via BoingBoing

Bathsheba Grossman is a sculptor who uses cutting-edge technology to render math- and science-inspired shapes in three dimensions. You can buy 3D-printed laser-cut metal ones, or order them in plastic at lower costs from ShapeWays. That sound you hear is my jaw scraping my keyboard.

Borromean Rings

120 Cell

Along these same lines – check out the renderings on the Minimal Surface Archive, and for some background on what it means to project a 4-d dodecahedron into 3 dimensions, this video explains how to think in 10 dimensions.  If you really want to blow your mind, try parsing this article on the Lie Group E8, which has been proposed as a fundamental model of physical existence.

The Wall Street Journal just published a lengthy article discussing the unbearbly hot summer we’ve been having here in Austin and included some statistics to put it all in perspective:

The protracted heat wave — Austin on Monday recorded its 64th day of 100-plus degree weather since June 1 — has pushed electricity demand up to record levels, as air conditioners run overtime.

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The average, around-the-clock temperature in San Antonio this summer has been 87.9 degrees, beating the old record set in 1980 of 86.2 degrees. Houston, at 86.6 degrees, averaged over a 24-hour period, is slightly above the old record of 86.4 set in 1980. In Austin, the average temperature has been 88.6 degrees — the hottest since records began in 1898 — beating the prior record of 86.7 degrees in both 2008 and 1998.

The average household in Austin consumed 2,157 kilowatt hours of electricity last month, costing $235. Roughly 8% of households are delinquent with utility payments. Austin Energy is rolling out a plan to let residential customers pay 25% of their bill immediately and spread the remaining 75% owed over a six-month period.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it looks as though this whole ‘global warming’ theory might actually lead to the weather being warmer:

One source of those impacts, hellish heat waves, will become commonplace in the coming decades if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon, as the figure above makes clear (see “Definitive NOAA-led report warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!“). By 2090, it’ll be above 90°F some 120 days a year in Kansas — more than the entire summer. Much of Florida and Texas will be above 90°F for half the year. These won’t be called heat waves anymore. It’ll just be the “normal” climate.

Based on two recent studies: By century’s end, extreme temperatures of up to 122°F would threaten most of the central, southern, and western U.S. Even worse, Houston and Washington, DC could experience temperatures exceeding 98°F for some 60 days a year. Much of Arizona would be subjected to temperatures of 105°F or more for 98 days out of the year–14 full weeks.

I’ve seen similar claims in the news before, but I thought I’d post this one.  According to Live Science, researchers here at UT Austin have developed a spray on PV system using nanoparticle CIGS.  They’re still working on the details – they currently only get 1% efficiency, but if they can work out the details this could be an interesting product.

via Inhabitat

If you’ve seen the holodeck on episodes of Star Trek here’s the real-life application. Essentially, Intel is working to create physical, three-dimensional replicas of people or objects, so lifelike that human senses accept them as real. This is interesting stuff for the field of medicine but it’s applications to architectural representation and built form merit discussion as well.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080108083214/http://www.intel.com/research/dpr.htm

Check out the section: ‘Potential applications of Dynamic Physical Rendering’

Or, to phrase it a little more politely:

Brains are calorically demanding organs. Our distant ancestors had small ones. Australopithecus afarensis, for example, who lived some three million years ago, had a cranial capacity of about four hundred cubic centimetres, which is roughly the same as a chimpanzee’s. Modern humans have a cranial capacity of about thirteen hundred cubic centimetres. How, as their brains got bigger, did our forebears keep them running? According to what’s known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes.

Turns out human newborns have the highest body fat of any species besides harbor seals, and on a slightly related not, “humans, unlike most other animals, have no set season of fertility. Instead, ovulation is tied to a woman’s fat stores: those who are very thin simply fail to menstruate.”  All this thinking is making me want a cheeseburger.

Here’s a post about an idea that was in the news a year ago and seems to be maturing into a viable product.  Shawn Frayne started a company called Humdinger Wind Energy to produce a new type of wind generator.  Rather than using a turbine with rotors to generate power, Shawn’s product is essentially a long rigid frame with thin band of material which can oscillate in the wind.  The band is connected at one end to a permanent magnet which induces an electrical charge as it oscillates.  The system has virtually no moving parts and can be built for far less than a typical turbine.  He claims his current models can operate at $1/watt, and he has various sizes from small models you can carry around to large arrays.  His invention is targeted at low-power applications where power is scarce; largely the developing world.

Integrating this into building could be an interesting performative element; they could be used horizontally for shading while providing power, and there’s probably no reason the oscillating piece couldn’t be 30′ wide.

Here’s one for the next structural engineers we work with in California: physicists in france have recently extended their work on sonic invisibility cloaks to encompass buildings and earthquakes, and have proposed a method for designing buildings which are invisible to the shock waves of earthquakes.

Guenneau said that it’s possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren’t there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.

“It’s the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water wave that is propagating in a river, and it’s bent smoothly around the rock and will be reconstructed around the rock.” The object, or building, is “invisible” to the mechanical waves.

A series of concrete rings would surround a building or other structure, forming the shield. The shield would redirect the vibration around the object inside. “Each ring is going to wobble in such a way that the wave will bend around (the object),” Guenneau said.

Earthquake waves come in varying lengths, with many peaks and troughs in a given distance, or just a few. To effectively shield a building from short and long waves that earthquakes generate, several rings could be built around a structure, each “tuned” to a different wavelength.

A 1,000 square foot house, for example, would need a circular shield with a 33-foot radius, which could be built with commercially available concrete. Guenneau suggested that the method might be used to protect a large building like a stadium, where people could seek shelter after an earthquake and be protected by the rings from possible aftershocks.

Well this is new: it turns out that mixing fresh water and salt water releases energy, in the same way that desalinating salty water requires energy.  Apparently this has been recognized since the 70′s, but until now there hasn’t been a way to take advantage of the fact.  Well, thanks to Doriano Brogioli we can now create electricity simply by mixing water of different salinity levels in the presence of activated carbon (the stuff in your brita water filter).

Brogioli has developed a new approach to salination, a prototype cell that relies on two chunks of activated carbon, a porous carbon commonly used for water and air filtration. Once he jump starts the cell with electric power, all that is required to produce electricity are sources of fresh and salty water and a pump to keep the water flowing. When the separate streams of salty and fresh water mix, energy is released.

A typical cell would require about three dollars worth of activated carbon, and, given a steady flow of water, the cell could produce enough electricity to meet the needs of a small house. It’s the equivalent, in hydroelectric power, of running your appliances from a personal 100 meter (338 feet) high waterfall.

Salination would be an ideal technique for places where fresh and salty waters naturally mix, such as estuaries, according to Brogioli. He said that a coastal community of about a hundred houses could set up a plant with minimal damage to the ecosystem. “A salinity difference plant will be much smaller than a solar plant,” he said. The only waste product is slightly brackish water that can be poured directly into the sea or, Brogioli suggested, into ponds that support estuary-friendly flora and fauna.

How cool is that!?

Bruce Schneier (my favorite cryptanalyst) has a great post about the psychological bases and effects of group size on organizations:

Primatologist Robin Dunbar derived this number by comparing neocortex — the “thinking” part of the mammalian brain — volume with the size of primate social groups. By analyzing data from 38 primate genera and extrapolating to the human neocortex size, he predicted a human “mean group size” of roughly 150.

This number appears regularly in human society; it’s the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at which Hittite settlements split, and the basic unit in professional armies from Roman times to the present day. Larger group sizes aren’t as stable because their members don’t know each other well enough. Instead of thinking of the members as people, we think of them as groups of people. For such groups to function well, they need externally imposed structure, such as name badges.

…

More generally, there are several layers of natural human group size that increase with a ratio of approximately three: 5, 15, 50, 150, 500, and 1500 — although, really, the numbers aren’t as precise as all that, and groups that are less focused on survival tend to be smaller. The layers relate to both the intensity and intimacy of relationship and the frequency of contact.

The smallest, three to five, is a “clique”: the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress. The twelve to 20 group is the “sympathy group”: people with which you have special ties. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from the same pool of 150 people. No matter what size company you work for, there are only about 150 people you consider to be “co-workers.” (In small companies, Alice and Bob handle accounting. In larger companies, it’s the accounting department — and maybe you know someone there personally.) The 500-person group is the “megaband,” and the 1,500-person group is the “tribe.” Fifteen hundred is roughly the number of faces we can put names to, and the typical size of a hunter-gatherer society.

These numbers are reflected in military organization throughout history: squads of 10 to 15 organized into platoons of three to four squads, organized into companies of three to four platoons, organized into battalions of three to four companies, organized into regiments of three to four batallions, organized into divisions of two to three regiments, and organized into corps of two to three divisions.

Coherence can become a real problem once organizations get above about 150 in size. So as group sizes grow across these boundaries, they have more externally imposed infrastructure — and more formalized security systems. In intimate groups, pretty much all security is ad hoc. Companies smaller than 150 don’t bother with name badges; companies greater than 500 hire a guard to sit in the lobby and check badges. The military have had centuries of experience with this under rather trying circumstances, but even there the real commitment and bonding invariably occurs at the company level. Above that you need to have rank imposed by discipline.

Aside from being an interesting piece of neuro-psych trivia, this seems like something worth considering in the context of our discussions of shared space and community.  If an apartment complex with 300 people has no chance of developing a coherent community identity, how can we go about providing the structure to allow localized community identity to develop within portions of the complex?  What is a ‘good’ size for such a community?  It would seem that aside from the capacity of the brain to maintain relations with other individuals, other matters would come into play: having enough neighbors you can ignore the ones you don’t like, but not so many you never feel encouraged to speak to any of them, providing a good mix of privacy and shared space, etc.  It would be interesting to look into research along these lines, I’m sure it’s been done…

Wired reports on some findings in the journal Nature that suggest granular materials (sand) behave as a 5th state of matter (in case you’re wondering, the 4th state is plasma):

In the formation of droplets in a stream of falling sand, scientists have witnessed a dynamic that points beyond the boundaries of traditional physics, and may represent one aspect of a fifth state of matter.

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Measurements of this phenomena, published Wednesday in Nature, overturn the previous explanation for sand droplets — that grains stick to each other after colliding — and quantify what’s called an “ultralow-surface-tension regime.” It’s entirely new territory for researchers, and just one of many dynamics governing the behavior of granular materials, which for reasons unknown to science act sometimes as solids, or liquids, or gases — or something in-between.

“You walk on the beach, and the sand supports your weight. Pick up a handful, and it runs through your fingers, like a liquid. But you can’t walk on water,” said Jaeger. “In the top of an hourglass, sand is this strange solid. It’s at the verge of being a solid; it flows through the middle as something like a liquid, and then it’s a solid again,” he said.

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On a less-speculative level, research into granularity could be a boon for manufacturers. Most finished products and foods pass at some point through a granular stage — pellets of plastic, gravel in concrete, corn in a silo, powders in a pill, on and on. A report published by the Rand Corporation in 1986 found that granular industrial processes generally function at about 60% of capacity.

These high-speed videos are amazing:

Who would have thought that a high speed camera and a box of sand is enough to get you published in Nature?