Recently I was looking through the art web site of Sven Geier. He has a lot of fractal images that he has been creating since 2001. Many of the images are quite beautiful, particularly the recent ones if you scroll down to 2011.

What is interesting though is to see the progression as the power of home computers has increased over the last decade. Fractal art around 2001 was mostly 2D with bold colors, lower resolutions, and fairly raw in that the images come with little post processing. They tend to make use of complex number sequence sets such as Mandelbrot with familiar fractal spirals. Then around 2003 the fractal flame algorithm really became popular with programs such as Scott Draves’ Electric Sheep distributed screensaver and the Apophysis software. It became possible to create very rich and complex 2D patterns which could be easily

Many people are familiar with the maxim from chaos theory that the fluttering of a butterfly in one part of the world can lead to a hurricane in another. Causes and effects are ubiquitous. Mystics tell us that one of the basic revelations is that everything is connected, there is no you and me, and we are one with the cosmos. Let us shine the spotlight of science onto this concept and play a little.

As we go about our day doing ordinary things, we think in terms of tasks that we need to do and the objects and tools that will be useful. We talk to other people who seem distinct from us. We hold in our hand a pen or a book. We put them down, we type on a thing called a computer. We pack it up and put it in a bag, pull out our keys and get into the car. We drive and we think about people and places and relationships between distinct

In a previous post I talked about the use of nanoscale antennas for solar power collection. In this post I want to mention a few other ideas which relate to our new-found ability to manufacture extremely small-scale structures using processes in nanotechnology.

Technology is getting to the point where we can manufacture structures on various substrates that are only a few nanometers in size. Certainly it is now very easy to layer conducting elements on silicon which are smaller than a micron in length. In 2011 silicon technology reached the 22 nanometer length scale for CMOS processing. This corresponds to half the distance between memory cells in a memory cell array. We are expecting to get to 11 nanometers by 2015. Optical light has wavelengths between 400 and 650 nanometers and the wavelength of infra-red light is around 1 micron. Therefore we are able to build structures where by

DesignBoom.com has some great posts about art and design. At the moment I particularly like Horst Kiechle’s torso with removable body organs completely made out of paper and looking like a computer graphics rendering. I am also a big fan of Tokyo photographer Hal’s Flesh Love series of photographs of vacuum sealed couples. It would be interesting to watch the artist in the process of taking these photos. Due to the fact that the couples are vacuum sealed in plastic, they have to hold their breath during the shoot, which obviously can only be for a few seconds. I enjoy the richness of the colors and costumes in this set, and the tangled intimacy of each couple’s embrace, particularly the one with the guitar which is quite amusing. If you want to see more of this series you can even get the iPad application.

Christopher Baker’s Hello World video diary installation at the Saatchi gallery is another favorite. Thousands of video blogs from Youtube were used to create this animated display wall. The faces and superimposed voices of so many ordinary people broadcasting their lives out into the world and hoping for a connection makes for a disturbing experience.

On January 11th I was checking out some of the log files produced by wikipedia. I was trying to write a script to determine which articles are being read by people on an hourly basis to get results a little like this. I noticed that while Mitt Romney was way up in the page view hits on wikipedia at 8522 hits per hour, a less well known name was far more popular by more than an order of magnitude at 155257 hits per hour, Nicolas Steno. The question is, why is everyone looking up a 17th century catholic scientist?

It turns out that Google happens to have featured him on their main search page for the day of January 11th, corresponding to Steno’s birth date in 1638. The company produced an artistic version of the Google logo made to look like geological layers and people clicking on this were told about Steno. It shows quite a lot of power over people’s behavior to be able to trump the publicity of a leading political candidate by such a large factor. Let’s hope that they carry on using this in a neutral manner and continue to educate.

A formal system in mathematics is a system which contains a set of axioms (unquestionable statements of truth), and then adds to these a set of production rules by which new true statements can be generated. The process of production can go on forever allowing a never-ending list of truths to be derived.

A famous result called Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shows that in such a system, there are some true statements that are nevertheless un-provable (undecidable) using the rules of the system. It shows that a self-consistent

The hypothesis that all ravens are black is logically equivalent to the statement that all non black things are non ravens, and this is supported by the observation of a white shoe.

This is a paraphrasing of a famous paradox due to Hempel. There is a lot of fairly impenetrable discussion on the Wikipedia page about this paradox, some of which I believe to be incorrect, and so I include a readable resolution based on a Bayesian perspective here, and I also relate this issue to our ability to know the truth about physical laws.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about Aidan Dwyer, a 13 year old, who has created a stir with his science project which purported to show that if solar cells are arranged in space like leaves on a tree rather than on a flat surface, they collect more solar energy. His project write-up can be found here. The internet response has ranged from praise and offers of business capital to aggressive attacks and charges that his experiment is