Showing posts with label Nasa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nasa. Show all posts

Sunday, November 24, 2013

24/11/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics

This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics. Enjoy!


Shopping malls rarely inspire - both in terms of exterior architecture and interior design… their utilitarian purpose combines with aesthetic of the masses to produce bland, dentally-inspired greyness… unless, of course, it is a shopping mall in Sweden, where extreme capitalism collides often spectacularly with extreme socialism to produce unexpected visuals. Behold this Van-Damme-Volvo-ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10) equivalent in the shopping mall architecture:
http://it.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2013/november/14/malmos-melted-shopping-mall/
After all, energising those satiated consumers to spend their money on things other than social justice requires visual experiences that are truly spectacular...



Three sets of links relating to space next.

First, NASA's latest Cassini images of the Titan - with high resolution section showing Northern Lakes (Salt Flats): http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/imagedetails/index.cfm?imageId=4900
H/T: @raluca3000 @NASAWebbTelescp (click on image to enlarge)



Second, a beautiful set of visuals to put the relative dimension of the Earth and our solar system compared to some stars out there:
http://www.mbandf.com/parallel-world/our-sun-is-extremely-large-our-sun-is-fairly-small

The page above comes courtesy of a fantastic Mechanical.Art.Devices (M.A.D.) Gallery http://www.mbandf.com/mad-gallery/explore/ A fascinating glimpse into the world of unique engineering and design… (not strictly space image, but so elegant, it might just be stellar)...



Three: one hell of a cool story, via arstechnica, from the Antarctica, where earlier this year, scientists discovered Ernie and Bert, "two neutrinos with energies over 100 times higher than the protons that circulate in the LHC. Now, the same team has combed through its data to find an additional 26 high-energy events, and they've done a careful analysis to show that these are almost certainly originating from somewhere outside our Solar System."
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/11/south-pole-detector-spots-28-out-of-this-world-neutrinos/

And in a related story, http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-tech-literally-running-a-south-pole-data-center/ arstechnica covers the jobs at the South Pole data centre where they have to "heat the air used to cool… data centre".

Brilliantly written and fascinating!


Science Gallery at TCD is featuring this week in dezeen with a story about the latest show "Grow Your Own - Life After Nature" that runs through 19 January 2014 and is worth visiting…
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/20/olafur-eliasson-tears-used-to-make-human-cheese/ See @ScienceGallery

A brave show, pushing the bounds of what we consider aesthetically acceptable and blending these bounds with what we consider both art and science. And the science bit is not about the actual physical stuff, like growing cheese culture based on human body excretions-produced bacteria. Instead, it is a science of our self-awareness, the compartmentalising nature of our understanding of the acceptable. In many ways, this is about ethics reaching beyond their own domain into aesthetics. As we commonly have a problem with seeing the animal that provides us with a steak in their living condition, we have a problem seeing (let alone tasting) a slice of cheese that was grown from the bacteria harvested from our bodies.

"Selfmade is a series of ‘microbial sketches’, portraits reflecting an individual’s microbial landscape in a unique cheese. Each cheese is crafted from starter cultures sampled from the skin of a different person. Isolated microbial strains were identified and characterised using microbiological techniques and 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing. Like the human body, each cheese has a unique set of microbes that metabolically shape a unique odour."

We then frame the whole experiment into what is ethically or aesthetically acceptable to us: "Cheese odours were sampled and characterised using headspace gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, a technique used to identify and/or quantify volatile organic compounds present in a sample."

I will leave you at this and suggest you explore the said boundaries on your own…



Interesting show in London's St Petersburg gallery: Vladimir Baranov-Rossine: From Cubism to Surrealism:
http://www.saintpetersburggallery.com/exhibitions.html


Apparently, the first exhibition in 30 years retrospecting his works in Europe.

While on Russian art, an amazing collection of rare Allies posters highlighting the role of the Soviet army during the World War 2: http://rbth.co.uk/multimedia/pictures/2013/11/14/wwii_lend-lease_posters_campaigning_for_soviet_troops_31715.html

And travelling further in time, an unseen until recently collection of early photographs of life in Russia from the beginning of the 20th century
http://www.businessinsider.com/prokudin-gorskii-photos-of-russian-empire-2013-9#a-water-carrier-poses-for-prokudin-gorski-in-the-street-25
Here's a sample - both in colour and original print:





Readers of WLASze would know that I am not a big fan of Zaha Hadid, having written before my opinion about her over-exposed, over-worked studio. However, where credit is due, it should be given. Fantastic aesthetic and total absence of respect for balance can be a cool combination. This building confirms:


http://www.designboom.com/architecture/innovation-tower-by-zaha-hadid-at-hong-kong-polyu-11-20-2013/


And for the last bit - an absolutely fantastic Gel talk by Vi Hart on mathematical applications to music composition:
http://vimeo.com/29893058?utm_content=bufferb7b81&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

Enjoy!

Friday, September 13, 2013

13/9/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

Due to time constraints of tomorrow's TEDx talks (http://www.tedxdublin.com/), this is a shorter version of WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics. More to follow in part 2 later, so enjoy the eclectic mix…


Let's start with the truly 'first' for humanity. This week, Nasa announced that "Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space. The NASA spacecraft, which rose from Earth on a September morning 36 years ago, has traveled farther than anyone, or anything, in history".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHsdOU9biAU&feature=youtu.be
Read about it here: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
What a fantastic achievement. A long leap for a piece of by-now-outdated technology, and a giant laps for mankind!


The taxonomy of space traversed by Voyager 1 is explained here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17460 with a handy graphic. And here is the hero itself, as spotted by earth-based radio telescopes back On February 21, 2013,


For large numbers lovers: the spacecraft, launched in 1977, is currently nearly 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away from the sun. The picture shows Voyager 1 at 11.5 billion miles (18.5 billion kilometers) away. This was the stuff that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (who's 156th birthday will come September 17th), Hermann Oberth and Robert H. Goddard dreamed about.


Skies, space, time still fascinate us today. On a smaller scale of achievement, but stunningly beautifully executed, here are the Ethereal Landscape Photo Manipulations by Polish photographer, Michal Karcz:
http://emorfes.com/2013/09/08/ethereal-landscape-photo-manipulations-by-michal-karcz/
His website: http://www.michalkarcz.com/
Of space:


And time:



While on concept of time, here's a shot from the past - a long mis-identified van Gogh
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/arts/design/new-van-gogh-painting-discovered-in-amsterdam.html?_r=0&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1378732079-VxsU8Azzq08ccDgxBuLvEw
All handy-dandy, art prices etc, but The Onion take is as usual - priceless (yes, the discovery is significant enough to make it into The Onion)…
http://www.theonion.com/articles/heartless-dutch-curators-put-deranged-scrawlings-o,33803/
Here are two highest resolution images I could find:





From things filling us with wonder and amazement to dumbing down. The former are of art, the latter is of science… or rather the study of humanity... even worse, humanity linked to politics (now the standard is set at absolute zero):
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate
Absolutely fascinating, until you recognise that majority of economists are mathematically more numerate and politically more dogmatic than your average educated person. Which, of course, just confirms the study results... by not even being an exception to the rule…

Saturday, July 6, 2013

6/7/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and Zero Economics

Given that this week is the 4th of July week, it is probably apt to start my WLASze: Weekly Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics instalment with a bit of Americana.

And so we shall.

On sciency-bit side - an awe-inspiring story of a 35-years-old-and-still-running scientific journey: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/science/space/going-going-still-going-voyager-1-at-solar-systems-edge.html?_r=0
My favourite quote: "…when the two Voyagers launched in 1977 on a grand tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the space age was just 20 years old, and there was no way to know that NASA had built something that would last 35 years…" Now, recall the life span of your iPhone… 35 months?.. near, not even that. And to that: Happy Birthday, America!


But while on the topic of space, fascinating images from arstechnica on ISS workings:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/gallery-the-international-space-station-flight-control-room/#image-1 The logos above the Mission Control Center and the typography of the sign are a bit OTT… like, tacky. The second and third images are brilliant: it takes fewer computers and people to run the ISS than to execute a mildly sizeable hedge fund management strategy… The amazing bit is that these guys are managing equipment that is largely Russian-designed and built, floating out in space and manned by all sorts of crews, so Big Respekt!


Via @stephenkinsella - an absolutely amazing, comprehensive and exhaustive visualisation of univariate distributions linkages: http://www.math.wm.edu/~leemis/chart/UDR/UDR.html . You can scroll over the defined distributions of the right hand side to 'focus' on their respective clusters: a list of 76 probability distributions formed by 19 discrete and 57 continuous ones. Screw Tall Ships and Star Wars posters! I know, I want to print this one out on a 'blackboard' paper like 3x3 meters-sized for Luca's room.


On the arts side: "Until It Makes Sense" is an encounter with the work of Mario García Torres at Dublin's Project Arts Centre http://ht.ly/mD7lK . Worth a visit. Here's an interview with Torres in line with this 2007 Stadelijk Museum show: http://www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?pagina=articolo_det&id_art=90&det=ok&title=MARIO-GARCIA-TORRES

An interesting reference to "John Baldessari’s rendition of Sol LeWitt’s Sentences On Conceptual Art" - http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/189072 Baldessari's 1972 work.
I prefer Baldessari as a conceptual photographic artist, with works like here: http://www.muralsoflajolla.com/john-baldessari-mural/

and Classic Baldessari:


Staying with art: Arte Laguna - a regular international competition "aimed at promoting and enhancing Contemporary Art" and held at Venice Arsenale was announced for 2013-2014: http://www.artelagunaprize.com/index.php/prize.html
with exhibition to be held 9 October-30 October 2013.

Here are some of 2012 winners. A brilliant recomposition of classical pastoral narratives using photography as the medium to replicate the texture, light and colour gamma of oil by Linda Pottage:
http://www.artelagunaprize.com/index.php/component/content/article/985-linda-pottage.html
In larger size, and including her other work:



Amazingly fluid and, obviously, dynamic structure, reminiscent of 3D plots you might get in Mathematica… or the 'Regression Machine' one of my econometrics professors at UCLA used on us (not a very happy memory of tortured geekiness) by Jill Townsley:
http://www.artelagunaprize.com/index.php/component/content/article/986-jill-townsley.html



Source on 2012 show: http://bellezzedarte.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/la-mostra-dei-finalisti-premio-arte-laguna/

Another excellent work: Jaspal Bir's oil:


Stay tuned - more links will be forthcoming in Part 2.