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Fantastic Beasts Brought to Life by the Wind - Issue 108: Change

blog tumbling : Many of us hit the beach to enjoy some sunshine or catch a wave. But for Dutch artist Theo Jansen it’s all about the wind. Jansen’s been working with this limitless natural resource for 30 years to create a fabulous array of giant beach creatures—brought to life by the wind. With every gust, his wondrous seaside sculptures become more lifelike, ambling along the coast like creatures in their own right. They come in the most imaginative shapes and rely on intricate engineering. Some have sail-like wings and seem to dance across the sands, others scuttle along like enormous centipedes. One of them can even fly. Made of PVC pipes, their skeletal white forms and spiky silhouettes are like relics of a bygone geological era. Yet, watching these beasts make their way across the beach it somehow feels as if they belong here. Jansen started designing them in the 1990s after reading about rising sea levels threatening the low-lying Netherlands—a country famous for the fact that one third of it is below sea level. He had a dream of creating a herd of wind-powered coastal sentinels, perpetually piling sand high onto the dunes to keep the water at bay. What he ended up building took a different turn, with Jansen developing the idea to explore evolution as the primary creative force behind all life on Earth, capturing people’s imaginations in the process. Every year, the artist lets new and ever-more complex “species” loose to see how they weather the challenges of their surroundings. His aim? For these creatures to be completely self-sufficient, continuing to exist without any human support. “My inspiration comes from the theory of evolution, the beach, nature, and life itself. The fact that we came into being out of nothing is a constant source of wonder to me,” Jansen says. These amazing kinetic sculptures are now regularly on show in exhibitions the world over, and people flock to see them—because as beautiful as they are to look at, they also reveal what we are capable of when we work together with the wind. To learn more about Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, visit the Strandbeest website, where Jansen details the principles behind his creations and how he builds them. Anne-Marie Hoeve is a senior journalist at 5 Media, based in Amsterdam. Reprinted with permission from 5 Media. Read More… http://dlvr.it/SD9SB3 @robinravi

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The Electromagnetic Force of Fridge Magnets - Issue 104: Harmony

blog tumbling : Science is not just something we do at school or professionals undertake in labs. It is at the heart of how everything works. With the development of applied scientific principles, science enables us to not only understand how things work but how to make use of that understanding in the technology that supports our everyday lives. In this excerpt from their new book, How it All Works, Adam Dant and Brian Clegg take us inside a modern kitchen. Each illustration is accompanied by a short description of the scientific law (marked with an “L”) or phenomena (marked with a “P”) behind the activity or object featured. They show us that in everything we do, in everything we experience, we are witnessing and taking part in scientific phenomena, guided and linked by scientific laws. Adam Dant is a contemporary British artist known for his visual narratives realized through elaborate and intricate pen-and-ink drawings. Dant has work in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Lyons, The New Art Gallery Walsall, the Deutsche Bank and UBS collections, and in many leading private collections. Brian Clegg is an English science writer. He is the author of popular science books on topics including light, infinity, quantum entanglement and surviving the impact of climate change, and biographies of Roger Bacon and Eadweard Muybridge. Reprinted with permission from Ivy Press, an imprint of The Quarto Group. Copyright © 2021 Brian Clegg and Adam Dant. Read More… http://dlvr.it/S6LJLp @robinravi

The Natural Harmony of Faces - Issue 104: Harmony

blog tumbling : Researching my upcoming book on film, Suddenly Something Clicked, I was struck by something that had not occurred to me in 50 years of film editing. In closeups and medium closeups, cinematographers tended to place the eyes of actors along a line corresponding to the golden ratio division of the vertical dimension of the frame. In correspondence with cinematographers Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now), John Seale (The English Patient), Caleb Deschanel (The Lion King), and directors Francis Coppola and Carroll Ballard, it became clear that this was not a conscious decision on their part. Seale put it succinctly when he wrote “I just try to make the face feel comfortable within the frame.” The golden ratio is represented by the Greek letter phi (φ) and has held a strong grip on human imagination since it was discovered by the geometers of the ancient world. It’s represented by a bisected line whose shorter section is in the same relationship to the longer section, as the longer section is to the whole line. This ratio works out to be an irrational number, 1.618034…, and was especially valued by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who named it as one of the two great treasures of geometry, the other one being the Pythagorean theorem. The golden ratio is the limit of the Fibonacci series, and it can be found in many unexpected places in the natural world—in the structure of DNA, the spirals of galaxies and hurricanes, the growth patterns of leaves and seeds, and many other places, including, I would suggest, in cinematography and the architecture of the human face. I’ve learned that in the great proportion of human faces among all races, and across history, judging by painting and sculpture, our eyes fall at the golden ratio line between the hairline and chin. Furthermore, there are golden ratio proportions between other significant zones of the face: the distance of eyes to lips compared to the distance of lips to chin; eyes to nostrils :: nostrils to lips; eyes to nostrils :: nostrils to chin. There are variations, of course. Jay Leno has a disproportionately large chin, and Helen Hunt has a very tall forehead. But the overwhelming tendency is for the human face to show these proportions. This is particularly true in art, painting or sculpting an idealized face. My tentative conclusion about cinematography was that when the face is the subject of the composition, the face feels “most comfortable within the frame” when the eyes fall along the same golden ratio line of the frame as the eyes fall within the face. A kind of compositional harmonic. Cinematographers can vary this, depending on the aesthetic of the film. Placing the eyes above the line tends to make the character more dominant, and below the line tends to emphasize the character’s relative weakness. Extreme diversions from this can be seen in films by Pawel Pawlikovski; for example, in his Academy Award winning Ida. The short film below is an exploration of those zones of the face and their mathematical relationships. Why these relationships exist, and are so consistent, is a deeper mystery. The music accompanying the video is from “Oasis” by Paul Sauvanet. Walter Murch has been working in film for more than 50 years, as an editor, sound designer, writer, and director. He edited and sound-designed many films for Francis Coppola (The Godfather Trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain). His interest in science can be seen in his editing of Mark Levinson’s film Particle Fever (2013), about the search for the Higgs Boson. Read More… http://dlvr.it/S54sgD @robinravi

How Coronavirus Mutations Arise and New Variants Emerge - Facts So Romantic

blog tumbling : This piece was produced in cooperation with the Nib. Maki Naro is an award-winning feral cartoonist and science communicator. You can reliably find him online, where he tweets from the handle @sciencecomic Diana Kwon is a freelance science journalist based in Berlin, Germany. She primarily covers the life sciences and health, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, The Scientist, Nature, Knowable Magazine and many other publications. This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter. Read More… http://dlvr.it/Rvjp1h @robinravi

This Is How Your Brain Walks the Dog—a Dialogue - Facts So Romantic

blog tumbling : Habits: You two were arguing, I just kept walking. Felt like the right thing to do.Photograph by evrymmnt / Shutterstock INT. HOME OFFICE—DAY BODY, a middle-aged woman, is working at a computer, trying to finish a plan for the household budget. Habits Oh! It’s time to walk the dog. BODY stops typing. Central Executive Uh, oh right. The body has to walk the dog. Come on, girl. BODY walks outside with the DOG on a leash. The DOG is a pug. EXT. THE SIDEWALK—DAY Default Mode Network How are we going to afford to keep the second car? Maybe we should cancel one of our three streaming services. Reward System Oh, look at that sun. What a nice day! Let’s stop and let the sun shine on the face before we walk into the shadow of that building. Habits No, let’s keep walking. Reward System No, let’s stop— Central Executive We’re walking. The dog needs to go. Default Mode Network Does Disney+ really have enough content to warrant the monthly fee they’re charging? The kids already own half of Disney’s catalog on DVD… BODY sees a discarded aluminum can across the street. Central Executive Aluminum is, environmentally speaking, very costly to produce, but is one of the most recyclable materials out there. Lots of energy gets preserved…. Habits Keep walking. Central Executive The body should go pick up that can and carry it home to the recycle bin. Reward System But it’s all the way across the street! It’s a busy road! Central Executive It’s the right thing to do. Habits Let’s just keep walking. Central Executive Think of how good you’ll feel when the body tosses that can into the recycle bin! Reward System But that’s like 11 minutes away. Habits I’m with Reward System on this one. Ignore it. Central Executive Fine. Default Mode Network We’re cancelling Disney+ when we get home. Reward System What about the next season of The Mandalorian? BODY keeps walking DOG. A cold wind blows by. Reward System Ah! The body should have worn a coat. Central Executive That’s true. Why didn’t it? Habits It’s been pretty mild lately. I didn’t think of it. Reward System Let’s go home. Central Executive The dog hasn’t done her thing yet. Habits Let’s keep walking down this street like we do every day. Reward System I’m cold. I hate this. Central Executive You got your way with the can, now shut up and leave us alone. BODY walks into an intersection without looking. Reward System You’re cold too, not just me. Body, turn around. Central Executive You can take it. The dog— A car stops just short of the dog, honking its horn. Central Executive What happened? Habits You two were arguing, I just kept walking. Felt like the right thing to do. BODY waves apologetically and moves out of the intersection. Reward System That was scary. You should have been paying attention. Central Executive But I was—Arrrrg. DOG finally pees. The next three lines are spoken simultaneously. Habits Time to go home! Reward System I want to go home! Central Executive We should go home now! BODY walks home and gets back to work on the document. INT. HOME OFFICE—DAY Central Executive The body has to get this budget squared away… Default Mode Network The body is going to cancel Disney+. That should help. Central Executive Thanks. BODY types for a minute. Reward System ...I’m hungry. Jim Davies is a professor at the Department of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. He is the author of Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power and Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make us Laugh, Movies Make us Cry, and Religion Makes us Feel One with the Universe. He is co-host of the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain. His new book, Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You, comes out in February 2021. Read More… http://dlvr.it/RvLtN0 @robinravi

Let’s Aim for Physical Rather Than Social Distancing - Facts So Romantic

blog tumbling : Isolation can be toxic. Let’s reduce physical distance while staying connected.Illustration by Tartila / Shutterstock Amid all the calls in nearly every country for social distancing, the most powerful tool we have to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, one important fact gets lost: We are fundamentally social beings, and social distancing can carry a heavy psychological price tag. This is particularly true for people who live on their own, but we can all struggle with the emotional impact of isolation and its first cousin, loneliness. Although there’s been no time to study the effects of social distancing related specifically to the novel coronavirus, we know a great deal about the impact of social isolation on mental and physical health. It’s often experienced as highly stressful, and the stress can become toxic. Isolation, particularly when it causes loneliness, increases the risk of anxiety and depression. Social isolation has the equivalent adverse impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s a greater threat to health than obesity, and is linked to an increased risk of a wide variety of health problems. In a http://dlvr.it/RSF0Bs @robinravi

Why I Built a Dumb Cell Phone with a Rotary Dial - Issue 83: Intelligence

blog tumbling : In 2007, when touchscreens first started coming on the scene, I was excited, like everyone. As a lifelong science-fiction fan, they always seemed to me to be the obvious choice for future user interfaces. But, for over a decade, I’ve been living in what feels like a bad dream. The devices we have now are not what science fiction promised. When you grow up using a personal computer with a keyboard and a mouse, you come to expect precision, and the computers of the future—including smartphones—should only be an improvement on that. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, all the computers are touchscreens, cluttered with detail in a good way. The creators of that show imagined what the next step would be beyond the incredibly dexterous control personal computers offered. The crew of the Enterprise weren’t poking at big, colorful blocks with context-dependent responses to swipes, with even the most basic functionalities hidden within menus. Most importantly, the computers were used for “computery” things. Mapping the stars. Translating alien languages. Analyzing genomes. There was no hint of social media, or that people would stop talking in favor of the apparently… Read More… http://dlvr.it/RSCDcN @robinravi

The Good and Bad News from a Coronavirus Pandemic Model - Issue 83: Intelligence

blog tumbling : How many people could die from a novel coronavirus infection? Of course, no one knows. But just before anyone had a hint of COVID-19, we got an estimate from a panel of health, security, and economic experts: 65 million deaths worldwide within 18 months. That is a high estimate—likely far too high—from a model with a bunch of assumptions. But it is based on enough solid scientific, political, and business expertise to make you stop wondering why you can’t go to your local restaurant, visit your grandmother in the nursing home, and why there is every reason to be very concerned. In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Economic Forum hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201. It simulated the appearance of a novel coronavirus disease that spread from bats to pigs to people. “There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year,” reads a line in the fictional scenario. The exercise is part of an ongoing effort, notably since 9/11, to prepare for pandemic threats, with reports and policy recommendations that have consumed a lot of time and millions of… Read More… http://dlvr.it/RSBBdl @robinravi

The Pandemic Is Showing Us How to Live with Uncertainty - Issue 83: Intelligence

blog tumbling : During the Spanish flu of 1918, it was Vick’s VapoRub. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, it was canned food. Now, as the number of cases of COVID-19 grows worldwide, it’s, among other things, toilet paper. In times of precarity, people often resort to hoarding resources they think are likely to become scarce—panic buying, as it’s sometimes called. And while it’s easy to dismiss as an overreaction, it underscores just how difficult it can be, for both the general public and public health authorities, to choose the right response to a dangerous, rapidly evolving situation. “One of the reasons we have so many challenges is that there’s just so much uncertainty, especially in the early days of an outbreak,” said Glen Nowak, a former director of media relations and communications at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), now a professor of advertising at the University of Georgia. Even for authorities, Nowak said, the number of moving parts and open questions during a public health crisis—where the disease originated, how infectious and deadly it is, how many people are already infected and who’s at risk—can be overwhelming. This means that the rest of us,… Read More… http://dlvr.it/RS9b3c @robinravi

The Pandemic Is Showing Us How to Live with Uncertainty - Facts So Romantic

blog tumbling : What is certain is that if, when the dust settles, we can look back at all the “panic” about this pandemic and laugh at ourselves, we should consider it a blessing.Photograph by FrameAngel / Shutterstock During the Spanish flu of 1918, it was Vick’s VapoRub. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, it was canned food. Now, as the number of cases of COVID-19 grows worldwide, it’s, among other things, toilet paper. In times of precarity, people often resort to hoarding resources they think are likely to become scarce—panic buying, as it’s sometimes called. And while it’s easy to dismiss as an overreaction, it underscores just how difficult it can be, for both the general public and public health authorities, to choose the right response to a dangerous, rapidly evolving situation. “One of the reasons we have so many challenges is that there’s just so much uncertainty, especially in the early days of an outbreak,” said Glen Nowak, a former director of media relations and communications at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), now a professor of advertising at the University of Georgia. Even for authorities, Nowak said, the number of moving parts and open… Read More… http://dlvr.it/RS7Js6 @robinravi

The Good and Bad News from a Coronavirus Pandemic Model - Facts So Romantic

blog tumbling : Hospitals in the U.S. are above 90 percent capacity without any considerations for COVID-19 demands. According the planners of Event 201, and other experts, we will soon see a surge in demand at U.S. hospitals that is almost impossible to imagine.Photo illustration by enzoalessandra / Shutterstock How many people could die from a novel coronavirus infection? Of course, no one knows. But just before anyone had a hint of COVID-19, we got an estimate from a panel of health, security, and economic experts: 65 million deaths worldwide within 18 months. That is a high estimate—likely far too high—from a model with a bunch of assumptions. But it is based on enough solid scientific, political, and business expertise to make you stop wondering why you can’t go to your local restaurant, visit your grandmother in the nursing home, and why there is every reason to be very concerned. In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Economic Forum hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201. It simulated the appearance of a novel coronavirus disease that spread from bats to pigs to people. “There is no possibility of a vaccine being… Read More… http://dlvr.it/RS3sLG @robinravi

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