Lego Michelangelo
The acoustic signatures of many animals contain features we humans cannot appreciate, given the limited range of frequencies we can hear. In fluid dynamics and many other fields, scientists and engineers have to find ways to analyze and decompose time-series data—like acoustic pressure signals—into useful quantities. Mark Fischer uses one tool for such analysis, a wavelet transform, to turn the calls of whales, birds, and insects into the colorful snapshots seen here. Wavelet transforms are somewhat similar to Fourier transforms but represent a signal with a series of wavelets rather than sinusoids. They’re also widely used for data compression. (Image credits: M. Fischer/Aguasonic Acoustics; via DailyMail)
This shit always flips my brain. I love this kind of visualization.
(via ianbrooks)
Pixels and Poetry
This was written for the forward of Kern and Burn, a Kickstarter funded book of interviews and essays from design entrepreneurs, including Aaron Draplin (Field Notes / DDC), Andy McMillan (Build Conf. / The Manual), Peter Buchanan-Smith (Best Made Co.), Ben Pieratt (Svpply / Lookwork / Varsity Bookmarking), and a load of other amazing folks.
I.
I graduated from design school with boundless optimism, jumping from the bubble of university life into a post-recession real world, where hope was a rare commodity. I believed that design could induce change — that it could shape the way we understand and interact with our world.
I moved to New York for a lead design position at a two-person shop and considered myself lucky to be employed, even though we didn’t have a single client. We filled our time with small-scale side projects that we hoped would land us paying jobs. The projects did lead to new clients, and the cash started rolling in. For the first time in my career, I felt like a legitimate designer—but I wasn’t challenged; I was comfortable.
Every designer and creative should read this, especially if you’ve recently graduated from your program. Learn the skills you need, then venture out and take risks.
Probably one of my favorite posts on this site ever.
i’m feeling nostalgic for Richard Keyes Color Theory class.
(via happyhealthyhumanoid)
This was magical.
If you ever needed a reason to follow @TheDailyShow, this is it.
Here’s the original segment, in case you missed it.
holy shit—Daily Show WIN!
(via pandarican)
Calligraphy on girls
Omg-absolutely beautiful. Modern day henna?
A Spark is All It Takes by Charlotte Estelle Littlehales
The math: 2,600 matchsticks, 720 minutes to create, and 1 minute of fiery immolation to undo it all; Charlotte’s typographic matchstick design is a testament to the creative and sometimes destructive power of imagination.
Art & Leisure and Art & Leisure, Dante Carlos
24 May – 11 July 2013, London Centre for Book Arts
Art & Leisure and Art & Leisure presents work by Dante Carlos in his first show in the UK.
The exhibition centres on a limited-edition book produced by the artist in collaboration with LCBA, which uses the form and function of a calendar consisting only of Saturdays and Sundays. Art & Leisure… is a book that becomes an exhibition, a proposition, a utopia, and a joke. In a social climate where the simple act of taking time ‘off the clock’ and doing something without intrinsic market—but human—value, becomes something unintentionally quixotic, Art & Leisure… re-imagines our relationship to time, labour and art practices.
Raised in California, Carlos is a graphic designer based in Minneapolis. In addition to his own practice, he has been senior designer at the Walker Art Center since 2009. As with his work at the Walker and with collaborators—from furniture and landscape designers ROLU to his sister Debbie Carlos, a Michigan-based artist/photographer—Carlos uses graphics, a wink and a nudge and an economy of means to create visual entry points into different types of knowledge: from maths to dance, language to science and music, or as he puts it, “from Peach Snapple to downtown beef, and everything in-between.”
If you’re in the UK, go see this. This man is genius.
(Source: londonbookarts, via seensaidheard)
Dave Gibbons interview with Liam Sharp…
The hottest thing in digital comics right now.
World’s Most Beautiful Abandoned Places
Italian product manager and web designer Francesco Mugnai recently added a collection of images to his blog touting some of the most beautiful images of abandoned spots and modern ruins that he’d ever seen. The images Mugnai has captured come from empty castles, shuttered power plants, and dilapidated churches around the world. From a sunken yacht in Antarctica to a forever-closed amusement park in Japan, these images all make up a sort of anti-phoenix; rather than rising as new from the ashes, these husks remain preserved in decomposition, forcing viewers to confront the strange beauty of ruination.
(via wicked-naughty-diva)
flower exposed to radiation from Fukushima nuclear facility Japan
Radiation will do some fucked up shit.
(Source: hoaxtheory, via batinsteadofboat)
I came downstairs and thought my dog’s leg had fallen off or something (it’s part of an old dog toy).
ha! That would freak me the fuck out.
Optical Illusions
When Supermassive Supergiants Go Superboom
Article by Phil Plait via Slate
I have long been fascinated by gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs). These are incredibly violent events: It’s like taking the Sun’s entire lifetime energy output and cramming into a single event that lasts for mere seconds! The energy emitted is so intense, so bright, we can see GRBs from a distance of billions of light years.
Gamma rays themselves are just a form of light, like the kind we see, but with huge energy; each photon is packed with millions or billions of times the energy in a single photon of visible light. Only the most energetic events in the Universe can make them, so if we detect a burst of them coming from the sky, we know something literally disastrous has happened.
We know GRBs come in many flavors. Some last literally for milliseconds, while others stretch on for minutes. We also know different events can cause them, too. Short ones seem to come from merging neutron stars, ultra dense compact objects left over after stars explode. The longer ones occur when massive stars explode, leaving their cores to collapse. In both cases, the huge blast of high-energy gamma rays signals the birth of a black hole.
But astronomers were recently surprised to find a third type of GRB, one that lasts not for minutes, but for hours. Whatever these objects are, they don’t just flash with light, they linger, blasting out far, far more gamma rays for far, far longer than was previously thought. What could do such a thing?
Several ideas were put forth, but new observations provided the linchpin: an ultra-long-duration GRB occurred on Christmas Day in 2010, and its distance was found to be a soul-crushing 7 billion light years away, about halfway across the visible Universe! This left only one possible candidate for the progenitor: a hugely massive star, one so big it dwarfs the Sun into insignificance.
HOLY FUCK!
—read this and prepare to have your mind blown—
(via lonelycoast)
