ƒThis is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics. Enjoy…
Let's start with couple of links about mathematics… popularising and reductionist, but nonetheless brightly descriptive and engaging:
"The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face" is a post on Nautilus covering the nature and role of Fourier Transforms in our everyday life. And the comments are really good, too… http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-homer-simpsons-face
A non-Simpsonite visualisation of music using Fourier Transforms via http://leaflondon.net/partners/
And a fast Fourier Transform music video: http://vimeo.com/5334539
From the science of imagining to the science of digging out: a fully intact skeleton of a baby dinosaur:
http://www.livescience.com/41486-smallest-intact-baby-ceratopsid-found.html
If you really are geeky, try computing the prior likelihood of this discovery…
And from prehistoric dinosaurs to human ancestry: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38008/title/Dating-the-Origin-of-Us/
Dating the origin of us has to be out there with the other 'ultimate' questions such as dating the origin of everything. Which, of course, only opens up an even bigger question of dating the origin of everything that precluded the origin of everything we know as reality… Fourier Transforms won't be enough here, but Homer Simpson's world referencing might just work… "This is indeed a disturbing universe"…
Though neither the mathematics, nor Homer were the fans of Soviet automotive industry, there is a certain quaint relation between the images below and the dinosaurs: http://rbth.co.uk/multimedia/pictures/2013/11/12/heroes_of_their_time_top_russian_car_makers_automotive_ma_31657.html
Purely aesthetic… of course…
Courtesy of Saatchi Gallery, brilliant brief interview with American artist, Maurice Sapiro:
http://magazine.saatchionline.com/articles/artnews/saatchi-online-news/from-the-studio-of-saatchi-online-news/maurice-sapiro?wmc=E-Mail.collectors.20131126&utm_source=collectors&utm_campaign=cb7f901342-Collectors_Tuesday_November_26_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c7e0716c03-cb7f901342-342475861
Space, colour, intensity, air…
A cool story from my old home town of Baltimore, where "Architects Turned This Former Set From "The Wire" Into A Training Ground For Tomorrow's Designers" http://www.fastcodesign.com/3021481/how-architects-transformed-this-former-set-from-the-wire-into-a-training-ground-for-tomorrow
I am impressed. Really impressed. The ambition, the scale of execution, the range of thinking that went into this are substantial and substantive... all for under USD27 million?! Beats burning cash on a minor super-yacht...
Visionary and iconic at the same time, "Rigati e tessuti" glass pieces designed by Carlo Scarpa for Venini, ca. 1938–1940 are on display at the Met in a retrospective of Scarpa's works.
http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/press-room/exhibitions/2013/venetian-glass-by-carlo-scarpa
Per Metropolismad: "Every single piece of glass on display is breathtaking. The exhibition is organized by manufacturing technique, a strategy that works well because it is how Scarpa himself worked, pushing the master craftsmen at Venini’s furnaces to reinvent old methods, year after year."
Scarpa's work ranges from deeply structured basalt-like pieces of melted glass in organic geometry of singular bodies, to intricately woven lattices to paper-thin bowls of incredible lightness and grace, to geometric perfection of cubism. Instead of evolution toward higher complexity, Scarpa's work is a constant narrative of search and invention.
If anything, the fact that a work of a once-an-apprentice with little formal education can reach the Met is (among many other things) a testament to the long-lost pathway to exceptionalism and excellence - the good-old-fashioned learning-by-doing… You really can't teach this in an MBA class…
