Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Bleigiessen
Yesterday my colleagues and I took part in the monthly guided tour of the new Wellcome Trust building on London's Euston Road. The main point of the visit was a chance to get up close and personal with the seven stories of Thomas Heatherwick's Bleigiessen installation.
Bleigiessen is described on the Wellcome trust page as follows:
Consisting of 150 000 specially processed glass spheres, suspended on almost one million metres of fine stainless steel wire, the sculpture glows with a constantly shifting rainbow of colours. This effect was created through a unique process of sandwiching reflective 'dichroic' film within the glass.
The form of the sculpture has been derived, through the use of 3-D computer modelling, from the twisted shape of a drop of molten metal, which cooled and solidified as it fell through tumbling water. The aim was to produce a sinuous, curvaceous form with variety, so that it would look different from each of the building's nine floors.
So Bleigiessen's organic forms turn out to be from a happy accident with molten metal, rather than the DNA or biological roots I had naively assumed given its Wellcome Trust connections. I like that. More background on Heatherwick in this great PingMag feature.
Since it's on UCL's doorstep, I've admired the sculpture from the pavement several times before, and I wasn't alone in having my nose pressed up against the glass when it was under construction. Inside though, the ambition and scope of the work becomes clear.
Bleigiessen's thousands of steel cables render its interior an obscure and enticing mystery, strobing in and out of view as the layers of cables overlap. To me sculpture is art manifest by space and requiring movement to explore and enjoy it, and so Bleigiessen is the anti-sculpture in that it demands stillness from its viewer. Tilt your head up and down to take it all in, by all means, but don't cross its overwhelming verticality.
Well worth the trip, the only downside is that the fast and smooth glass lifts don't linger alongside it for long enough. Tours are currently running on the last Friday of every month, the Wellcome Trust site has the details.
Biomapping Sketch
I've been looking at some of the data from Christian Nold's Biomapping project.
This new applet is a visualisation of GPS data from people walking on the Greenwich peninsula. The height of the mesh is a measure of GSR (Galvanic Skin Response, related to stress levels) at that point. See the Biomapping FAQ for more details, and note the emphasis on personal interpretation. Since I didn't split out the individual walks from the sample data this shouldn't really be considered an accurate map of stress in Greenwich!
Come The Apocalypse: Fortress Iceland?
With it's vast geo-thermal energy surplus, Iceland is set to abandon any last dependencies on oil. This begs the question - what other dependencies does Iceland have?
Given an inevitable distopian Mad Max/Waterworld type future, then what things should Iceland be stock-piling now? Could they grow enough food? Should they be hoarding electrical components, battery acid, pipes for steam power, or are they doomed like the rest of us?
Come the apocalypse, nations/regions will play to their strengths - will places like Iceland become impenetrable fortresses of power, winning the energy wars by situation and living the 20th century's sustainable-unsustainable lifestyle against all the odds?
On the other hand, Phil Gyford sensed a "seductive illusion of self-sufficiency" about the Falklands in his recent trip. Would Fortress Iceland be like that? Is energy enough?
Tethered Freedom
John Maeda, "Look Mom, No Batteries!" / Jan Chipchase, The Power of Not Charging / Sam Brown, in the future we won't need cables
What a difference a digg makes
My tube map is getting so much attention it brought the server to a crawl*, thanks to links from Digg.com and Spiegel.de.
Digg seems to be living up to its reputation as a cross between metafilter and slashdot - good content bubbles up very often, but the comments are overwhelmingly inane and the hastiness to declare a link a dupe gets in the way of actually looking at it. One user claimed to have seen my tube map a month ago, which is impossible since it only barely went live a week ago. Of course, they were mixing me up with Oskar Karlin's map, but they could have found that out by reading my applet page for 30 seconds or so.
Interestingly, Digg also seems to be sending roughly ten times as much traffic per digg than del.icio.us sends per bookmark, but perhaps that's a network effect which comes into play once you hit the front page?
*Big thanks to Mikel Maron for mirroring it in the meantime.
Being In The Know
Somebody just emailed me and asked me about Processing sites that aren't commonly known. It's a difficult question to answer, but if you're just starting out with Processing, here are a couple of tips.
- I can't emphasise enough how useful the Processing.org discourse section is. Anyone can join the forum and post questions, and there are several regulars (myself included) who enjoy helping out wherever they can. I learnt a lot from that forum in a very short space of time, and you could too! Psst! It's also worth noting that I won't answer questions by email, but I answer questions on the forum all the time. Likewise, the Processing.org Frequently Asked Questions really could solve a lot of your initial headaches.
- This blog, and any others I can find, are syndicated at Processing Blogs. Subscribe to our RSS/Atom feed (what?) and keep up with our latest experiments, events, rants, raves and off-topic meanderings...
- Searching for "Built with Processing" on Google gets you to all the pages which haven't changed Processing's default html link (and there are lots!).
- I keep links at del.icio.us/TomC/processing.org, and the full del.icio.us/tag/processing.org feed is well worth watching. (Processing's own Casey Reas also has well-organised and focused links, and Generator.x's tagged links are good for a wider view of the scene - Processing and beyond).
- In London, dorkbotlondon is a popular event for several Processing-friendly people - your local dorkbot might be similarly receptive to Processing show and tell.
- Finally, Rich Hauck's CodeTree is shaping up to be an interesting resource for Processing and Flash hackers alike, and I encourage you to try submitting some work there and see what people think.
Just remember that Processing is designed as a teaching language so there will always be more newbies than experts. You should never be embarrassed to ask questions - I can guarantee that they won't be as dumb as you think!
King’s Cross Stories #1
He was brushed aside by a young gentlemen in a hurry, who ran accross the usual flow of lunchtime pedestrians and purposefully deposited a coffee cup in the gutter. His assertion - that it's not litter now - went unchallenged.
Sufficiently Advanced Technology
"Within a few years, electronically controlled insects carrying mini-cameras or other sensory devices could be used for a variety of sensitive missions - like crawling through earthquake rubble to search for victims, or slipping under doors on espionage surveillance."
-- Robot Gossip, via WMMNA.
"Moody reached into the jar, caught one of the spiders and held it in the palm of his hand so they could all see it. Then he pointed his wand at it, and muttered, 'Imperio!' The spider leapt from Moody’s hand on a fine thread of silk, and began to swing backwards and forwards as though on a trapeze. It stretched out its legs rigidly, then did a back flip, breaking the thread and landing on the desk, where it began to cartwheel in circles. Moody jerked his wand, and the spider rose onto two of its hind legs and went into what was unmistakably a tap dance."
-- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling.
Fearlessness
As my Christmas break comes to an end, I'm catching up on some recommended reading. I've picked up a copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I'm glad I did.
In the small amount of teaching I've been doing over at The Bartlett's MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation, I've emphasised the need for programmers to be fearless symbol manipulators, fearless text editors - much as students well-schooled in calculus become fearless with algebra and equations, and students well-schooled in drawing become fearless sketchers and draftsmen. Once you're literate in coding constructs (variables, loops, conditionals, data structures, etc.) they become a framework on which you can hang your ideas - the real work if you will.
Neal Stephenson's Isaac Newton is a parametric modeller, a master of bottom up systems. He doesn't care for constructing geometries where he can generate them. Furthermore, his discoveries are powered by his effortless, fearless manipulation of algebra:
"In explaining why those curves were as they were, the Fellows of Cambridge would instictively use Euclid's geometry: the earth is a sphere. Its orbit around the sun is an ellipse - you get an ellipse by constructing a vast imaginary cone in space and then cutting through it with an imaginary plane; the intersection of the cone and the plane is an ellipse. Beginning with these primitive objects (viz. the tiny sphere revolving around the place where the gigantic cone was cut by the imaginary plane), these geometers would add on more spheres, cones, planes, lines, and other elements - so many that if you could look up and see 'em, the heavens would turn nearly black with them - until at last they had found a way to account for the curves that Newton had drawn on the wall. Along the way, every step would be verified by applying one or the other of the rules that Euclid had proved to be true, two thousand years ago, in Alexandria, where everyone had been a genius.Isaac hadn't studied Euclid that much, and hadn't cared enough to study him well. If he wanted to work with a curve he would instinctively write it down, not as an intersection of planes and cones, but as a series of numbers and letters: an algebraic expression. That only worked if there was a language, or at least an alphabet, that had the power of expressing shapes without literally depicting them, a problem that Monsieur Descartes had lately solved by (first) conceiving of curves, lines, et cetera, as being collections of individual points and (then) devising a way to express a point by giving its coordinates - two numbers, or letters representing numbers, or (best of all) algebraic expressions that could in principle be evaluated to generate numbers. This translated all geometry to a new language with its own set of rules: algebra. The construction of equations was an exercise in translation. By following those rules, one could create new statements that were true, without even having to think about what the symbols referred to in any physical universe. It was this seemingly occult power that scared the hell out of some Puritans at the time, and it even seemed to scare Isaac a bit."
-- Neal Stephenson, Daniel Aboard Minerva, Quicksilver Book One pages 97-98.
Great stuff. Back to the book...
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