More Of The Noise. Lovely To Look At!

Wow, this story is my hope for humanity! Keep it up and keep doing what you do, Mathed-potatoes! :)

People never cease to amaze me in every way. 

Today, we had an emergency response drill. This involves flashing lights and loud sounds. I have a neurological disorder that makes this type of even very uncomfortable. 

The hour before this drill, I had an incredibly disappointing interaction with one of my work supervisors. My reaction was much stronger than I might have anticipated on a theoretical level, and I was still reeling when the drill started… so I didn’t take steps to avoid the sensory barrage. The loud noises happen first, and I was already starting to spiral the drain. 

And then…

And then one of my students caught my attention. She told me the lights were about to start flashing, and asked if I needed to go outside. I was so far gone I couldn’t really process how to do the ‘get outside’ thing. Like, I couldn’t find ‘outside.’ So she sherpa’d me to safety, just in time to avoid the flashy lights that would have triggered a full meltdown. 

So, here’s the thing: I have mentioned my disorder to her once, in passing, by name only. She literally remembered that I had a condition, and took steps to know what emergency protocol I might need in certain situations. I thanked her profusely, and asked how she had learned to be so sensitive to stuff like that. She told me she has a younger sister with a disability, and so she understands how significant the timely attention of a knowledgeable ally can be. 

It is significant. It makes a world of difference. 

She saved the day for me. 

She kept me from having to leave in the middle of the day, from having to cancel my afternoon discussions. 

And, at that particular moment, when I was still shocked by an instance of the human capacity to harm, she reminded that their capacity to help, to be compassionate, to care about one another, is far greater still.

Got to love Geometry!

The Complex Geometry of Islamic Design

In Islamic culture, geometry is everywhere. You can find it in mosques, madrasas, palaces and private homes. This tradition began in the 8th century CE during the early history of Islam, when craftsman took preexisting motifs from Roman and Persian cultures and developed them into new forms of visual expression. 

This period of history was a golden age of Islamic culture, during which many achievements of previous civilizations were preserved and further developed, resulting in fundamental advancements in scientific study and mathematics. Accompanying this was an increasingly sophisticated use of abstraction and complex geometry in Islamic art, from intricate floral motifs adorning carpets and textiles, to patterns of tile work that seemed to repeat infinitely, inspiring wonder and contemplation of eternal order.

 Despite the remarkable complexity of these designs, they can be created with just a compass to draw circles and a ruler to make lines within them, and from these simple tools emerges a kaleidoscope multiplicity of patterns. So how does that work? Well, everything starts with a circle. The first major decision is how will you divide it up? Most patterns split the circle into four, five or six equal sections. And each division gives rise to distinctive patterns. 

There’s an easy way to determine whether any pattern is based on fourfold, fivefold, or sixfold symmetry. Most contain stars surrounded by petal shapes. Counting the number of rays on a starburst, or the number of petals around it, tells us what category the pattern falls into. A star with six rays, or surrounded by six petals, belongs in the sixfold category. One with eight petals is part of the fourfold category, and so on. 

There’s another secret ingredient in these designs: an underlying grid. Invisible, but essential to every pattern, the grid helps determine the scale of the composition before work begins, keeps the pattern accurate, and facilitates the invention of incredible new patterns. Let’s look at an example of how these elements come together. 

We’ll start with a circle within a square, and divide it into eight equal parts. We can then draw a pair of criss-crossing lines and overlay them with another two. These lines are called construction lines, and by choosing a set of their segments, we’ll form the basis of our repeating pattern. 

Many different designs are possible from the same construction lines just by picking different segments. And the full pattern finally emerges when we create a grid with many repetitions of this one tile in a process called tessellation.

By choosing a different set of construction lines, we might have created this any of the above patterns. The possibilities are virtually endless.  

We can follow the same steps to create sixfold patterns by drawing construction lines over a circle divided into six parts, and then tessellating it, we can make something like the above.

Here’s another sixfold pattern that has appeared across the centuries and all over the Islamic world, including Marrakesh, Agra, Konya and the Alhambra. 

Fourfold patterns fit in a square grid, and sixfold patterns in a hexagonal grid. 

Fivefold patterns, however, are more challenging to tessellate because pentagons don’t neatly fill a surface, so instead of just creating a pattern in a pentagon, other shapes have to be added to make something that is repeatable, resulting in patterns that may seem confoundingly complex, but are still relatively simple to create. 

This more than 1,000-year-old tradition has wielded basic geometry to produce works that are intricate, decorative and pleasing to the eye. And these craftsman prove just how much is possible with some artistic intuition, creativity, dedication along with a great compass and ruler.

Hey BAB, could you please share the code to this? Im on the way to learn some processing and this is the kind of code i would like to learn. So, please share, so i can learn from it :)

Take care mate!

rgb knot

Wolfram shows off :)

So Google does math for you??

division

square roots

dividing percentages

IT EVEN FOILS

beautiful.

Just the ruler missing. Love to draw with those tools!

How the f could a human do something like that? I want to see a video of that guy in action.

His name:  Achim Leistner.

He is the master optician of the Avogadro project, an international effort to define the Avogadro constantwith maximum precision. He was asked to join the project from retirement as it was deemed that his expertise and craftsmanship were essential for the success of the project.

Here is a video: [x]

(Fact Source) For more facts, follow Ultrafacts

Greenpeace #clickclean campaign GIFs ‘Wind Turbine Likes’

Beautiful! 

Double Arm

This sketch was made by rotating point 1 around a circle, rotating point 2 around point 1, and then joining a line between point 1 and point 2. In the gif point 2 is traveling in the same direction as point 1. Point 1 is traveling at 1x, and point 2 is traveling at 2x. Following the gif are some of my favorite combinations of the periods:

Rotating same direction:

1x and 1x

1x and 2x

1x and 5x

2x and 1x

2x and 5x

5x and 8x

The last image is an array of all the varieties from 1x to 9x for each point.

code: http://p5js.sketchpad.cc/sp/pad/view/jLceHatXid/latest

This slide is really something! :)

Video of my talk last week at ICERM, where I discussed a bit of my process for making GIFs. You can also access my slides here.

This, wow!

Impressive artwork.

Dr. Greg Dunn (artist and neuroscientist) and Dr. Brian Edwards (artist and applied physicist) created Self Reflected to elucidate the nature of human consciousness, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behavior of neurons. Self Reflected offers an unprecedented insight of the brain into itself, revealing through a technique called reflective microetching the enormous scope of beautiful and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this work of art. Self Reflected was created to remind us that the most marvelous machine in the known universe is at the core of our being and is the root of our shared humanity.

h-t New Scientist: Brain images display the beauty and complexity of consciousness