Today, Boing Boing linked to a post, A Four Dimensional Tribute to the Late Madeleine L’Engle, at The Bryant Park Project. Watching the Bryant Park’s excellent video I was reminded of the portion of Cosmos, seen below, where Carl does his best to explain the tesseract. Video after the fold.

continue reading "Tesseract"

On his way out of the office yesterday, Carl sent me a link to an excellent video about how to make a ‘bendable tripod.’ Similar, to Joby’s Gorillapod, but insanely less expensive, this flexible little tripod can mount a camera to almost any surface, making it extremely useful in the field. Come October I plan to build one of two of these pods for use with my Spotmatic and Holga.

For the last few weeks I have been really itching to interact with another world.

I spend a fair amount of my time imagining myself in a number of ‘out-there’ situations. These daydreams are often fueled by a mix of history, science-fiction, my imagination and the desire to explore . While lately the responsibilities of an adult job and relationship have dampened my auto-exploratory-self-created-worlds-of-fun, I recently finished Delaney’s The Einstein Intersection, which I loved, and which also really brought my imagination back on board. Since then I have had the itch.
continue reading "Spore."

Knowledge gained by the means of science has been historically shown to impact the shape and ambitions of society. And as technology increasingly plays a larger role in our lives today, I believe, this will continue to be the case.

The editors of SEED magazine seem to agree. Indicated by the magazine’s subtitle, ‘Science is Culture’, the central premise behind SEED is that scientific thought fuels cultural change.

While this connection between science and culture informs much of the magazine’s coverage, they have been running a series of discussions, the Seed Salon, that focuses specifically on this convergence. Each issue runs an edited transcript of a conversation between a prominent scientist and artist. Past participants include: Jonathan Lethem and Janna Levin, David Byrne and Daniel Levitin, and Lisa Randall and Chuck Hoberman.

From the talks that I have read, I am most excited by the discussions that touch on the similarities and differences in process. I have long been interested in the common ground between the scientific method and the creative act, and these active professionals bring some excellent insight into these commons.

Going beyond the magazine, SEED provides an excellent service by providing unedited video of these discussions. Now we can watch these pertinent conversations grow naturally.

Whether read or watched, the Seed Salon is an excellent elixir for a mass media that trends toward covering the end product instead of the means by which that product was created.