“A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms”

George Wald

L’oeuf, projet pour New York, 1977-1978

Star Wars matte by Yanick Dusseault

“We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures.”

A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and he silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills. (Goethe)

Star Wars cyclorama by Yanick Dusseault

Photo credit

“Within thirty years,
we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

Vernor Vinge

Karman Vortices — Each of these swirling clouds is a result of a meteorological phenomenon known as a Karman vortex. These vortices appeared over Alexander Selkirk Island in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rising precipitously from the surrounding waters, the highest point on the island is nearly a mile (1.6 km) above sea level. As wind-driven clouds encounter this obstacle, they flow around it to form these large, spinning eddies.

“In the same way that a microscope will calibrate your eyesight, computer simulations can re-calibrate your instinct across vast scales of space and time.”

Will Wright

"From about 1956 until 1964, US aeronautics engineers and rocket scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of spherical satellite balloons called, awesomely enough, satelloons. Dubbed Project Echo, the 100-foot diameter aluminumized balloons were one of the inaugural projects for NASA, which was established in 1958."

Visual Poetry 2006—A numerical value is assigned to every letter of the alphabet. Adding the values of all letters, one gets a number that represents the overall word. Using this system, an entire poem is arranged on a circular path. The diameter of the circle is based on the length of the poem.

Bolivian Deforestation — Once a vast carpet of healthy vegetation and virgin forest, the Amazon rain forest is changing rapidly. This image of Bolivia shows dramatic deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Loggers have cut long paths into the forest, while ranchers have cleared large blocks for their herds. Fanning out from these clear-cut areas are settlements built in radial arrangements of fields and farms. Healthy vegetation appears bright red in this image.

Jordan
Wadis combine to form dense, branching networks across the landscape of southeastern Jordan. The Arabic word "wadi" means a gully or streambed that typically remains dry except after drenching, seasonal rains.

Ocean Sand, Bahamas
Satellite image of the sands and seaweed in the Bahamas. Tides and ocean currents in the Bahamas sculpted the sand and seaweed beds into these multicolored, fluted patterns in much the same way that winds sculpted the vast sand dunes in the Sahara Desert.

Whirlpool in the Air
A spinning formation of ice, clouds, and low-lying fog off the eastern coast of Greenland.

The Atlas moth (Attacus atlas) is a large saturniid moth found in the tropical and subtropical forests of Southeast Asia, southern China, common across the Malay archipelago, Thailand to Indonesia.

“Fractals represent a new geometry that mirrors the universe.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that approximate fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, and snow flakes.

Free Spirit Spheres via Everyone Forever

Marius Watz: Generative systems written in Processing were used to create 3D polygon models, which were then output as STL files. The actual object was produced at the RP lab at the Oslo School of Architecture.

The Japanese Typeface Collection includes 1650 typefaces from 18 foundries, with typesetting examples and detailed technical notes.

Trees, artificially seperated from nature.
Via Everyone Forever

Sun transit - more here

Ferns are fractal in nature and can be modeled on a computer by using a recursive algorithm. A frond from a fern is a miniature replica of the whole: not identical, but similar in nature.

Cymatics (the study of wave phenomena) is a science pioneered by Swiss medical doctor and natural scientist Hans Jenny (1904-1972). For 14 years he conducted experiments animating inert powders, pastes, and liquids into life-like, flowing forms, which mirrored patterns found throughout nature, art and architecture.

These Football drawings show the ball movements during a soccer game as viewed from above. The first drawings were produced in 1982. Via VC.

Photographer Giles Revell reveals hidden realities through reinterpretations of nature.\

Miami-based Jen Stark displays striking, hand-made sculptures built with multi-colored construction paper.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller

Fat car. Austrian artist Erwin Wurm (1954). Photo via the Hi! Feed.

Space biology 01 / Robert Hodgin

Space biology 03 / Robert Hodgin

Space biology 04 / Robert Hodgin

From Pingmag: Frederic Chaubin takes photos in places like Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Georgia and reveals an extraordinary sci-fi world.

A green cauliflower, in the B. oleracea Botrytis group, called "Romanesco" has been commercially available in Europe since about 1990. Its head is an example of a fractal image in nature, repeating itself in self-similarity at varying scales. (Wikipedia)

French artist creates mind bending geometric shapes that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.

Heatherwick Studio creates a structure that is a cube punctured by over 5000 long thin windows that project from all its surfaces and lift it off the ground. The cube, which measures 2.4 x 2.4 metres, is precision-machined from 15mm anodised aluminium and the windows are 18mm square-section aluminium tubes glazed with transparent orange acrylic.

A tesseract, also called 8-cell or octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of a (three-dimensional) cube where motion along the fourth dimension is often a representation for bounded transformations of the cube through time.

"Subdivision is the recursive process of dividing a shape into siblings and then dividing those sibling shapes further and so on. Micheal Hansmeyer uses this procedure to create exquisite 2d and 3d crystalline visualisations using Processing." Learn & see more at Data is Nature

Marianne Schnall: You’re also a well known advocate for space migration. What ideas do you have for a future evolution where families migrate in space?

Timothy Leary: Well, in the 1970s there was a big civilian movement for space migration. What happened was that in 1980 Ronald Reagan took NASA over and made it very military and Star Wars.

Since that time, cyberspace is taking the place of intergalactic space. We are going to migrate from the planet, I have no doubt about that, but it’s not going to happen as soon as we had hoped. And in the meantime, the way to get ready for this is build up communities of people from different countries who share cyberspace.

It’s a very interesting comment that they call it cyberspace. In other words, this new electronic environment that you can visit, which in some ways is analogous to going out into real space out there in Jupiter and Mars – they call it cyberspace. This is a very interesting metaphor.

I’d just like to see
thinking come back
in style —

I haven’t heard a new idea in eight years. (...) You are the hottest, sexiest, most empowered generation ever. You’re in charge of your own evolution now that we’ve deciphered the DNA code. The future is going to be different. You can’t be bought off because there are just too many of you. You can make the world into anything you want. Open up the all the world’s future possibilities. —Tim Leary