randform

I just found this link about the upcoming meeting on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, which will soon take place in Boston.

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Just some images from an interesting architectural application of solar cells.
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The Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at the University of Virginia recently presented at a press conference in Rome the virtual city project rome reborn 1.0:

Visitors to virtual Rome will be able to do even more than ancient Romans did: They can crawl through the bowels of the Colosseum, filled with lion cages and primitive elevators, and fly up for a detailed look at bas-reliefs and inscriptions atop triumphal arches.

“This is the first step in the creation of a virtual time machine, which our children and grandchildren will use to study the history of Rome and many other great cities around the world,” said Bernard Frischer of the University of Virginia, who led the project.

The $2 million simulation will be used by scientists to run experiments – such as determining the crowd capacity of ancient buildings – and as a scholarly journal that will be updated at each new discovery of one of Rome’s marvels.

(citation from physorg)

A LED’s thing by future factories

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As the interested randform reader knows I like to report about popular experimentation trends in science (like e.g. this post about resonance rice or this post about cornstarch music (which is linking also to the famous diet coke experiments, whose popularity seems to be unstoppable)), here is a new trend, namely: ripping phone books in half.

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A remarkable mathematical conjecture (proven 1995 by Sabitov) is that there exists no rigid bellows. This means if you have a closed volume which is formed by (triangle shaped) “plates” and if you deform it then the volume stays always constant (i.e. if it would have been a bellows then you couldnt press air out of it). This is why accordions need some elastic fabric in order to allow for deformation. May be also a useful knowledge for architecture, since it means that if you press a (closed) house on one side it would bulb on some other side.

The workshop Rigidity and polyhedral combinatorics is discussing related problems.

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

The big local news here in Berlin are the mutual consent of the city of Berlin and the federal government of Germany on the financing of the Humboldt Forum – a collection of buildings in the heart of Berlin intended for cultural and scientific interchange.

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