Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Nomographs
From a post titled The Art of Nomography on Dead Reckonings (a blog dedicated to forgotten-but-beautiful mathematical systems! I’d better subscribe to this one…) :
Nomography, truly a forgotten art, is the graphical representation of mathematical relationships or laws (the Greek word for law is nomos). These graphs are variously called nomograms (the term used here), nomographs, alignment charts, and abacs. This area of practical and theoretical mathematics was invented in 1880 by Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938) and used extensively for many years to provide engineers with fast graphical calculations of complicated formulas to a practical precision.
Along with the mathematics involved, a great deal of ingenuity went into the design of these nomograms to increase their utility as well as their precision. Many books were written on nomography and then driven out of print with the spread of computers and calculators, and it can be difficult to find these books today even in libraries. Every once in a while a nomogram appears in a modern setting, and it seems odd and strangely old-fashioned—the multi-faceted Smith Chart for transmission line calculations is still sometimes observed in the wild. The theory of nomograms “draws on every aspect of analytic, descriptive, and projective geometries, the several fields of algebra, and other mathematical fields” [Douglass].
More about nomograms and abacs on Wikipedia.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
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Floral Acoustics
I’ve heard that plants attract insects and other pollinators using nectar guides (nature’s own user interface!), but I’ve never heard of this adaptation: the plants depicted above manipulate sound rather than light to attract attention, a bit of floral acoustics.
Ralph Simon at the University of Ulm in Germany and his colleagues analysed the leaf’s acoustic properties and found that its unique shape produces a strong, constant echo across a range of sound-source angles. They then trained bats to seek a feeder hidden in artificial foliage. The animals found feeders topped with the cup shape in an average of 12 seconds — around half the time it took them to locate unadorned feeders or those under other leaf shapes.
(Via Nature)
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Stop Motion “Pinball Number 12”
I’m not sure how I feel about the minor key version of the song (hard to beat the Pointer Sisters original), but…OMG STOPMOTION PINBALL NUMBER COUNT!
OnetwothreefourFIVEsixseveneightninetenELEVENTWELVE!
(Via Make)
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Shel Silverstein on the Johnny Cash Show
[Video no longer available]
To override that last post of questionable coolness, here’s something decidedly cool: Shel Silverstein on the Johnny Cash Show, where he talks about being Uncle Shelby, plays a very quick duet with Johnny (“Boy Named Sue”, naturally), and finishes up with a solo of “Daddy, what if…?”.
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Philip Pullman How to Be Cool
I’ve never read this, can’t say I’ve seen the TV miniseries, and I know you shouldn’t judge a book by the cover, but this seems like a total non sequitur coming from the celebrated author of the iconoclastic His Dark Materials… What happened here?
(via Julian Hector)
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Lego Minifigs Rocketed to Jupiter
NASA has teamed up with LEGO to blast the above three custom minifigs to Jupiter via an Atlas V rocket! There’s so much about this idea that excites the little kid in me. The three aluminum individuals going along for the ride are the goddess Juno (namesake of this NASA Jupiter probe project), bearing an outsized magnifying glass; Jupiter himself, with lightning bolts; and Galileo, with telescope and globe, who isn’t a god but made followers of one kind of angry back in the day when he started noticing and thinking about the moons circling the distant planet.
If these weren’t cast in metal, I’d like to think all three would be wearing the classic LEGO Space logo suit.
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Hightower Rip
Inside, I’ve got to feel I’m the best, but if I tell you I’m the best, then I’m a fool. Bubba Smith, football and Police Academy star, quoted in his New York Times obituary.
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Lucasfilm Games Tv Humor Video
If you’re a fan of the old Lucasfilm Games (and the kind of video game nerd that likes this sort of weird find…), don’t let your week go by without watching this internal Lucasfilm Games parody video unearthed by Mix n’ Mojo. Shots of Skywalker Ranch, Ron Gilbert, Larry Holland, jokes riffing off of the “Bo Knows” and “Spielvergnügen” (erm, Fahrvergnügen) ads, and even a song sung on the Ranch’s porch about their adventure games. It doesn’t get much more 1990 then this, folks!
(Bonus: watch for the boxed copy of King’s Quest V on the desk at around 8 minutes in — how’d that get in there??)
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Visual 6502
Archeology Magazine has a feature story about the “digital archeologists” behind Visual6502, the group “excavating” and fully remapping the inner workings of the classic 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor. That might not sound interesting, but if you’ve been alive for more than 20 years you know the chip: it was the heart of early home computers ranging from the Apple I and Apple ][ to the Atari game consoles all the way up to the Nintendo NES.
Very cool and all, but in case you’re still not interested, here’s some excellent trivia slipped into the article:
In the 1984 film The Terminator, scenes shown from the perspective of the title character, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, include 6502 programming code on the left side of the screen.
Whaaat!? The SFX team working on The Terminator went so far as to copy actual assembly code into their shots? That’s pretty awesome! So where’d they get it? It was copied from Apple II code published in Nibble Magazine (even the T-800 enjoys emulators when its not busy hunting down humanity, I guess).
Bonus nerdery: check out this HTML5 + JavaScript visual simulation of the 6502 chip. Holy smokes!
(Via Discover, photo from the Visual6502 site)
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Ibm Selectric Turns 50
It’s the 50th anniversary on Sunday of the IBM Selectric, the typewriter that revolutionized modern office equipment. Removing those antiquated mechanical keys attached to individual type bars, the Selectric introduced the crazy golf ball thing seen above, rapidly rotating the correct letter into place before striking the paper (unlike older typewriters, the paper stayed put and the ball + ink ribbon moved). Users could even swap out their golf ball for one of many with a different font set, a feature now taken for granted with our magical computers.
Retro-sexy enough to be featured in the 1960 world of Mad Men (the model they use is somewhat anachronistic), solid enough to be Hunter S. Thompson’s preferred machine (his was red), but with enough geek cred to be used as an electromechanical computer terminal interface (six-bit character encoding!).
My office’s supply room still stocks some of these balls, even though I can’t imagine there are many typewriters left. I’d better go stock up.
(Via El Reg)
