MetaFilter posts tagged with Zeno

Hanover Historical Texts Project

Kattullus — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:53:27 -0800

Hanover Historical Texts Project is a collection of primary source texts from ancient times to the modern era in English translation. There is a great number of interesting texts, for instance accounts of Zeno, he of the paradoxes, the diary of Lady Sarashina, a lady-in-waiting in Heian era Japan, a letter from Count Stephen of Blois and Chartres, a crusader writing to his wife, Arthur Young's travels in France before and during the Revolution, a report by the American ambassador in St. Petersburg on March 20th, 1917, immediately after the February Revolution, and finally Petrarch's letter about his graphomania. That last one is from what is perhaps my favorite part of the website, a trove of Petrarch's Familiar Letters. But there's much more in the Hanover Historical Texts Projects besides what I've mentioned.

This view of time does not look encouraging for time travelers

finite — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:01:11 -0800

The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an object’s speed as its displacement per a given time. But some researchers theorize that this Newtonian idea of time as an absolute quantity that flows on its own, along with the idea that time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, are incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a view that corresponds more accurately to the physical world: time as a measure of the numerical order of change.

Music is Math is Beauty

filthy light thief — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:52:24 -0800

Glenn Marshall is an Irish computer video artist and musician whose recent work has focused on audio visualization programed in the Processing language. Generally the program is left to its own devices, though his work-for-hire has more intentional design, as in his video for the Peter Gabriel song "The Nest that Sailed the Sky." Marshall has also been hired to create video for Guinness for Sky TV and the Rugby Six Nations Tournament, and a looping animation for Hermes of Paris. Marshall discusses his works with some detail on his blog. (More videos inside) The tree-like visuals employ his ZenO process, as seen in following videos: Music Is Math (unfinished) (3:15) first animation in Processing. Inspired by the Boards of Canada track 'Music is Math' from Geogaddi (blog post) The 'Mandela' Variation (3:45) variation of 'Music is Math,' using Nelson Mandela's prison number as the seed value (blog post) Music is Math (final version) (5:24) "I just let the program run till the end of the music" (blog post) Metamorphosis (2:49) based on Boards of Canada's 'Corsair,' also from Geogaddi (blog post) Radiohead - 'Bodysnatchers' (4:11) song from In Rainbows. Marshall's first attempt at music visualization (blog post) Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake suite (5:45) entirely generative/audio reactive animation, i.e. no keyframing or manual input or editing (blog post) The Nest That Sailed The Sky (test) (5:06) Music by Peter Gabriel, from his album OVO – The Millennium Show (Millennium Dome, London) (blog post) The Nest That Sailed The Sky (final) (5:07) with three extra visual ideas from photos from the original album shoot: single cells, an empty nest, trails of red berries (blog post) Hermes window display animation (1:06) the first of a couple of commercial projects that employed Marshall's 'zeno' animation system (blog post) Other videos: Marbles (1:29) an early study/realism piece - a nostalgic homage to classic computer raytracing (blog post) Landscapes (4:49) a test made with Terragen, music by Ligeti; inspired by Kubrick and Koyaanisqatsi cinematography (blog post) Latte-mation (1:15) a test done with 3ds Max and After Effects (blog post) Butterfly (10:00) Marshall's first short film, commissioned by the Irish Film Board in 2002, which made rounds at film fests (blog post) The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus (4:45) a short animated guide to Buddhist breath meditation, with narration adapted from a talk given by Ajahn Brahm (blog post) Animated Guinness from Fractals (1:26) "One of my few minor claims in life is the first to animate Guinness for TV, and all using math" (blog post) The Red Rose of Newcastle (2:58) a short film commissioned for a regional BBC series called Days Like This (blog post) Work with Peter Gabriel: The Drop (3:08) first music video, for Peter Gabriel, made in 2003 - made on his own time, but eventually included on an official DVD, and paid for his time. The song is from the album Up (blog post) Quiet Steam (6:27) second video for Peter Gabriel, a b-side track from Digging In The Dirt (blog post) Visuals for 'No Self Control' (live recording) (4:38) which consists lots of Processing work (procedural animation) and sequences from some of ‘Butterfly’ (blog post) Glenn Marshall is now working on two projects: a Graphic Synthesizer program that uses the same principles of wave synthesis but to generate changing images, (blog posts 1, 2, 3 and Graphic Synthesiser Demo (3:51), 4, 5) and an iPhone App (blog post 1, 2 and iPhone App Test #1 video (1:06))

Student Challenges Basic Ideas of Time

Pinwheel — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 07:20:15 -0800

A bold paper published in the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters seems set to change the way we think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics. The work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno's paradoxes. (Via Kurzweilai.net. More inside...)