Real Tree
I created this living, light responsive, real tree.
It’s also a fractal.
real magic
If you take a strip of paper, twist it once and attach the ends, you have a Möbius strip. If you were to draw a line right through the middle of the strip, the line would meet its origin, proving that it’s just one surface of twice the length that we perceive. A Möbius strip is a surface with only one side and one edge.
Ranjit Bhatnagar, a sound artist who has developed several DIY musical instruments, took advantage of this mathematical oddity and came up with the möbius music box. In Bhatnagar’s own words “What you end up with is a tune that is played upside-down and backwards, and then just backwards, and then upside-down and backwards again. Over and over, forever”.
cool guy
Klein bottles don’t have an identifiable inner, nor outer surface. Just look at this one carefully and see it for yourself.
brain-computer interfaces
I work at this company in Toronto, that uses EEG technology to detect your brainwaves and allow you to control things with your mind. A team of young scientists, engineers and designers working on bringing EEG into peoples everyday life.
How does it work? You put on a headset with electrodes that detect voltages resonating outside of your scalp. With a bit of math and programming, these voltages can be translated to brainwave frequencies, and used as commands for electronics, games, etc. Right now we’re mostly working with alpha and beta brainwaves, which relate to meditative and focused states of mind, respectively. With some practice, you can learn how to enter these states of mind and get the computer (or machine) to do what it’s been programed to do. There are all kinds of medical applications that are being developed around the world with BCI, but at InteraXon we’re more interested in what can be fun and useful to improve the lives of those without any medical conditions. It’s interesting to be able to get feedback on how your brain is doing at a certain time of the day, and get it to behave differently when you want it to. You gain a whole new perspective of yourself when you’ve played with the system. It would be nice to allow people, who might have had a rough day, to slap a headband on, look at their iPhone to get brainwave feedback, and play a game that will help them relax, focus, or fall sleep when they need to.
I just started auditing a class called physical sciences in contemporary society, and even though it’s been only one class, I can see where it’s going. The premise seems to be “science rules and pseudoscience is stupid”. And the book we’re reading for the course, Carl Sagan’s The Deamon Haunted World, is so far just my beloved Sagan repeating himself over and over about how it doesn’t make sense to believe in the power of crystals and the prophecies of Nostradamus. But is pseudoscience really that bad? When I saw the movie Matilda, as a child, I obsessed for years on end trying to use my zen powers to make things fly. It never worked, but now with BCI, I can make a chair levitate when I’m meditating. No joke.
We also recently did a a collaboration with toronto artist Alex McLeod. He designed a beautiful 3D environment that users can control with their brains. It looks amazing. Check his work out if you haven’t already.
Sci-fi writers are modern day prophets
Arthur C. Clarke almost nailed it here.
Also, a friend of mine once pointed out that comedians are modern day philosophers… “What’s with carrots?”
If you ever draw a particle, draw it with a squiggly wave tail (just in case)
The famous double-slit experiment was designed by Thomas Young to explain the phenomena of diffraction and interference of waves. In quantum mechanics, this experiment can show the inseparability between waves and particles. It’s a bit of a mystical concept, kind of like the divine trinity in christianity: god is made of three people, like light is made of a wave and a particle. Difference is, there’s proof for the latter.
With the double slit experiment you can observe the nature of waves, at home, if you fill up a bathtub with water, place a barrier with two slits somewhere in the tub and direct waves towards the barrier. You will see that each wave breaks as it hits the barrier, forming two smaller waves that come out of the slits. These smaller waves will interfere with one another, forming patterns in the water. At some places the waves will add up forming bigger waves and at other places they will cancel each other out.
Light behaves like the water in your bathtub. If you flash a laser beam through a double slit barrier and place a screen beyond that barrier, you’ll see a pattern of spots that are dark and spots that are bright, on the screen. The dark spots show that the waves have canceled each other out at some locations, while the bright spots show that the waves have added up, generating greater brightness.
If particles are launched against the same type of barrier, they will act exactly as baseballs would if they were thrown towards a wall with two holes in it; some would bounce back and some would go through the holes. If there were a screen recording how many particles went through the holes, at first it would seem completely random whether the particles bounce back or go through either whole. As the number of particles increases, however, they seem to form a pattern that is exactly that of the wave.
Particles generate an interference pattern, which is the product of some sort of enigmatic communication between them. Thanks to Young, we can talk about wave-particle duality, as particles can behave as both. This was a breakthrough in physics of the early 20th century. It prompted quantum mechanics!
