Origami explained in ‘Between the Folds’ October 8, 2009

Between the Fold

I just came across a pretty awesome documentary explaining the math behind the art of paper folding, more commonly called Origami.

The blurb for the film:” ‘Between the Folds‘ filmmaker Vanessa Gould explores the expression of mathematics through origami. The film chronicles 10 fine artists and eccentric scientists who have devoted their lives to the unlikely medium of modern origami”…

Director’s statement:

“When I first learned about the curious phenomenon of fine artists, scientists and mathematicians from all over the world working in the very same medium of origami, I knew there had to be something special about it—that in the simplicity of a paper square must be hiding some untold potential for new connections and ideas.”

Check out the official webpage of “Between the Folds” to see the trailer.

The DVD became available online this week.

*Edit*: Just as an interesting side note, a team at IBM is working to create faster computers using the principles of…origami!

Twilight Zone turns 50 October 7, 2009

Copyright CBS, Inc.

You are now entering the Twilight Zone of cinema and science!

On October 2, 1959, the first episode aired of what would turn out to be a seminal work of science-fiction television. For the first time the famous four-note musical motif played, and for the first time Rod Serling told viewers that they were “entering a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” Yes, it may be hard to believe, but October marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of The Twilight Zone.

The first episode, titled “Where Is Everybody?” and starring Earl Holliman, was written by Serling and very much set the tone for the series: Holliman plays a man, dressed in an Air Force jumpsuit, who wanders about a town that seems to have no other people in it, though has evidence of very recent habitation (food on the stove, burning cigarettes in ashtrays, etc.). It turns out (SPOILER ALERT) that he is imagining the whole thing, and that he’s actually been put in isolation to see if he can stay sane for a trip to the moon.

The latest from Hubble: October 2, 2009

Pretty amazing! The images were taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument before it suffered a power failure in 2007. The images were recovered when astronauts restored the unit in May of this year on the last Hubble Servicing Mission. Both are deep enough to show distant background galaxies.

High-res version of the top photo (40 MB): NGC 4522
High-res version of the  bottom photo (29 MB): NGC 4402

These photos are actually amazing for two reasons:

1. Hubble has once again wowed us with the beauty of nature, and without even trying to has created images the likes of which we’ve only seen in science fiction. The assumption often made, including by this website, is that art has to be manmade. And technically this is; it is an electronic image created by humans for non-altruistic/not-directly-related-to-survival purposes. BUT, sometimes it’s also amazing to just sit back and look at nature, including galaxies far far away, and just be amazed at the gloriousness of the world(s) around us.

2. These photos show the process of “ram pressure stripping,” or basically what happens when galaxies travel at 6.2 million miles per hour (astronomers estimate): their edges start flying off into the nether regions of the Universe.

Wired and Bad Astronomy discussed this phenomenon a little bit.

Free Museum Day tomorrow September 25, 2009

September 26th is Annual Museum Day, and lots of museums and parks are offering free admission in celebration. Read on for more:

On Sept. 26, as part of the fifth annual Museum Day program, Smithsonian magazine has convinced more than 1,200 other museums, zoos, and arts and cultural attractions across the country to also welcome visitors for free.

In California, you’ll can use your Museum Day admission card to visit the classic cars displayed at the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento (regular adult admission: $8), in New York City you can use your pass at the South Street Seaport Museum (regular adult admission: $10), and in Dallas, your pass will get you into the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (regular admission: $13.50), which explores the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy. 

To see the full list of all the participating museums so you can plan your day, visit the Smithsonian’s Museum Day 2009 Web site and poke around. Be ready to be a bit overwhelmed.

Extradimensional theories of the universe as opera September 9, 2009

Lisa Randall recites her opera

Since writing a bestselling book on her fascinating and complex extra-dimensional theory of the universe, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall has been busy re-imagining it as an appropriately cerebral art form—opera. After three years of development, Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes premiered at Paris’s prestigious Centre Pompidou in June and, like Randall’s book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions [Buy], it manages to translate the impenetrable world of theoretical physics into something that not only appeals to scientists, but to anyone willing to look beyond the obvious for clues about the nature of reality.

Spanish composer Hèctor Parra, 33, first saw artistic potential in Randall’s ideas after reading Warped Passages, which uses plain language to describe how hidden dimensions may explain some of physics’ greatest quandaries—such as why the gravitational force is so weak. When the book was released in Europe in 2006, Parra met up with Randall in Berlin to ask her to write a libretto based on her work. Randall admits she was “a little uncomfortable focusing so much on the physics,” she says, because she didn’t want to alienate the audience. “But I did see that the exploration of an extra dimension could be very nice as a metaphor. It seemed exciting.”

As its title suggests, Hypermusic Prologue doesn’t simply make art out of hard-to-grasp scientific theory, it inverts and renovates the genre of opera with an experimental score, a two-person cast, and minimalist and abstract stage design. Randall asked artist Matthew Ritchie [Video], whose sculptures often reference inflationary universe theory, to design the sets. Ritchie also developed a series of video projections for the performance: The industrial imagery projected behind baritone James Bobby represents the lower four-dimensional universe while the soprano, Charlotte Ellett, is often surrounded by projections of wildly colored celestial shapes, suggesting the expanded reality of a fifth dimension.

Read the full article…

Best science visualization videos August 26, 2009

Some of the most impressive images in science are produced when researchers take numerical data and represent it visually through modeling and computer graphics. The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference (SciDAC) in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful (and descriptive) visual data can be.

More from WIRED.

Zombie battle plan August 25, 2009

WordPress has been wonky today, so I apologize for the short and perhaps oddly-appearing posts.

A team of mathematics professors and students has figured out a mathematic model for how to survive a zombie attack.

Here’s the spoiler: strike early and often!

Buckaroo Bonzai 25th anniversary August 21, 2009

I always thought that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension was some odd film that nobody but I saw and loved, and now I’m so happy to learn that it does in fact have a cult following…I was just in the wrong cult. Hooray!

From Geekdad Ken Denmead: 

 ”August 15th was the 25th anniversary of the release of a film near and dear to many geeks who came of age in the ’80s. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension was a great, adventurous, geeky movie, with enough silly science fiction and great characters to fill any three lousy summer blockbusters these days. Didn’t we all dream of someday being a super-scientist/rock musician and get to travel around the country on the coolest tour bus ever made to save humanity from the evil aliens hiding amongst us?”

It also got me to ask my dad about physics/dimensions/and other space-time continuum questions. .

Check out some other fans’ favorite quotes from the film. Mine? “Laugh while you can monkey boy.”

Quote of the Day: August 14, 2009

“Artists and scientists are the official noticers of society. They notice things other people either have never seen or have learned to ignore.”
    -Frank Oppenheimer, physicist who worked on the atomic bomb and founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA.

Hear a story about him on NPR.

More european art and science August 10, 2009

Wired Magazine online has a “Day in Tech” page, featuring some great scientific or technological discovery. This is from a few days ago, but still interesting.

Aug. 3, 1803: Crystal Palace Architect Born

Joseph Paxton is born in Milton Bryan, England. His career will take him from garden boy to gardener to landscape designer to architect-engineer of the largest glass buildings of his day — including London’s famous Crystal Palace of 1851.

Paxton built a huge glass greenhouse at Chatsworth between 1836 and 1840 for his employer, the Duke of Devonshire. Queen Victoria knighted Paxton in 1850 not for his architectural accomplishments but for a horticultural achievement: coaxing the huge Victoria amazonica water lily to flower in a greenhouse.

Paxton’s fame earned him a seat in the House of Commons, and it was there that he intersected with plans for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Royal Society of Arts had promoted the idea of an international exhibition of manufactures and industrial goods, and a royal commission was formed in 1850 to produce the event.

The ungainly result was a huge iron dome on a long, low brick building. The press had a field day making fun of it, and — worse yet —none of the 19 bids submitted by contractors came in under the 100,000-pound budget (about $14 million in today’s U.S. currency). Desperate, the committee lopped the dome off the design, leaving no more than a squat mega-shed.

Read about the full adventures.