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mefi
The Mandelbulb
"The original
Mandelbrot is an amazing object that has captured the public's imagination for 30 years. It's found by following a relatively simple math formula. But in the end, it's still only 2D and flat - there's no depth, shadows, perspective, or light sourcing. What we have featured in this article is a potential 3D version of the same fractal."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 10:06 AM on November 12, 2009
(117 comments)
A (mostly) vegetarian spider:
"A small jumping spider has taken to hunting plants instead of bugs. Bagheera kiplingi dodges throngs of aggressive ants to feast on the leaf-tip morsels of acacia shrubs, making it the first mostly vegetarian spider known to science."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 5:54 PM on October 13, 2009
(37 comments)
The Revolutionary
"Consider, then, the Fosbury Flop, an upside-down and backward leap over a high bar, an outright—an outrageous!—perversion of acceptable methods of jumping over obstacles. An absolute departure in form and technique. It was an insult to suggest, after all these aeons, that there had been a better way to get over a barrier all along. And if there were, it ought to have come from a coach, a professor of kinesiology, a biomechanic, not an Oregon teenager of middling jumping ability."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 6:57 PM on September 14, 2009
(27 comments)
Colombia Confronts Drug Lord’s Legacy: Hippos
"In what ecologists describe as possibly the continent’s most ambitious effort to assemble a collection of species foreign to South America, Escobar imported animals like zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses and, of course, hippopotamuses. Some of the animals died or were transferred to zoos around the time Mr. Escobar was killed. But the hippos largely stayed put, flourishing in the artificial lakes dug at Mr. Escobar’s behest."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 11:11 AM on September 11, 2009
(86 comments)
Glass Microbiology
"These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the doctoring of scientific imagery affects our visualization of phenomena."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 4:21 PM on September 3, 2009
(9 comments)
The foreign exchange student
"Some years ago we had a foreign exchange student come to live with us. We found it very difficult to pronounce his name correctly, but he didn’t mind. He told us just to call him 'Eric'." A short story in pictures by
Shaun Tan.
Previously.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 8:26 AM on July 27, 2009
(38 comments)
An Outsider's View
"Over the past fifty years, factions of biologists have had a complex relationship. Some scientists have continued to carry out relatively traditional natural history work, with little need to delve into molecular (or computational) biology. Others have given little attention to natural history, focusing their efforts instead on deciphering the complexities of a membrane channel, or building new algorithms for identifying open reading frames. In some cases, biologists have bridged this divide, and the result has been a fruitful collaboration. But in other cases—such as the DNA studies on whales and hippos—one group moves into the other's traditional territory, sparking new conflict."[
via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 3:18 PM on July 22, 2009
(12 comments)
The Quality-Control Quandary
"As newspapers shed copy editors and post more and more unedited stories online, what’s the impact on their content?" [
via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 6:20 AM on July 8, 2009
(23 comments)
How does our language shape our thinking?
:"What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 8:52 AM on June 25, 2009
(101 comments)
Getting up to speed
: "If it can get started, the California high-speed train would almost certainly be the most expensive single infrastructure project in United States history. Judging by the experiences of Japan and France, both of which have mature high-speed rail systems, it would end the expansion of regional airline traffic as in-state travelers increasingly ride the fast trains. And it would surely slow the growth of highway traffic."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 7:04 PM on June 14, 2009
(77 comments)
"The Boyle Family
are a family of collaborative artists based in London. Their best known work, however, continues to be their Journey to the Surface of the Earth. Begun in 1964, this work encompasses many different series. Each of these series has involved various random selection techniques to isolate a rectangle of the Earth's surface. In the case of the World Series 1000 random selections were made from
a giant map of the world by blindfolded visitors. Once the random selection has been made, they recreate the site in a fixed and permanent form as a painted fibreglass relief. They recognise that each work is, in a sense, a failure. They know the selections can never be truly random and that it is impossible to eliminate themselves and their own subjective influences."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 8:23 PM on February 17, 2009
(3 comments)
The Lecture System in Teaching Science
"Meanwhile, back at the classroom, the lecture is drawing to a close. Just as the bell rings, the lecturer, if he's a really smooth operator, comes to the end of a sentence, a paragraph, a nice neat unit. He lays down his last piece of chalk — he knows exactly how many pieces the lecture will take — picks up his precious lecture notes, and goes out. The students, tired but happy, rise up and follow after him. Their heads are empty, but their notebooks are full. Their necks are a little tired; it's been like a sort of vertical tennis match: board, notebook, board, notebook. But other than that, everything is all right. Any student will tell you, "I never had any trouble with the course until the first examination."" [
via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 7:34 PM on February 6, 2009
(63 comments)
Khoda
:"What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired
Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 5:45 PM on January 20, 2009
(41 comments)
People of the Screen
: "Digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming
people of the screen, not people of the book?"
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 9:22 PM on January 16, 2009
(31 comments)
The Hellstrom Chronicle
"The film posits a theory any science fiction buff would glom onto in a second—that dominion over the world will come down to a battle between two classes of Kingdom Animalia, Man and insects, and that insects will win."
Watch on youtube, 11 parts.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 5:38 PM on December 29, 2008
(35 comments)
The SERPENT project
Collaborating closely with key players in the oil and gas industry, the SERPENT project aims to make cutting-edge industrial
ROV technology and data more accessible to the world's science community, share knowledge and progress deep-sea research.
Galleries, video of rare
elbowed squid.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 9:48 PM on November 24, 2008
(5 comments)
2008 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge
"The
winners -- in categories including photography, illustration, informational graphics, and multimedia -- captured the crystalline beauty of diatoms, the expanse of the human circulatory system, a fairy tale tea party re-invented, and the dynamic life of a plant cell." (
previously)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 11:01 AM on September 26, 2008
(5 comments)
A new whale anti-collision system
"A remarkable feature of Andre's system is its ability to single out and track an individual whale among all its “family” members in the same area – a breakthrough made with the help of a West African musician. In attempting to unravel the chaotic rhythms of the sperm whale clicks, he was struck by the similarity between his underwater recordings and African tribal music. A Senegalese griot (drummer) confirmed the likeness and – amazingly – was able to pick individual whales from André’s recordings through their distinctive rhythmic structures."
[via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 9:43 AM on September 12, 2008
(11 comments)
Genome Quilts
"The quilts are visually pleasing, with their strong colors and seemingly traditional design, but they hide and reveal an entirely other construct of information." [
via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 8:08 AM on September 5, 2008
(8 comments)
Khaufpur
is a city of approaching a million souls situated at the absolute centre of India. The lakes around which our city is built were made a thousand years ago. Since that time the city was lost in jungles, rediscovered and
rebuilt. Again in the lifetime of those living, a terrible
calamity came upon this city, but again it has risen and continues toward a future filled with promise.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 11:28 PM on July 14, 2008
(13 comments)
Mexican Aerophones
are wind musical instruments or artifacts that can generate sounds or noise with air jets and one or several resonator chambers of globular, tubular and other shapes. Roberto Velasquez, a mechanical engineer, has
recreated some of these aerophones. Example sounds:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5 (.wav files)
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 1:28 AM on July 1, 2008
(6 comments)
State of decay
:"Over the years, Boston artist
Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered objects, like termite-eaten books and fish skeletons."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 10:36 PM on May 28, 2008
(6 comments)
Keyboard calligraphy
"To produce such a typeface, Müteferrika knew he had to analyze Arabic script. Calligraphers might learn to make the correctly shaped letter combinations by practice, without conscious application of tens of thousands of rules, but for machine reproduction of the script, deciphering those rules was exactly what was essential."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 12:25 AM on May 1, 2008
(28 comments)
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu
doesn't speak much, but when he takes up his guitar, he
sings, literally and figuratively. He sings of growing up in an Aboriginal community on a remote island off the north coast of Australia; he sings of coming to terms with being born blind; and he sings the creation stories of his
Yolngu people.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 4:34 PM on April 22, 2008
(19 comments)
Eviction Slip
:"In the spring of 2003 about 8,000 tribal people and low-caste farmers living in the Kuno area of Madhya Pradesh, India, were summarily uprooted from the rich farmlands they had cultivated for generations and moved to 24 villages on scrub land outside the borders of a sanctuary created for a pride of six imported Asiatic lions."[
via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 5:46 PM on April 16, 2008
(4 comments)
Identity crisis in scientific publishing
:"Chinese authors are publishing more and more papers, but are they receiving due credit and recognition for their work? Not if their names get confused along the way."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 5:22 PM on April 13, 2008
(40 comments)
The Mexican kitchen's Islamic connection
:"When Mexico’s leading writer, Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz, arrived in New Delhi in 1962 to take up his post as ambassador to India, he quickly ran across a culinary puzzle. Although Mexico and India were on opposite sides of the globe, the brown, spicy, aromatic curries that he was offered in India sparked memories of Mexico’s national dish, mole (pronounced MO-lay). Is mole, he wondered, “an ingenious Mexican version of curry, or is curry a Hindu adaptation of a Mexican sauce ?” How could this seeming coincidence of “gastronomic geography” be explained ?"
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 11:18 PM on April 9, 2008
(53 comments)
Can scientists dance?
"No one quite knew what to expect as the lights came up on a pair of astrophysicists dressed as binary galaxies. The rowdy audience of scientists exploded with applause. The world's first Dance Your Ph.D. Contest was off to a good start."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 10:59 PM on March 8, 2008
(18 comments)
The Synchronicity Project
Since 2005, Japanese art director Jun Tsuzuki has been running a project he calls Synchronicity, where he asks people all over the world to take a picture of what they are doing at a pre-determined moment in time. [
via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 5:19 PM on February 21, 2008
(9 comments)
A Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems
"What happens in the vast stretches of the world's oceans - both wondrous and worrisome - has too often been out of sight, out of mind. The goal of the research presented here is to estimate and visualize, for the first time, the global impact humans are having on the ocean's ecosystems."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 5:15 PM on February 14, 2008
(20 comments)
Map Paintings
by
Paula Scher: “These are absolutely, one hundred percent inaccurate,” Paula Scher declares of her colossal map paintings. Then, after a pause: “But not on purpose.” Another pause: they’re actually “sort of right.” [
via]
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 4:58 PM on November 12, 2007
(10 comments)
How to say "I love you"
"(42) Inappropriately, to a coworker who is already sleeping with another coworker. (43) With a heart filled with lies. (44) With a she puppet and a you puppet. (45) As she leaves for Spain with your much better-looking brother. (46) At Thanksgiving, to her twin sister, by accident."
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 8:41 PM on November 8, 2007
(41 comments)
Brazilian Ethnomapping:
Inside a thatched-roof schoolhouse in a village deep in Brazil's Amazon rain forest, Surui Indians and former military cartographers huddle over the newest weapons in the tribe's fight for survival: laptop computers,
satellite maps and hand-held global positioning systems.
Some of the
resulting maps.
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva
at 1:10 AM on October 11, 2007
(6 comments)
