Science Poem of the Week February 9, 2010

I stumbled upon this old archive at DiscoBlog of poems dedicated to science. It looks like they only wrote 8 of them, but there’s obviously so much more than can be artfully described in word about science. I think Robert Frost always does a great job in the “worship nature” category. In fact most of my favorite poets write about their undying love and respect for nature. (“Leaves of Grass“ anyone?) Maybe we should start a write-in campaign to bring the science poems back to DiscoBlog? Or maybe I could feature one here? 

Here’s one I liked in particular featured on DiscoBlog:

Earth’s Embroidery

By Solomon Ibn Gabirol

With the ink of its showers and rains
With the quill of its lightning, with the
Hand of its clouds, winter wrote a letter
Upon the garden, in purple and blue
No artist could conceive the like of that.
And this is why the earth, grown
Jealous of the sky, embroidered stars in
The folds of the flower beds.

 

I’m also going to throw one in by good old Frostie just for kicks…the first part of “Birches”

Birches
by: Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
…
Read the whole poem

Know any good poems about science? Written any yourself? Post them in the comments, and I might feature them in a future post!

Modern art, kids, and science February 9, 2010

I read this commentary from Kathy Ceceri at GeekDad (or would she be a geek mom?), and really appreciated her insight into how kids can interact with art and get science lessons out of it, and how in fact it makes learning that much more fun:

The Lifecycle by Torrance Fish

We dropped in to our local art museum the other day, and I was reminded of why taking kids to see art – especially contemporary art – is such a serendipitous experience. Just past the coat room … was the weirdest bicycle we had ever seen, and the man who made it – Torrance Fish, Senior Preparator at the Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery.  Mr. Fish explained that he was taking advantage of a hiatus between shows to set up his work, Lifecycle, and make a record of it. Lifecycle is made of steel tubing, bike parts, and electronics. When you sit on it and spin the pedals, a projection on the wall of roads Fish is fond of begins rolling. You can also see little video images of Fish using the Freecycle in what look like rear view mirrors.

The kids climbed aboard and gave it a whirl… It was incredibly cool.

But this kind of thing happens all the time at the Tang. One year, they had an exhibit of sound. One piece consisted of a wall full of file drawers. When you pulled one open, the sound would be released. (The museum usually has a sound exhibit programmed for its elevator, as well.) Another year there was a miniature movie theater. Inside the mini-theater everything was built to scale, which created the illusion that you were in the balcony of a vast cinema. When the usher showed you to your seat and you put on your headphones, you heard what sounded like people rustling around you as you watched the film on the tiny screen. And of course, the year they had the giant rotating bird’s nest, into which chairs and Legos and all kinds of neat things were woven. (I hear the artist came and roosted in the nest for an event.) …

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Stargazing at the Opera February 8, 2010

From NPR:

The Hayden Planetarium in New York takes opera to the moon with a new production of Il Mondo Della Luna, a comic opera about the moon written by Joseph Haydn in 1777. The performance blends traditional opera with laser and light technology provided by the planetarium.

Diane Paulus and Philip Bussmann talk about merging cosmos footage with music, how science can enhance the arts and the future of technology and theater.

Here more about the theatrical process on NPR’s Science Friday.

Also read the NYT article.

Artist profile: H.R. Giger February 8, 2010

From Wired: 1940: Cyborg surrealist Hans Rudi Giger bursts out of his mother like a fearsome Alien, unleashing an influential torrent of monochromatic body horror, night terrors and art bedeviled by sex, tech and death.

The Skull Beneath the Skin

Born in Chur, Switzerland, H.R. Giger (pronounced Gee-ger with two hard g’s) followed a different path from his chemist father. But his admittedly idyllic childhood in mountainous Chur was nevertheless shot through with dread and darkness. Giger’s vivid imagination created early nightmares that morphed into night terrors as his life wore on.

Seven decades after his birth, Giger’s uncanny merge of human and machine has crept outward like a cultural virus. There is probably no other artist alive whose work is as instantly recognizable. And, for that, we have Giger’s itinerant fears to thank.

Like David Lynch — whose brilliant feature-length debut Eraserhead, Giger admitted, was the closest that cinema ever got to his tortured art — the Swiss-born icon has capitalized on his nightmares and visions like few others. Mapping the territories of the unconscious and its dark mash of birth, sex, death and technology, Giger has created a legacy as substantial as that of his inspiration Salvador Dali.

Thanks to his monstrous Alien, seductive Brain Salad Surgery and more, we’ve been terrified and titillated by it again and again.

Read full story

DJ Baby App February 5, 2010

At the risk of looking waaaaay too indulgent (and I’m not even a parent yet):

DJ Baby is a simple iPhone/iPod Touch app that lets even small children rock the turntables. It’s dead simple to use: Each of the four “records” has a vocal sample, and the button with the musical note starts and stops the  backbeat.  Clicking on the needle varies the vocal sample a little.  You can try out the app online (Flash required), although it’s more engaging with the touchscreen interface.  Plus, if you shake the device, there’s a bonus sound effect!

The app is definitely easy to use: Basically, if you trust your kid to hold the device, then they’ll be able to figure out the interface.  And the target audience–say, 6 and under?–will almost certainly find it diverting, although children in the older part of that range might not be willing to play long at a stretch without asking to play something else.

The simplicity has some consequences: there’s no way to save a beat, nor is there a way to create your own sample, whether by recording your voice or using a track from iTunes.  You can see why: It would defeat the whole purpose of the app if you were constantly being called over to fiddle with settings.

Thought-controlled lights at winter games February 5, 2010

From Wired:

Along with the figure skating, ice hockey and snowboarding, another event will compete for attention at the Winter Olympics in Canada this month.

A Canadian company has created what it calls the “largest thought-controlled computing installation.” It’s an experiment that lets visitors to the Olympics use their brainwaves to control the lights at three major landmarks in Canada, including Niagara Falls.

“When people put on the headsets and find themselves increasing the brightness of the lights by just thinking about it, you can almost see their brains explode,” says Trevor Coleman, chief operating officer for InteraXon, the company that has created this installation.

As consumers get more comfortable with going beyond the keyboard and the mouse to interact with their computers, companies are looking for alternate ways to make the experience better. Already, touch and voice recognition have become a major part of the user interface in smartphones, and harnessing brainwaves or other biological data is slowly emerging as a third option, especially in gaming. Companies such as NeuroSky offer headphones that promise to translate the gamer’s brainwaves into action on screen. A biometrics company called Innerscope is helping Wired host a geeked-out Super Bowl party. And even Microsoft is working on alternate forms of input; its Project Natal promises to add gesture recognition to Xbox 360 games later this year.

Read all about it.

Natural beauty: glow-in-the-dark mushrooms February 4, 2010

This story came out back in October, and I’ve been hanging onto it until now because, well, it’s not like the mushrooms are prettier in the dark. They’re just bioluminescent. Lots of things can do that. But, it’s natural beauty, and it turns out the scientists were inspired by artists in naming this thing, so there you go.

As if teensy night-lights were dangling from tree trunks and branches, glow-in-the-dark mushrooms illuminate the forests across the globe. Now, scientists have discovered several species of such radiant ’shrooms.

The freaky findings, reported today in the journal Mycologia, increases the number of aglow mushroom species from 64 to 71, shedding light on the evolution of luminescence in nature.

The newly identified mushrooms, which emit a bright, yellowish-green light 24 hours a day, were found in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico. They include four species new to science and three new reports of luminescence in known species.

Found on sticks in an Atlantic forest habitat, Mycena luxaeterna is tiny, each cap spanning 0.3 inches (8mm) in diameter, with jelly-like stems. (The species’ name, which means “eternal light,” was inspired by Mozart’s “Requiem.”) One psychedelic-looking mushroom, called Mycena silvaelucens, was found on the bark of a standing tree at the Orangutan Rehabilitation Center in Borneo, Malaysia. Each mushroom cap measuries just over a half inch (18 mm) in diameter. So-called Mycena luxarboricola was collected from the bark of a living tree in an old growth Atlantic forest in Paraná, Brazil. Each cap measures less than 0.2 inches (5 mm) in diameter. (The species’ name, which means “perpetual light,” was also inspired by Mozart’s “Requiem.”)

Graphing photos February 4, 2010

From Wired:

Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph. See more of her Found Functions series at Nikkigraziano.com.

When graphed, this trigonometry function produces an ever-repeating wave of peaks and valleys that mirror the natural curves Graziano sees in plants. (October 2008.)

Avatar’s choreographer February 3, 2010

Just in case you’re not already sick to death of hearing about the processes behind making Avatar, or just sick from the 3D, here’s more from NYT:

Until recently the Los Angeles-based choreographer Lula Washington did not use e-mail. Actually, she resisted most forms of technology. Her dance company had a Web site; Ms.Washington just hadn’t visited it. So it’s somehat interesting that a few years ago she found herself working with one of the most technologically innovative directors in Hollywood.

Ms. Washington, whose company is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and will be performing at Peak Performances@Montclair beginning on Thursday, helped choreograph the ritual movement and body language for the Na’vi people in James Cameron’s blockbuster “Avatar.” Dancers in her company also helped provide motion for the characters through performance-capture technology. Ms. Washington, who grew up in the Watts section of Los Angeles, worked with Alvin Ailey and specializes in reflecting the African-American experience through movement. She speaks very softly, but her bright poppy-red lipstick hints at her feistiness and strength. Her new piece, “www.connections.2010,” which is having its world premiere on Thursday, is inspired by the ways people connect and expose themselves through social networking on the Web.

We talked to the choreographer at the Ailey Studios in midtown Manhattan about her experience working on the film. Here are excerpts from the conversation:

Continue on for interview.

She’s my type February 3, 2010

Ha ha, bad pun, sorry.

From Wired: 

Jeremy Mayer spent more than 1,400 hours at the typewriter in the past year, but he wasn’t banging out a sci-fi novel. Instead, he was building Nude IV, aka Delilah — a 6-foot-tall sculpture made entirely of typewriter parts.

“It took over a year to make, and I’ll probably only make a few more in my lifetime,” said Mayer, the 37-year-old artist who lives in Oakland, California. Mayer’s creations have been displayed at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Device Gallery in San Diego and Ripley’s Believe it or Not museums. (Wired.com profiled Mayer and his work in 2008 with a gallery: “Typewriters Morph Into Creepy Sci-Fi Creatures.”)

Mayer uses vintage typewriters in his intriguing artwork, carefully taking them apart and then recombining the mechanical pieces into anthropomorphic sculptures. Parts from about 50 typewriters went into making Delilah, said Mayer, who took inspiration from a friend’s artwork as well as the Bible when choosing a name for his latest creation.

“I was kind of inspired by my friend Brent Clifford’s paintings of robot women in very sexy reclined poses, and wanted to do sexy without slutty — a pose with strength and dignity but definitely with a sexually charged presence,” he told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “So in that vein I named the most recent piece, Nude IV, Delilah. It was not only a meditation on the story of Samson and Delilah, but also named for the woman who modeled for the piece, Delilah Brown.”

Read about Mayer’s process and see more pics.