ferkeltongs

half puzzle, half tree

2009-12-09T23:44:02Z

Here's our Christmas tree:

(That's Turtle in the blurry atmospheric shot.)

The tree slots together, and packs flat. I made it out of plywood. Here's the Google SketchUp model, including the cutting layout:

(click to download)

The five pieces in the middle shot are the only ones that are glued together. The others slot into each other when assembled.

Materials:
- plywood sheet (903mm x 608mm x 3mm)
- wood glue
- wood primer
- toy safe enamel paint (brown and dark green)

Tools:
- hacksaw (one that can rotate the blade to cut sideways)
- drill (to start the slots)
- sandpaper
- paintbrush

Making stuff is fun! Especially projects like this where it doesn't matter too much if it all goes wrong. (Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the tree's 'branches' are the wrong way up in the photos! The plan was correct, just not my execution...)

L'Origine Nascosta

2009-11-09T15:17:28Z

Another post mentioning Ludovico Einaudi...

Below is a spectrogram of L'Origine Nascosta ("the hidden source") from his album Divenire ("to become").

Time goes from left to right (the song is just over 3 minutes long) while frequency (pitch) increases from the bottom to the top of the picture. You can see individual piano notes (red patches) followed by reverberation (blue-green streaks).

It's a delicate piano piece but with an extraordinary orchestral swelling in the middle which you can clearly see in the image above.

(Sound analysis by Overtone Analyzer Live 1.1.1.)

put a blanket over your head

2009-10-26T14:09:20Z

If you're two years old, and even if you're not, possibly the most fun you can have is to put a blanket over your head. Especially if someone's under there with you, you can tickle them unexpectedly, or just look at each other and laugh in the strange pink and orange light. You can pretend to hide from everyone else in the room, and giggle as they pretend to look for you and pretend not to hear you giggling.

I don't have any photos but now in my head is a group of neurons forever dedicated to keeping alive the memory of sitting on the floor on Saturday with Turtle and Monkey, all of us hiding under a blanket, while Divenire played in the background. It was that thing again.

Uno

2009-10-20T12:20:10Z

(My obsession with Ludovico Einaudi continues...)

The first track on his album Divenire is called Uno. It's just piano and loops, pretty minimalist (as he has been described but doesn't describe himself). Especially in the middle it sounds like nothing so much as Radiohead's Pyramid Song.

Compare:

Uno (ignore the ridiculous Lego video!)
Pyramid Song

It's nice to get confused about genres.

(I've just booked tickets to go and see Einaudi perform in Birmingham!)

Nightbook

2009-10-07T09:18:57Z

They played this on Classic FM this morning. Wow.

It's the title track from Ludovico Einaudi's new album Nightbook. (Rhythmic intertwined piano and cello; cinematic modern classical music, about halfway between Philip Glass and Michael Nyman to my uneducated ears.)

(source)

Truchet Tiles

2009-09-24T16:56:38Z

"Truchet tiles are cute."

Simply tile this image in either of two orientations:

Here's an interactive demonstration: http://miriam-english.org/articles/truchet.html (enable javascript)

A monk called Sébastien Truchet invented this in 1704. He also created an early version of Times New Roman.

More info on Truchet tiles here: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TruchetTiling.html

The Milky Way

2009-09-17T16:33:15Z

When I was a kid I used to love the nights when it was clear enough to see the Milky Way as an arch across the sky, a bit like this:

(source)

I remember wondering why it was lumpy and not smooth.

Now with recent photos I've finally realised that the blotchiness is caused by dust clouds blocking the light in patches. In a new panoramic image of the whole thing you can see it very clearly:

(click for high-res)

You can see that the glowing mass of stars behind is a perfect streak of light, with patchy black clouds in front. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy of course but because we're in it ("far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm") it looks like a line, with a bulge in the middle at the centre of the galaxy.

You can see the clouds here too in another galaxy:

(click for high-res)

Ben Goldacre

2009-09-17T09:29:06Z

"I was just some nerd who emailed in a column once a week, but once I was being chased by millionaires it was lagers with the bosses. The editor txted me the other day. To me that is some slightly weird shit."

-- Ben Goldacre, on working for the Guardian while being sued by a South African millionaire.

(source)

This is from a year ago but I'd missed it at the time. In his book he said that a chapter had been removed for legal reasons, and this was it. So hopefully there's a new book coming out soon.

doodles and coral reefs

2009-08-13T16:29:52Z

I was doodling idly on some paper the other day, and things got a bit out of hand because trying to understand what was happening led me into the world of "Schläfli symbols" and hyperbolic geometry, and finally into crochet, coral reefs and curly kale.

Here are the instructions for this particular type of doodle:

1. Draw an n-sided figure.
2. From each corner, extend out more lines until there are p in total coming from that corner.
3. Fill in the gaps between the lines with more n-sided polygons.
4. Repeat from step 2.

Step 1. Let's choose n=5, the pentagon:

Step 2. Let's choose p=3, so we just need to draw one extra line on each corner:

Step 3. We fill in the gaps with more pentagons:

Step 2 again: We add five more lines on the outside where needed:

Step 3 again: We add more pentagons in the gaps. They're a bit stretched but that's ok.

Step 2 again: Oh wait, there are already 3 lines coming from each corner. We can't go any further. The doodling algorithm has come to a stop.

Hmmm... well it's kind of pretty but so what?

Let's do another one, with n=6 (hexagons). Step 1:

Step 2: extend one more line from each corner:

Step 3: join the lines up with more hexagons:

Step 2 again: more lines:

Step 3 again: more hexagons:

We're drawing a honeycomb, and can continue this for as long as we want - unlike the pentagon case this one goes on forever without ever coming to a stop.

Let's try one more, with n=7 (heptagons). Step 1:

Step 2: extend a line from each corner:

Step 3: join the lines up with heptagons:

Step 2 again: extend a line from each corner that needs one:

Step 3 again: fill in the gaps with heptagons.

Wow that's a lot of heptagons already. Let's stop there.

With n=7 and greater it quickly gets hard to draw because there are too many polygons around the outside. It's not like the n=6 case where the tiling was nice and regular. You can draw the n=7 case on a piece of paper but only by making the outer polygons get smaller and smaller, or more and more stretched. Wikipedia has a page with the same drawing here and tells us that the method of making the polygons get smaller and smaller is called the Poincaré disk model for rendering hyperbolic geometry. It also tells us that this tiling is given the Schläfli symbol {7,3} because n=7 and p=3.

Let's try one last one, with n=4 (still with p=3 lines from each corner). Step 1:

Step 2: extend lines from each corner:

Step 3: join up the lines with squares (well, squashed squares):

Step 2 again: nothing to do, every corner already has 3 lines coming out.

There's something familiar about this image - it looks like a cube. And now when you think about it the finished n=5 image at the top looks like a flattened dodecahedron. Those two doodles ended up by closing in on themselves (much like the way clathrin does when it assembles itself). But for n=6 you get a flat plane, while the n=7 graph gets all jammed up at the edges. There's something very odd going on.

Let's make a table of what happens for different values of n and p:

p (number of lines coming from each point)	n (number of sides on each polygon)
p (number of lines coming from each point)	3	4	5	6	7
3	tetrahedron	cube	dodecahedron	plane	hyperbolic
4	octohedron	plane	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic
5	icosahedron	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic
6	plane	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic
7	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic	hyperbolic

All five platonic solids appear in this table like magic. All three regular tilings of the plane appear too. The rest of the table is all hyperbolic.

(This table isn't my discovery, by the way, it's just the table of Schläfli symbols for regular polygons. But I've never seen it written out in full like this.)

(There's also an interesting symmetry in the table above. Take any two entries that are positioned symmetrically across the diagonal, like {5,3} and {3,5}, the dodecahedron and icosahedron. These shapes/tilings are duals of each other. Entries along the diagonal are self-dual.)

So what is this hyperbolic geometry? It's actually more familiar than you might think. Lettuce is a good example:

(source)

You can take any part of a lettuce leaf and flatten it down, but you can't flatten the whole thing without folding or tearing it. Curly kale is more extreme:

(source)

It gets more and more frilled as you move away from the stalk, just like our heptagons got more and more jammed in. It's closely related to the fractal branching of trees, except that the branches stay joined together by flaps of skin. The veins on a lettuce leaf show this very clearly.

You can make your own hyperbolic geometry by cutting out lots of heptagons from paper and sellotaping them together. The resulting sheet will leap off the table into a frilled form exactly like lettuce. (Instructions and a printable template here.)

Daina Taimina realised that a better way to make these hyperbolic forms is to crochet them:

(source)

Since then Margaret Wertheim and others have been crotchet-ing like crazy, making knitted coral reefs to both draw attention to global warming and demonstrate hyperbolic geometry:

(source)

Her TED talk on the subject is well worth watching, even if none of the mathematics interests you.

ferkeltongs @ 2009-08-11T16:31:00

2009-08-11T15:35:26Z

We're training Turtle to be a Ninja Assassin. Her stealth speciality is to hide behind the clothes horse, and her preferred method of kill is to creep up on people when they are sleeping and jump on them.

Don't say you haven't been warned.

my grandpa's fork

2009-07-27T20:01:19Z

When we started gardening a few years ago, my parents gave me the garden fork that had been my grandpa's. A lovely old wooden thing, quite delicate.

So delicate in fact, that after using it a lot I managed to break it. For a while it sat in a broken state with the other tools, looking sad. And I was sad too. But then recently Turtle was given an old trike, one that had been well-loved and was missing its handle - and so now the old fork handle lives on! You can see it here behind Turtle:

(she doesn't look impressed with Microserfs)

web usage

2009-07-03T11:20:59Z

Here's a graph I hadn't seen before. Browser usage from 1996-2009:

source

Just look at all those people! (Still only a sixth of the world is online though...)

I'm old enough to remember using CompuServe in the early 90's before the web came along, dialling into its proprietary 'forums' which looked much like the web does now but had to be accessed through their own software. Thank god html and www came along, else we might still be stuck using different software for different websites. Hooray for open standards.

Robot sad.

2009-06-18T12:16:44Z

There's something melancholy about this robot trying to find a place to plug itself in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S2dc_B-6Kg

The humans applaud at the end but I don't think the robot is happy. He just looks exhausted.

Notice the bits on plaster on the floor below plug 9, where the robot's febrile stabbing has chipped away at the wall.

The project is from WillowGarage who are the current sponsors of the amazing OpenCV.

(via DVICE)

The Fountain

2009-06-15T14:42:07Z

These are some thoughts about The Fountain. If you haven't seen it yet then please stop reading.

We re-watched it two nights ago. I think it is my favourite film. Certainly in my top 3. Everyone seems to disagree on what it is about, which is a good thing.

It's a sci-fi film (unless you view certain scenes as allegorical) about a tormented man who discovers the fountain of youth (a tree) in South America and thus lives into the far future, forever haunted by memories. Filmed almost entirely without computer graphics, the space scenes (as in the poster above) are astonishingly beautiful. It is Darren Aronofsky's third film, after Pi and Requiem for a Dream.

Hugh Jackman (in the DVD extras interview) said he thought it was about the resolution (on a personal level) of yin-yang dichotomies such as between the Christian Bible's Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge.

For me the film (much like The Matrix) is Buddhist in nature, and captures the ultimate realization that the state of being alive and of being conscious are both merely rearrangements of the atoms of the world, and thus illusory. The main character conquers death both on a personal level and in the real world.

Mnki suggested that the film represents what is common to all religions: the need for a comforting explanation of death. We talked about how religions have evolved with the times and adapted to keep their explanations relevant. Maybe Christianity, as one of the newer religions, has one of the least convincing explanations because it is so obviously a product of modern (two-thousand year old) thinking. She then said: "nobody fully accepts their religion intellectually" which is quite shocking and probably true.

I got a lot more out a second viewing. Much of the photography is heavily coded with colour: gold and white. Other imagery that appears throughout includes a star field (the hanging candles in Spain, the glass of the hospital door) and two lights on either side of the main character that mirror the film's Mayan nebula Xibalba. All of these visual references (and I really don't think I'm over-interpreting this) add to the film's growing sense of impending doom. It's one of those films where knowing what's going to happen can actually enhance its power.

I don't know what I came here to say, other than that I had to write this down. Hello.

How many fingers does an alien have?

2009-06-12T11:04:40Z

Q: How many fingers does an alien have?
A: Ten

I bet this has been asked as an awkward interview question.

ferkeltongs @ 2009-06-03T18:01:00

2009-06-03T17:17:49Z

Hey wow! Steve Grand has read my cells paper. See the comments at the bottom here:
http://stevegrand.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/where-do-those-damn-atoms-go/

His book "Creation: Life and How to Make It" is a really good overview of what artificial life might mean, I've read it several times.

Here's hoping Simbiosis (if it ever gets made) has a decent low-level approach. It could be awesome.

Fukebane

2009-06-03T09:52:28Z

I'm rubbish at typing. My index fingers look like the contestants in the Crystal Maze, frantically grabbing at the shiny bits of paper falling around them.

Here's what my overcaffeinated fingers decided to write today:

GetFukebane

Yes, my right hand was one key to the left of where it should have been. You should be able to work out what I had hoped to type.

Lambs are: Ready? Set? Go!

2009-05-18T09:17:31Z

Being a parent drives you mad sometimes, but in a good way.

Watching children's TV will do it, for example. I find that I love the lyrics to the 'springtime' ident on CBeebies. It has the most ridiculous rhymes:

Birds get busy. 
   Bees get buzzy
Bushes and the hedgerows.
   Start to get all fuzzy

More lyrics, and the video, here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/presenters/music/spring.shtml

(WARNING! Video contains small children dressed as adults.)

The Index

2009-04-20T09:00:57Z

In tribute to J. G. Ballard I'd like to share this story of his.

It's called 'The Index', and you can read it online:

(This loads Amazon's `look inside' feature (needs javascript). Click on the link on the left: 'Index'.)

The story takes the form of an index of a (non-existent) book. You can work out what happens to the main character (HRH) through the references listed. Fortunately he lives his life in a remarkably alphabetical order.

There's a review and explanation of the story here:
http://www.ballardian.com/indexed-out-of-existence

The amusing thing is that Amazon don't seem to have realised that they've actually made one of his stories available - they think they've uploaded the actual index of 'War Fever', the volume in which the story appears. This mistake is itself a tribute to Ballard, in a way.

new song

2009-04-09T09:18:45Z

Without any meaning
We're just skin and bone
Like beautiful robots dancing alone

Girls Aloud - Untouchable

I think I must confess that for a while now I have secretly been a fan of Girls Aloud. They've done some great songs. (I mean OK it's meaningless pop but that's what pop should be.)

Skyscraper turbines

2009-04-02T12:21:14Z

I thought this was some sci-fi concept image when I first saw it.

But it's real and working! Here's the video:

(source article, via DVICE)

The article says it will operate for 50% of the time (presumably they're a bit noisy for daytime office workers?) and will generate 11-15% of the building's electricity needs.

curves plus rules

2009-03-27T14:24:46Z

(source)

Chris Carlson explores the design space of a simple graphical ruleset in an excellent post on the Wolfram Blog (which spends most of its time advertising Mathematica but occasionally gives us gems like this).

He has discovered a system that resonates well with the human imagination, like Richard Dawkins' Biomorphs do.

He rounds it off with an awesome Picasso quote: "Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance."

Combat guinea pigs!

2009-03-26T20:42:38Z

G-Force:

(I work for Eurocom. This game comes out in July, along with the Disney film of the same name.)

ferkeltongs @ 2009-03-20T09:49:00

2009-03-20T09:56:52Z

So we managed to leave the car with just the marmot. A few steps later though she asked for turtle, so we had to go back for it. She can't be fooled so easily.

Off we go again but then she remembers her dog, so I give her her dog and her lion and of course I have to carry them for her because four animals is really too many for anyone to carry.

She couldn't have been happier going into nursery. She walked over to the sand table where the other toddlers were playing and by the time she got there the marmot and turtle were on the floor behind her, forgotten.

(Our own baby Turtle likes to take her toy animals to work with her.)

Pamela's back!

2009-03-06T11:22:18Z

Pamela's back and she's angry:

"TomTom will get the community's support. It has mine. I came out of my semi-retirement, so to speak, where I was basically closing Groklaw down, thinking it wasn't needed any more. Now I'm here, and we'll be covering this case a la our coverage of SCO v. the World. TomTom will not be standing alone."

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090304114657350

(an actual photo)

(Microsoft are suing TomTom, and many people see this as an attack on Linux. SCO was a long-running anti-Linux court case that recently finished.)