randformblog on math, physics, art, and design |
The horse latitudes are a region were sailors traditionally threw any horses available overboard (or slaughtered them) to save weight – or something like that. As we recently pointed out, we are heading for horse-lattitudesque temperatures and we might be forced to throw our modern “horse power” equivalents over the metaphorical railing to keep on going.
In a recent randform post the role of faces, their outer features and interfacing properties were discussed. An interesting side aspect is the question of beauty. This aspect is interesting for the construction of humanoid robots, as well as e.g. for the fashion industry with repect to avatars to be used e.g. in shopping environments.
An interesting artistic discussion is given by the artwork 13 Most Beautiful Avatars by 0100101110101101.ORG (whose funny URL can be interpreted so (i.e. as it is) or soso (i.e. as a number). Their artwork reflects the real world of beauty contests like this russian miss atom beauty contest, where one should remark that this beauty contest has an age limit. This is a bit in contrast to the quite unlimited use of nuclear energy in russia, despite the limited resources.
And again this beauty contest is only for females not for males.
When it became common knowledge, that the world is a ball (and not a disk), the world faced its first big problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Mice and men share about 90% of the genome. Therefore we are confident that one can safely assume to search one’s own brain when browsing the Allen Brain Atlas. Read the rest of this entry »
image from wikipedia
Sometimes sun light protection with simple and energy saving solutions like exterior window shutters or non electric mechanical window blinds (see above image) is not so easy feasible like in the case of big windows, like in business applications or in urgent cases, where a fast shield is necessary like e.g. in aviation.
An alternative to electro-mechanical (and thus energy costly) window blinds (in german also called Jalousie) are may be smart windows like e.g. the SPD light-control technology by research frontiers Inc. who seem to head for a big commercalization of their product see pressrelease from Feb 1.
->see also the information brochure by frontier research.
The elevator in the math building at TU Berlin.
Another note for our IPCC week: It seems like the american enterprise institute has set out a 10 000$ prize
for scientists that are able to disprove the IPCC 4th assessment report. We recomend however to rather try one of the millenium problems the Clay math institute set out for it is a) more money (1 000 000$ prizes) and b) better chances to succeed.
(and no: video rebuttals like this one or this won’t count)
stelarc is an australian artist who investigates the man-machine evolutionary step with his own body. He was giving a lecture yesterday at the transmediale.
Since nobody was responding on the ticketphone for transmediale I just went there. Luckily I guessed right that the location “@studio” on the transmediale website meant the west berlin academy of art and not the east berlin academy of art. However the lecture was apparently already sold out at noon. There were quite a bit of people which came from foreign countries and who like me didn’t manage to extract the right information from the transmediale website.
So I looked at the closing doors and how people were talking to each other in the lounge and went.
As I tried to explain in my previous posts it is not so sure, wether mankind will ever reach the posthuman state or any other condition at all. And yes it is hard to comunicate why scientists see so much evidence for not reaching that state due to the climate change , if they fail to do a good weather forecast for more than 3 days. However the two things are different and may be it is at the moment more convincing to look at the number of scientists who warn TODAY.
chairs at the back yard of TU Munich
