randform

In a link in this randform post about food among others the issue of obesity versus hunger was mentioned.

I am not so sure wether this comparision was really helpful in this context. As a matter of fact in western countries it is often the poor who have obesity problems. First a diet which is high on carbonhydrates, fat and sugar is often simply cheaper than a high quality fresh (organic) vegetable/low fat diet. Secondly even if you could replace a bad fat meal with simple and low cost but good ingrediences, this often requires a certain degree of diet education and awareness. In particular everybody who finally managed successfully to get rid of the extra load due to excessive heavy calories should be dearned cautious to put on new ones. But this is usually a long and not so easy learning process.

And as it seems for example in the US it is rather that people are lured into an unhealthy food consumption. It is especially the children, which are defenselessly exposed to subtle marketing methods.
According to a study Food and beverage companies spent $1.62 billion to market their products to children in 2006. The FTC study was requested by Congress in response to growing concern about childhood obesity in the United States. The study, did not look directly at the possible link between food and beverage advertising to kids and childhood obesity, but to assume that such a link exists is definitely not too far fetched, a more detailled distinction between advertisements for healthy nutrition versus fast food/soft drinks etc. will give more information.

Over here in Japan the advertisement of food in restaurants is especially interesting to observe. Restaurant/food stands meals are usually modelled in plastic, which looks like Fimo (please see images). This food modeling seems to be a kind of art form, may be similar to food fotography (which uses also often plastic). For me the meals look rather like some futuristc nano food, however given the sucess of this kind of advertisement it is obvious that people feel attracted to this plastic food simulation. Interesting question, why? Because this kind of food cant rott and smell badly?. Because colors and shininess are exagerated and thus better perceptible as a kind of 3D symbol?

after “read the rest of this entry” you can find an artwork by Franziska Assisi (Bosnia) called: “Fimo naschen mit nichtlichtartigem Beschleuni-GEAR”

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s-isothermic enneper surface by Tim Hoffmann

According to the blog tesselion (via boing boing) which is a blog about the project tesselion (Project Collaboration: Marc Fornes (www.theverymany.net), Adrienne Yancone (www.diecreative.com)) :

Recently the development of planar quadrilateral meshes have become a strong interest in the architectural community due to their potential ease for constructing complex surfaces. A race has begun to develop a system of flat panelization of free form surfaces which would enable large scale, efficient and economic, construction from flat sheet material.

I didnt know that there was an architectural race going on!

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image source wikipedia

The instantreality-framework is a high-performance Mixed-Reality (MR) system, which combines various components to provide a single and consistent interface for AR/VR developers. Those components have been developed at the Fraunhofer IGD and ZGDV in close cooperation with industrial partners.

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According to world-nuclear-news.org today -on French President Nicholas Sarkozy`s state visit to China- a deal was signed which ensures that

France’s national nuclear champion Areva will build two power reactors at Taishan, China and undertake a feasibility study for a used nuclear fuel reprocessing plant as part of an Eur8 billion deal ($12 billion).

Areva are also to provide “all the materials and services required to operate” the forthcoming 1600 MWe EPR units, to be sited at Taishan, 100 km southwest of Guangzhou and 150 km west of Hong Kong in Guangdong province.

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The above is a little applet from Tim and me, illustrating the associated family which interpolates between helicoid and catenoid. If you move the slider you can observe the interpolation. You can rotate the surface by dragging. Both geometric figures (and all interpolations in between) are socalled minimal surfaces, which means that they have mean curvature zero.

The applet was inspired by the fact that clowns usually wear red spheres on their nose, which are surfaces with constant positive mean curvature. We wondered how a variation of this kind of comic circus fashion may look like.

related:
-> the helical keyboard – a piano in a helicoidal shape (at least thats what i understood from the website) …where I indeed somewhat have the suspect that one could break ones hands if one would play on it for real.

From his last conference in spain Tim brought back the typical conference presents, like notepads and informations about the region of Castro Urdiales. Well I am not so interested in settling down in Castro-Urdiales so I flipped only briefly through the infos about the real estate developments of the region. However what caught my attention was the above paper strip. It is an explanation of how to use a spanish fan (there was also a plastic fan among the presents) (Warning: I had never been to spain so my astonishment about the fan may appear ridiculous to some spain experts).

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Hitachi has anounced a new light 3d display. It weights only about 1kg which makes people speculate that it can even be adapted for mobile devices. It is aparently a smaller version of the Transpost design from 2004.

Just a link to a new article with the title: From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter by V N Tsytovich, G E Morfill, V E Fortov, N G Gusein-Zade, B A Klumov and S V Vladimirov, which appeared in the open access journal “New Journal of Physics”. Among others the authors looked at molecular dynamics simulations of dust grains (“a dust cloud”) in plasma (details: Coulomb interaction with overscreening potential + “Grain motions are damped by friction (to model viscosity of plasma neutral component) and stochastically accelerated by Langevin force”).

In particular the dust grains (which are charged within the plasma) can e.g. assume the shape of a double helix. The authors investigated in how far these shapes and their behaviour can be compared to organic DNA-like behaviour. From the abstract:

“Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization.
….
It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.”

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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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)