Quasicrystals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal


Fig. 1: A 1s rotation diffraction pattern of a decagonal Al-Co-Ni quasicrystal recorded with monochromatic X-rays on a MarResearch imaging plate detector system, exposure time: 120 seconds, wavelength: 0.875 Å, crystal-to-detector distance: 100 mm.

Source.

Structural investigations of crystalline materials have contributed much to the present day understanding of the solid state. The discovery of quasicrystals, crystalline materials with an altogether different kind of ordering scheme, has extended the traditional concept that crystalline matter is a periodic arrangement of identical units (atoms, cluster of atoms or molecules). The typical quasicrystal is an intermetallic compound in which the building blocks are arranged in a non-periodic but highly ordered way. In fact, the long-range order can be as good as in perfect silicon crystals. Some of these novel materials, e.g. Al-Co-Ni alloys, show even a transition from periodic to aperiodic state and vice versa upon heating. In the course of this transition a rearrangement of atoms takes places which locally can cause disorder. It is one of the fascinating aspects of quasicrystals that they can exhibit perfect long-range order in the presence of short-range disorder.

Pythagoras Trees

http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/pythagoras/

Fascination

http://composersdatebook.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/popup.php?name=composers_datebook/2009/09/04/datebook_20090904_128

It's an enjoyable experience just to listen to a captivated person talk about what they find striking. They can be wrong, crazy, or thoroughly misguided and it won't detract from the enjoyment of simply hearing a person who has put some thought into the subject of the world as it presents itself to them.

Whether a scientist or an artist, I have a soft spot for people who get drawn in.

The world is exciting. Why not get excited by it?

Flicker is Addictive

Interesting photo of a fractal irrigation ditch from Afghanistan: here.

There's the usual dirt ditches, as idyllically seen here... if you look closely they follow a nice fractal pattern. Makes sense, so often in nature resource distribution goes fractal.

More sets that are right up my ally:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/sets/72157603524192835/

Linear Telephone

It's interesting that these functions not only become more noisy but more linear.

Here each row is a chain of people passing along a function relating X to Y. Each person first guesses and is corrected on 50 (X,Y) cases, then just guesses on 100 more cases. The final guesses of the last person become data for the next person. The final relations are all basically lines, 7/8 with a positive slope, 1/8 with a negative slope.

-Overcoming Bias

I'm a strict Westerner myself... but this reminds me of a talk by Alan Watts:

Hofstadter's butterfly

In GEB he writes:

Gplot: a recursive graph showing energy bands for electrons in an idealized crystal in a magnetic field. α, representing magnetic field strength, runs vertically from 0 to 1. Energy runs horizontally. The horizontal line segments are bands of allowed electron energies.

From Wiki:

The Hofstadter butterfly was the first fractal structure ever discovered in physics. In particular, Gplot (as Hofstadter called it) was described as "self-similar" in his 1976 article in Physical Review before Benoit Mandelbrot's word "fractal" was known.

Hofstadter is, of course, officially awesome.

Klopjob

Dirty Animal

"We had set fire to the wooded fields and little villages ... it was all most diverting ... The bombs hardly touched the earth before they burst out into white smoke and an enormous flame and the dry grass began to burn.  I thought of the animals: God how they ran ... After the bomb racks were emptied I began throwing bombs by hand.... It was most amusing:  A big Zariba surrounded by tall trees was not easy to hit.  I had to aim carefully at the straw roof and only succeeded at the third shot.  The wretches who were inside, seeing their roof burning, jumped out and ran off like mad."

 -Bruno Mussolini

Mussolini

The Dragon Experience

The Dragon Experience

Constant Conjunction

More Philosophical Powers here:

http://www.geocities.com/krinklyman2/powers.html

Staten on Nietzsche

On the one hand, there is an overall economy that includes both health and decay, on the other hand, Nietzche cannot deny himself the satisfaction of sounding the note of strong ascendancy over the forces of decay.  And the question of the relation between these forces is also the question of Nietzsche's identity.  -Henry Staten

Nietzsche on Socrates

In this quite abnormal character, instinctive wisdom appears only to hinder conscious knowledge at certain points.  While in all productive people instinct is the power of creativity and affirmation, and consciousness assumes a critical and dissuasive role, in Socrates instinct becomes the critic, consciousness the creator - a monstrosity per defectum! -The Birth of Tradgedy

von Karman coud vortices

The caption reads:

These are called von Karman cloud vortices, named after Theodore von Karman, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These vortices near the Aleutian Islands were photographed by an Expedition 15 crewmember on the International Space Station. The vortices are created by the wind encountering a barrier such as an island, then changing direction and velocity and forming eddies in the wind and subsequently, in cloud patterns. The image was taken almost a year ago, on May 23, 2007 and the location of the image is at 51.1 degrees north latitude and 178.8 degrees west longitude.

In the cloud image above, the islands disturb the wind flow. As a prevailing wind encounters the island, the disturbance in the flow propagates downstream of the island in the form of a double row of vortices which alternate their direction of rotation. The animation below (courtesy of Cesareo de la Rosa Siqueira at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil) shows how a von Karman vortex develops behind a cylinder moving through a fluid.

Source.

Daily Earth Science Pictures

here.

Examples include frost on a blade of grass:

The caption reads:

The spectacular image above shows morning frost on a blade of grass as imaged using a low temperature scanning electron microscope (SEM). This grass fragment was held in liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees C or -320 F), to keep the frost crystals from melting, before it was imaged at the Scanning Electron Microscopy Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Frost crystals form perpendicular to individual blades of grass. Note that although these plate type crystals are hexagonal, a number of them appear to be square-shaped.

http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=180832

The Southern Cross:

The caption reads:

This photo, taken in late February, shows the constellation of the Southern Cross (Crux), at the top center of the image, as viewed from Gramado Town in southern Brazil. The night sky was clear and moonless. Stars down to a magnitude 9 or so are shown, including some deep sky nebulosity. Crux is a southern circumpolar constellation -- comparable in declination or latitude to Ursa Major (Big Dipper) in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Southern Cross is indeed a brilliant constellation, consisting of several bright gems in the shape of a cross -- more or less. The brightest is Alpha Crucis (magnitude of 1.1), which is actually a triple star system. One of the stars is about 650 times as bright as our Sun and another is almost 1,000 times as bright. Beta Crusis (magnitude 1.5) is a blue star, and Gamma Crusis, at the head of the cross, is an orange colored second magnitude star. The star denoting the right-most corner on the cross (Delta Crusis) is the faintest of the four (third magnitude). Perhaps only the magnificent Orion has three bright stars that appear to be so close to each other.

http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=185888

Goldfrapp

I just listened to Seventh Tree...  It's worse than Supernature (which wasn't good but wasn't wretched either... awesome title though).  What happened?

Rite of Spring

Anna Karenina

This rainy Saturday morning I began rereading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  The translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is immeasurably superior to the translation I read previously.  The Pevear/Volokhonsky team are known for their Dostoevsky translations, particularly The Brothers Karamazov.  I found that couldn't put it down and read straight through the first book.  I'm particularly taken with the characters of Oblonsky and Levin.  The two are set up to be something of opposing tendencies, poles apart, yet friends.  They seem to be very close to aspects of my own personality, Levin, my dark, moody, obstinate, country loving, conservative side and Stepan, my light, cheerful, easygoing, cosmopolitan, liberal side. 

I'm deeply impressed, not only with Tolstoy's depth of insight into human beings and their world, but in his ability to articulate his insight clearly and convincingly.  Not a single character's thoughts, moods, or feelings are at any time foreign to my own experience of internal dialogue.  Tolstoy is such an astute observer of human beings that I believe that, upon reading his work, I would feel self conscious were I to be in his presence.

I like this excerpt from the libretto of Die Fledermaus:

Himmlisch ist's, wenn ich bezwungen

Meine irdische Begier;

Aber doch wenn's nicht gelungen

Hatt'ich auch recht hübsch Plaistir!

In English:

Heavenly it would be to conquer

My earthly lusts;

But though I've not succeeded,

I still have lots of pleasure!

As he said this Stepan Arkadyich smiled subtly, Levin also could not help smiling.

Update:

I awoke at 3:00 AM this Sunday morning, and being unable to return to sleep, and with little email or other internet work to fritter away my time with, I picked up Anna Karenina again.

I'm up to chapter 14 (in book 2) and I can feel the pull of Levin drawing me away.  It's no secret that Tolstoy likes him best.  The country life, the solitude and the soon to be domestic life… This must be the meaning of life!  It's still raining outside, and I can smell the wet soil on the cold November air through my open window.  That's a smell that I enjoy… dirt.  No really, it smells wonderful!

"But of Levins there are a great many in Russia, almost as many as Oblonskys." -Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer

The Sand-Reckoner

There are some ... who think that the number of [grains of] sand is infinite.... There are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough.... But I will try to show you [numbers that] exceed not only the number of the mass of sand equal to the Earth filled up ... but also that of a mass equal in magnitude to the Universe.

-Archimedes, The Sand-Reckoner

http://learner.org/resources/series210.html

I love this game

http://metroidr.brpxqzme.net/index.php?act=resdb&param=02&c=1&id=356

Cueva de los Cristales

Cueva de los Cristales, Chihauahua, Mexico.

Image Source.