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