Monday, 15 October 2012

No victory without war

"...those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war." - William S. Burroughs

Thursday, 11 October 2012

We are specks in the vasty deep


http://htwins.net/scale2 is an excellent tool for exploring the scale of the universe. I think we may have blogged an earlier version on this blog. I love that here are many stars out there whose diameter is (much) bigger than the distance from the earth to the sun. Puts things into some kind of weird perspective.

Tuesday, 9 October 2012

Euler's Samba



Music based directly on the famous Euler equation. The original poster's notes follow:

"The Magic 5 Constants: Pi = bass; e = piano; i, for 'practical' reasons the square root of 2 for this sonification, = trumpet and sax; 1 & 0 = metal mallets; 1 = whistle and, of course, 0 = the cuica.

There's a part of me that says this video is too full of gratuitous graphics and it tips the sound/visual balance too much to the visual. I mean, dancing fonts? On the other hand, Euler wrote over 500 books in his lifetime (yes, 500!) and his work touches on nearly everything modern, e.g., electronics, hydrodynamics, elasticity, radio transmission, networks, etc. So, I picked the fonts and their movement with that happy thought in mind."

Monday, 8 October 2012

Rose’s Law for Quantum Computers

" the very near future should be the watershed moment, where quantum computers surpass conventional computers and never look back. Moore’s Law cannot catch up." The amazing scaling of quantum computing!