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Living Room / Re: Planet Perplex: Art for the mind
« Last post by app103 on September 03, 2006, 02:51 PM »For those that are having trouble with the dolphin one, a little help...I enhanced them in red.
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An easy-to-use, alphabetical guide for creating rhymes.
- Features 55,000 headwords with pronunciations at every entry
- Lists arranged alphabetically and by number of syllables
- Thousands of cross-references guide readers to correct entries
The ASCII values found in the text of spam messages determine the attributes and qualities of the Spam Plants
The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.
| Now why can't it look this darn good in my inbox? If it did I'd print it out and hang it on my wall instead of deleting it. |
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
What you will find emerging out of the 119 original essays in the 75,000 word document written in response to the 2006 Edge Question — "What is your dangerous idea?" — are indications of a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systems — whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself — were not constructed by design; all have evolved. There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it.
Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. Based on the paper of George Johnson in The New York Times we list below 10 winners of this polling and accompany the short explanations of the physical experiments with computer animations.
A surprising argument has been made that if the discovery of science had not happened in Greece, it would not have happened at all, that scientific thinking is not essential for human culture, and that most cultures did not have it.
Planet Perplex is a comprehensive collection of optical illusions, impossible objects, hidden images, puzzles and related images.
Augmented Fish Reality is an interactive installation of 5 rolling robotic fish-bowl sculptures designed to explore interspecies and transpecies communication. These sculptures allow Siamese Fighting fish to use intelligent hardware and software to move their robotic bowls - under their control.
If beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, then genius resides in the deepest recesses of the mind. What is genius, who is a genius, what is the role and responsibility of a genius? No two people will answer in quite the same way. Seeking to shed some light on these and other questions, DigitAll queried five varied thinkers. The results? Genius.
The world could be headed toward a testosterone fueled apocalypse triggered by lop-sided sex ratios, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers, from China and the UK, say that cultures like China and India that favor male babies have bred an enormous surplus of men who will struggle to find sexual partners and will likely find themselves marginalized in society.
The brain has always been a battlefield. New weapons might be able to hack directly into your nervous system.
The skin is the easiest target for such stimulation. But, in principle, any sensory nerves could be triggered. The Controlled Effects document suggests “it may be possible to create synthetic images…to confuse an individual' s visual sense or, in a similar manner, confuse his senses of sound, taste, touch, or smell.”
Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis. The work suggests the parallel universes proposed by some quantum theorists may not actually be parallel but could interact – and with disastrous consequences.
Science will continue to surprise us with what it discovers and creates; then it will astound us by devising new methods to surprises us. At the core of science's self-modification is technology. New tools enable new structures of knowledge and new ways of discovery. The achievement of science is to know new things; the evolution of science is to know them in new ways. What evolves is less the body of what we know and more the nature of our knowing
These Non-Duality Cartoons can be used on your website if you place a link from each cartoon back to this website at http://advaitatoons.blogspot.com/
Let me tell you a secret. For years I have wanted to travel the longest straight line that traverses America. My rules for such a line were simple. The line could not pass outside America and could not go through the oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, the line had to stay inside the continental boundaries.
Our day-to-day beliefs often come from established theories, but what about beliefs based on theories in progress? A new book asks literary and scientific thinkers about what they believe but cannot prove.
However, in being someone with Asperger's Syndrome who is devoted to science fiction, I am hardly alone. Surfing the Internet brings to light numerous observations that science fiction fans frequently exhibit all the traits of Asperger's Syndrome; a recent autobiography by one man with the condition, Will Hadcroft's The Feeling's Unmutual: Growing Up with Asperger Syndrome (Undiagnosed) (2004), describes his youthful fascination with science fiction and fantasy; and a book designed to comfort children with Asperger's Syndrome, Kathy Hoopmann's Of Mice and Aliens: An Asperger Adventure (2001), describes a boy with the condition who meets a newly arrived space alien and compares the boy's problems in adjusting to his world with the alien's problems in adjusting to life on Earth. All explicit links between science fiction and Asperger's Syndrome will necessarily be recent, because the condition — although first identified by Austrian doctor Hans Asperger in the 1940s — was not named until 1981 and was not accepted by the medical community until the 1990s; but there seems little doubt that Asperger's Syndrome has been around for a long time, and some have theorized that a wide variety of historical figures, including as Isaac Newton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jane Austen, Alexander Graham Bell, and Albert Einstein, had Asperger's Syndrome. Still, there are reasons to believe that the condition became more and more common during the twentieth century — perhaps uncoincidentally, also the century that saw the emergence of the genre of science fiction.
Einstein demonstrated that time is relative.
But the rabbit-hole goes much deeper. Quantum physics discovered that consciousness is entangled in matter in some inexplicable ways; but other than the very fast, or very small, or very large, we tend to assume our “ordinary” reality conforms more to the laws of Newton. Simple cause and effect unfolding with clockwork constancy —well, it’s time to shatter this assumption. Let’s stop time.
Hawking and Hartle's original work on the quantum properties of the cosmos suggested that imaginary time, which seemed like a mathematical curiosity in the sum-over-histories approach, held the answer to understanding the origin of the universe.
Add up the histories of the universe in imaginary time, and time is transformed into space. The result is that, when the universe was small enough to be governed by quantum mechanics, it had four spatial dimensions and no dimension of time: where time would usually come to an end at a singularity, a new dimension of space appears, and, poof! The singularity vanishes.
You are offered a deal in which you are asked to flip a coin ten times. If any one of the flips comes up tails, you are swiftly and painlessly killed. If it comes up heads ten times in a row, you are given a banana. Do you take the deal?
For the purposes of this thought experiment, we may assume it is a perfectly fair coin, and that you like bananas, although not any more so than would generally be considered healthy. We may also assume for simplicity that your life or death is of absolutely no consequence to anyone but yourself: you live in secret on a deserted island, isolated from contact with the outside world, where you have everything you need other than bananas. We may finally assume that we know for certainty that there is no afterlife; upon death, you simply cease to exist in any form. So, there is an approximately 99.9% chance that you will be dead, which by hypothesis implies that you will feel no regrets or feelings of disappointment. And if you survive, you get a banana. What do you think?
Now change the experiment a little. Instead of flipping a coin, you measure the x-component of the spin of an electron that has been prepared in an eigenstate of the y-component of the spin; according to the rules of quantum mechanics, there is an even chance that you will measure the x-component of the spin to be up or down. You do this ten times, with ten different electrons, and are offered the same wager as before, with spin-up playing the role of “heads” for the coin. The only difference is that, instead of a classical probability, we are dealing with branching/collapsing wavefunctions. I.e., if you believe in something like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there will always be a branch of the wavefunction of the universe in which you continue to exist and now have a banana. Do you take the deal?
View this video full size.
Stare closely at the center of the screen and keep your eyes still.
Look away from the screen when instructed.
This museum is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses diverse examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures. Watch and be amazed as we bring to life eccentric and even intricate perpetual motion machines that have remained steadfastly unmoving since their inception. Marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel in all of its possible variations. Exercise your mind to puzzle out exactly why they don't work as the inventors intended.