It’s Alive!

Here is a delightful video of robot that is able to balance an inverted pendulum.  It’s worth nothing that the technology to center a ball on a flat surface demanded the full resources of computing power in the mid-nineties.

Wild.

Peafowl

Just a quick post to share with you some beautiful images of peacocks in their fully glory. Be sure to sort through the many pages of the galleries to get the full effect.

Schizophrenic Kitten

Louis Wain was a 19th-century painter whose whimsical drawings of cats were often featured in popular publications of the day. Much like ‘dogs playing poker’, Wain’s works imagined cats anthropomorphized in everyday situations. Largely uninspired work. He is of interest to us, dear reader, because he suffered from late-onset schizophrenia, and this neurological cataclysm was reflected, with eerie prescience, in his work. In time his drawings of cats became more and more abstract, exhibiting colors and patterns totally absent in his prior designs.

It’s fascinating to reflect on the fact that the structure of the mind, one of the most complex constructs known to science, so often results in a persistent stasis we know as consciousness and yet is so susceptible to nearly immeasurable, ineffable change.

Butterfly Utopia

Butterfly Utopia is a custom-order supplier of acrylic-mounted butterflies. I’ve collected butterflies for a little over a year now, and these are undoubtedly the most beautiful specimens I’ve ever encountered. There are dozens of strange and beautiful single butterflies, but the really stunning displays contain butterflies by the hundreds.

They’re Everywhere!!

Now, I may be late to the party on this one, but holy jesus … what a terrifying concept. Apparently the spiders have been organizing under our very noses, constructing giant communal webs. Mosquitoes are the only victims for the time being, but what next? When they came for the mosquitoes, I said nothing. Then, when they came for the house pets, I said nothing. When the giant carnivorous spiders came for me, there was no one left to speak up.

On a serious tip, one can only imagine what kind of territorial disputes go on in an ecosystem such as this. It seems that an alliance of this nature must be an uneasy one, with traditionally solitary creatures competing often for the same food resources. I wonder what kind of critical threshold occurred to allow this to happen. Was it a density issue? Is it simply that there’s far too much food to go around and so competitive pressures are essentially nonexistent? And, most importantly, will there be runs on Raid? I’d be curious to learn more.

More Organic Strangeness

This set of images is definitely worth a look, and features some of the strangest animals in the world, including several I have never before seen or even possible conceived of.

Beatbox Extravaganza

A tribute to those wacky breakmasters..

First, a relatively formal introduction to the sport.  Check out the singing / boxing around4:30.

But there are plenty of interesting variations to enjoy.  First, some dangerous fun in the kitchen …

Then, a harmonica …

& why not a Flute?

Incredible Fractal Zoom

Enjoy this lovely nearly two-minute zoom into a Mandelbrot fractal. It’s perplexing and a bit humbling to think that there is an infinite level of detail at any position within this structure. It’s worth noting that, within the domain of chaos theory, all strange attractors are fractal in nature. Fascinatingly enough, a dripping faucet and an arrhythmic heart share the same strange attractor, and papers have been authored exploring the relationship between the two, and how we can apply knowledge of the drip system to improve treatment for cardiac patients.

The following entry is also interesting in the way it illustrates that even within seemingly homogeneous regions of a fractal there are infinitely-intricate patterns.

SwimBots!

I’d like to share with you a clever little evolutionary application called SwimBots. SwimBots are colorful creatures that float around in your own virtual petri dish, looking for food, mates, and … well, mostly just food and mates. However, the dynamics governing locomotion and reproduction are interesting and extensible. The software is Windows-only unfortunately.

Tiny Little Dots

So I’ve been tasked in one of my courses with an ethnographic exercise. I am to “use a tool to record what you see, observe a place and then write a one page description of it.” In that vein, I’ve decided that I’m going to observe the human swarm from way upon high. I’ll station a video camera on top of the student union, about 8 stories up. I’ll record the human swarm for 15 minutes, observing the baseline activity levels. I’m certain interesting dynamics will emerge, and look forward to observing that film. Then, I’ll place a large pile of clean, unopened candy on the ground .. you know, M&M’s, snickers, etc. I’m curious to see how people respond. I’ll collect that pile, and then place 120 condoms in a pile in the same place. It will be interesting to observe which pile interests the crowd more. After collecting that pile, I plan to place another pile of both candy and condoms in the same place … I have no idea what’s going to happen here.

I’m totally open to suggestions for other phenomena to observe … I’d like to avoid using actors as much as possible, but if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

Funky Duck

Apologies for the late dearth of posts .. the beginning of the school year has kept me quite busy. Ironically, it is the school year, by and large, that is the reason I started this site, and I look forward to sharing many of the exciting things I encounter in the course of my studies into Informatics.

One such peculiarity is Vaucanson’s Mechanical Duck, a strange automaton constructed using mechanisms similar to those employed by watchmakers. This complicated, deterministic little creation was, at the time, considered to be a stunning manifestation of artificial life, a field I hope detail thoroughly during the coming months.

Fusion Realized

Ned Kahn creates beautiful installations that fuse, quite elegantly, the disciplines of art and science. From displays involving fire and light to installations featuring wind and water. He uses patterns in nature to create art that is provocative and fundamentally beautiful. I found this link by way of NPR’s fantastic archive of stories on “Where Science Meets Art“.

More From the Fluidic Muscle Front

Yesterday I posted about an incredible new technology that uses fluid-filled chambers to simulate the complex musculature of a human arm.  Today, we find that that same technology (from the same company, Festo) is being applied to racing simulations.

Fluid-Controlled Robotic Muscles

Amazing technology from Festo.

Now We Must Burrow Through

Those rascally scientists have found a giant hole smack dab in our very own Universe. The hole, which is devoid of even dark matter, spans over a billion light-years across, baffling scientists. The reason this is so perplexing is due to the well-supported notion that the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous. Essentially, we have observed that the Universe is made up of pretty much the same stuff regardless of where you look in the sky. Given this, finding a region of pure space this large is really quite a puzzler. With that in mind, I present to you, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. This little gem represents a slice of the sky about the tenth of the size of the moon as viewed from earth.

The Game of Life

Cellular automata are quirky little toys / computational tools that we can use to investigate the rules that lead to behavior we see in the natural world. Often a simple set of rules leads to intriguingly complex behavior, a process which is at the heart of complex systems analysis. One of the most famous cellular automata is known as the Game of Life, developed in the early 70′s by John Conway. His work is still important and has laid the foundation for much interesting inquiry.

Phylotaxis

Dig on this unique presentation of the day’s news and events from Seed Magazine. While it’s not terribly useful, the metaphor is engaging. Kick the slider all the way over to the left and you have science, perfect order. All the way to the right and you have culture, disarray, chaos, creativity, emergence. In the middle is the intersection of the two, a sunflower-esque glyph representing the order and beauty found in the natural sciences.

What A Way to Go Insane

Given that the stock market is a chaotic system with trillions of interacting components, I would take issue with the assertion that the golden spiral is a useful market-prediction tool. Regardless, this video is an approachable and well-produced treatment of some natural occurences of phi and Fibonacci sequences. Enjoy.

The Wall Street Journal has this to say, “The Elliott Wave Principle, as popularly practiced, is not a legitimate theory, but a story, and a compelling one that is eloquently told by Robert Prechter. The account is especially persuasive because EWP has the seemingly remarkable ability to fit any segment of market history down to its most minute fluctuations. I contend this is made possible by the method’s loosely defined rules and the ability to postulate a large number of nested waves of varying magnitude. This gives the Elliott analyst the same freedom and flexibility that allowed pre-Copernican astronomers to explain all observed planet movements even though their underlying theory of an Earth-centered universe was wrong.”

Whatever the case, the bottom line is that if these guys had figured out a way to predict the stock market, they wouldn’t be publishing videos about it on Youtube.

My, What a Large Contraption You Have There ..

In the spirit of “How can this possibly be legal?”, I present to you a video of the 25-foot tall Tesla coils they had intermittently firing in the middle of last year’s Coachella music festival. 2007 attendance was just over 90,000 people. Enjoy!

Fractal Essence

(Another beautiful photograph)

This is a stunning physical manifestation of a fractal pattern known as a Lichtenberg figure. The pattern is created by injecting an acrylic plate with a beam of electrons from a particle accelerator. The electrons burrow successively deeper into the acrylic and create a charge in the molding where they come to rest. When the charge grows too large for the material to maintain stasis, it undergoes the process of dielectric breakdown. This process involves the breakdown of a substance, such as air, acetylene or acrylic into its component atoms. When the substance is exposed to sufficiently high levels of charge, an electrical arc forms, melting the acrylic (or forming a welding arc).

Incidentally, it is this phenomenon that is responsible for the incredible arcs of tesla coils, and those funky purple plasma balls from childhood. Further, this effect creates ozone from electrified air during thunderstorms, resulting in that ‘fresh air’ smell. It’s worth noting that the level of fractal detail is thought to extend down (unsurprisingly?) to the molecular level. What’s more, this pattern is found not only in these beautiful artifacts, but also found on people, golf courses, and sandy areas struck by lightning.

One can ponder how this this phenomenon could be modeled computationally, and what analogues this process may have in biology and other natural phenomena. This all looks quite a bit like lungs look like trees look like capillary beds …