 minute stop-motion special effects film was also the first colour film in film history. The colouring in this film was done by hand on each single image. Colouring black and white films can be seen as a kind of “branding” . It actually took quite a time until it was possible to automatically color films with a -more or less- full color spectrum. This was achieved in 1932 with the Three-strip Technicolor process in the animation “Flowers and Trees”. The first colored feature film in film history was then “Becky Sharp” of 1935 displaying the typical bright technicolor colors.

I was always wondering why films and images of cosmological events like e.g. about the big bang or supernovae look as if they were shot in technicolor, although they were digitally processed.

The reason for this is that the unvisible light spectrum (and the brightness) gets transferred into a visible spectrum via a human interference:
-> Where do those images come from

signpost at FEZ
The FEZ Berlin a children, youth and family centre (actually the largest in Europe) is one of the jewels of Berlin. FEZ-Berlin is run as a non-profit organisation of the Land Berlin and is divided into three main components: the educational work with children, youth and families, the Berlin State Music Academy and the indoor and open air pools.
It was originally founded in 1950 as the Pionierrepublik „Ernst Thälmann“.

For the educational work it hosts among others an ecology garden, a kids museum, a real kids train, which dates back to 1956 and the Orbitall -a space exploration centre for kids dating back to 1979. With various activities like e.g. the space camp mission kids get prepared for the future.

Confocal quadrics are known to form a triply orthogonal coordinate system on most of the three dimesional space. (more…)

again some lego math visualization (more…)

update 22.02.2011: the above image is a still from the below referenced film.

From the SDSS homepage:

SDSS is systematically mapping a quarter of the entire sky, producing a detailed image of it and determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects. It is also measuring the distances to a million of the nearest galaxies, giving us a three-dimensional picture of the universe through a volume one hundred times larger than that explored to date. SDSS is also recording the distances to 100,000 quasars — the most distant objects known — giving us unprecedented knowledge of the distribution of matter to the edge of the visible universe.

youtube link

Way back in the beginning nineties the math department had a graphics supercomputer: (more…)

I finally managed to translate my article for the conference proceedings of the NMI2006 conference from german into english. There are a few additions, which are not included in the german version.

The article is a description of our installation seidesein. It gives an account on our motivations for creating seidesein but it explains a bit also our motivation for other daytar works.

The article is for download >>here or directly via the seidesein page.

I am very grateful for any feedback on this article.

water again: water simulations are cool. However the big question is: WHAT IS A SIMULATION? I.e. at what point do we accept a thing to look physically realistic? Do we want it to look realistic?

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