randform

It seems to be a London week here at randform.
sensity is an audio-visual artwork that lets you hear and see data collected by wireless sensors around in London.

Yesterday I felt like going to Hyde Park.
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It is fun to sit here in London SE with my sister and discuss and learn about architecture, like e.g. about an interesting project called openhouse.

from the introduction in the above booklet:

“Open house is a unique independent platform providing a vital opportunity for everone to unpack what makes good places to live, work, play and learn. With a well established basis of expertise and research and the support of amazing volunteers, we have led the way with pioneering campaigns and programmes in which thousands of people take an active part. Open house London is our annual call to Londoners of all kinds to join our debate. (Hon Friba, Founding director)”

What I found especially noteworthy of this years open house “Architecture in the Flesh” are the green built houses, like the urban eco-village BedZed and the Parity Project Eco Renovation House. I won’t look at the houses myself, since I will have left London already at the given time, but maybe someone else will blog about it.

For a change: A very 2D input device. I liked the idea and design of this selfmade multitouch pad. Some more explanations on how it is realized can be found in the blog comments if you follow the link. (via digg / spreeblick youtube direct)

Not exactly a touristic tip for nadja: A rendering of how London skyline will look around 2012 (if all the planed skyscrapers are indeed realized)(via) – for comparison: the above painting by T. Bowles shows London in 1751. (image source)

I will be soon in London for about ten days. Any comments on interesting things to see there are welcome! Blogging may be delayed/postponed.

Today’s post is about one of the rare examples where probably an artist made a discovery before the scientist did.

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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.

This post is a follow up post to some posts (1,2,3) relating to the question of simulation. It is concerned with the question of how “real” a simulation can “feel”.
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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.”