randform

Did the tarsier eat the simple apple because there was a worm inside?

— a celtic moddyfying case modding of apple power book logo design on this video.
—nintendo DS modding
–PC case modding in the upcoming part II of the games convention report…if I find time to upload the images.

The VVR berek – a subsidiary company of the Berlin public transport company BVG which is in charge for selling advertisement spaces in Berlin public transport is going to be sold. Unexpectedly…
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From 24.8-27.8.2006 there is the socalled Games Convention (GC) in the City of Leipzig. The games convention is – next to the Tokyo Game Show and the E3 (which got small this year) – the biggest fair for computer games in the world. For this years fair there have been already now more than 150 000 visitors. Part of the GC was the exhibition pong.mythos, which was generously placed right behing the XBox 360s booth. pong.mythos is an exhibition around the game pong, which serves as a central example in the development of computer games. daytars ToPong has an extra stand at the pong.mythos exhibition (see image above) and we hope that all 170 000 visitors or so come to play! :=0.

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One of the first mathematical visualization clips if not the first is: the impossible map by Evelyn Lambart from 1947. In the film it is explained how to find coordinate maps for a sphere, partially exemplified with a grapefruit.

Evelyn Lambart is usually in the shadow of her frequent collaborator Norman McLaren, with whom she worked together in the fifties.

They both liked to play with graphical and likewise mathematical “entities”, like lines and shapes in the interplay with coulours:
Caprice en Couleurs (1949)
Around is Around (1951)
Horizontal Lines (1962)
Vertical Lines (1960)

But both have in their animations also more “lifelike” shapes, like birds and variation of birds, which are coloured but which are mostly “flat” reminding of “shadow figures” like e.g. in the animations of Charlotte Reiniger. This was partially due to their cut-out and scratching techniques. However also real life appears in their films. Evelyn Lambart did a lot of illustrative animations for other science films, but also for e.g. the film: A Chairy Tale, which reminds me of the earlier mentioned Georges Méliès. (Watch e.g. his film “Un homme de tete” from 1898, which is currently on youtube.com)

Remark: It seems that since two days there is Blinkity Blank by Norman McLaren on Youtube.com, and also parts of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger. I dont know how long the films will be there, and what copyright problems are involved with them, thats why I dont link them.

update 11.10.10: An approximate and by no means accurate visual demonstration of the proposition that the area of a sphere is four times the area of its circular shadow (look also at this comment)

Take half an orange:

Peel the half orange in a spiral. You peel the spiral in such a way that you go around twice in order to peel it fully, while keeping the width of the spiral arm (approx.) constant (that is you peel an archimedian or arithmetic speiral). By looking at the peeled orange one (more or less badly) sees that going around only once, one peeled off a part which covers roughly the area of the circular shadow:

Fold the spiral in the middle and put the two spiral halfs on top of each other:

One (again more or less badly) sees that the middle of the spiral is (approximately) at the point where the spiral had gone around once:

So roughly one half of the spiral covers the area of half of half of an orange (because the two folded halfs of the spiral cover half an orange). In the meantime such a half also covered the circular shadow (i.e. that what you see by looking onto the orange from above), i.e. the second half was more or less perpendicular to the viewer and was thus (almost) not visible.
This is of course no prove of the proposition but gives only a rough feeling, that the proposition could be true.

A little follow up to our earlier posts about symmetries, which were a collaborative effort with graphics designer Etienne Mineur, who contemplated at the same time about ambigrammes in a socalled mineur-randfrom Blog pong match.

Sascha Lobo from riesenmaschine found via designboom the page of ambigramme designer John Langdon and found there probably (wo hat er das denn schon wieder ausgebuddelt!) also the link of this very cool ambigramm generator.

A classic topic in intersections between math and art/design are tesselations. This is mostly due to the fact that the included math is almost completely visualizable, which can’t be said for most parts of mathematics.
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This is a classic. hoogerbrugge.com has been around for quite a while now. Still his catalog of flash nails, interactive videos, and stories is constantly growing (and his site got recently redesigned).
Definitely worth a visit is flow (an interactive music video) and the modern living/neurotica series. I must admit that I was kind of an addict in the years this series was a regular (1998-2001) — one of my favorites is “51 Nervous”.

From July 19 to 21 the annual conference “New Media and Technologies of the IT Society” (“Neue Medien und Technologien der Informationsgesellschaft”) took place under the title “Film, Computer and TV”. (more…)

The german artist Dirk Schwieger spent some time in Tokyo and has posted a regular comic blog called tokyoblog on this experience, which is funny and interesting. He had lived also one year in Iceland and did some research on elves. The rumours are that he is about to move to Siberia. So we are of course now anxious to read a Siberiablog and to get interviews with bears, or mathematicians in Novosibirsk.

This is “old” news. There is an archeological site in Iran called “Burnt city” – a settlement which dates back to 2000-3000 BC. There a goblet of 8 by 10 cm was found on which a goat between two plants is depicted in various jumping positions. If one takes the positions together, it is clear that the movement of a goat was to be displayed.
The researchers put the images in a timely order…so one can see the 5000 years old animation in modern fashion.

The original post was I think from Irans’s Cultural Heritage news agency . However their link to the animation is broken (at the moment their whole site unfortunately doesn’t work properly) but I found another link here.