Sunday, March 23, 2014

Sierpiński Gasket

The Sierpiński Gasket, is a fractal with the overall shape of an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. What's more interesting is, it has a Hausdorff dimension of log 3/log 2 = 1.583... (as fractals exist in between whole dimensions) and has zero area!





Saturday, March 22, 2014

The Busy Heart

The Busy Heart
by
Rupert Brooke

Now that we've done our best and worst, and parted,
I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;
And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;
And the young heavens, forgetful after rain;
And evening hush, broken by homing wings;
And Song's nobility, and Wisdom holy,
That live, we dead. I would think of a thousand things,
Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,
One after one, like tasting a sweet food.
I have need to busy my heart with quietude. 




Monday, March 10, 2014

Take Me Into Your Skin

I met Trentemøller on Pandora radio by way of Mike Oldfield. The dark electronic music of this Danish composer pulled me into another mystical world I have not been to in a very long time. Very exhiliratingly refreshing indeed!




Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Unfiltered Human Thoughts

I just watched and was blown away by Mary Lou Jepsen's Ted Talk about the experimental work they've been working on to bring out mental imagery to a computer screen. It is very promising to see how close to perfection they are. Her proposal about using stronger magnets rather than larger magnets and utilizing complex magnetic field patterns to construct clearer images from our minds is absolutely brilliant! It is worth considering her questions and the implications of the potential answers:

"Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate  directly with human thought?" "How would we deal with unfiltered human thoughts?"





Saturday, March 1, 2014

Science Non-fiction

A team of scientists from Australia, South Korea, Canada, Turkey and China  led by the University of Texas at Dallas found a way to convert fishing lines and threads into powerful artificial muscles that are capable of lifting a hundred times more weight and generate a hundred times higher mechanical power than the same length and weight of human muscle. Among the wide potential applications of these artificial muscles would be robots with superhuman powers to tackle tasks where humans fall short.