Hey, I'm an undergraduate chemistry major at SUNY Albany in New York. This blog is for anything I find interesting. I have many interests: chemistry, math, philosophy, poetry, libertarianism, etc. I have some hero's who I hope to find on tumblr more often who include: Buckminster Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Carl Jung, Marshall Mcluhan, Kurt Godel, John Muir and more. Any questions about anything, just ask. The link below is to my other blog, it's less serious, and is for posting things that wouldn't fit on this one. It's more of an indulgence blog, so check it out.
http://weltanshauung.tumblr.com/
- Links
Totally in love with this image.
The making of a tree ring print! <3
You guys want to see something terrifying? Behold the bizarre alien creature that is the human vocal cords.
This is a technique called laryngoscopy. Check out the link above for some background, if you can stomach it. If you’re especially brave, check out this Reddit thread with even more video examples of vibrating vocal folds in all their freaky glory.
Megalopygidae opercularis <3
I just want to snuggle it!
Thinking of Bucky- Just listened to another amazing 99% Invisible podcast on Buckminster Fuller and a dome he has in Woods Hole (who knew?). More here, but it led me to remember my favorite Bucky creation: the dymaxion maps! In searching for different ways to understand our lovely planet, Buckminster Fuller faceted it’s shape, not unlike his geodesic domes, and unfolded the pieces into new, truthful, yet different maps. The result is amazing. I love ‘one continent’ and ‘one ocean,’ the two maps over on the left (the big map is also one continent).
The inspirational audio for the curious, thank you 99% Invisible.
Rue Saint-Honoré, Afternoon, Rain Effect - Camille Pissarro (1897)
(Point Reyes, California - 11/2012)
‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’, 1957 - gif
A Tree of Theorems (and its Shadow)
In the images I see of Douglas Hofstadter, he is so unassuming. Meek looking almost. Frail and human. It’s easy to forget that he wrote a book that sits like a Titan on my shelf next to all the smaller-souled books that surround it.
The book is Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and the figure above is a drawing from the book by the author. Just one page among the seven hundred. The white tree on the left is a Theorem Tree, growing into a black field of truths. On the right it’s shadow grows into a field of Falsehoods.
The early part of Godel, Escher, Bach is spent teaching the reader from scratch about Formal Systems. These are mathematical, typographical ways of thinking. Hofstadter designs some little game-systems, but most of them are meant to live in the world of numbers. They include numbers, mathematical symbols, logical connectors like “And/Or” and “If/Then”. And the theorems of the system can be built up using logical rules of inference.
Some of the outer boxes of this diagram represent the set of all strings (including the nonsensical), and the set of all well-formed sentences. This area is broken up into the truths on the left (in black) and the falsehoods on the right (in white). Into the truths grows a white tree. These are the theorems: the sentences one gets by starting with some axioms and applying the rules of inference. The shadow tree of negated theorems grows on the right.
Here is the point: The tree of theorems fails to cover the whole field of truths. Many areas are left black, meaning that many things are true, but cannot be proved by the rules of inference.
This is Godel’s incompleteness which Hofstadter leads us up to and explores ever-so-gradually.
One other point worth noting: the fuzziness of the boundary between truth and falsehood. Hofstadter did this on purpose, he writes, to suggest a fractal boundary like the Mandelbrot Set, so that no matter how close one zooms in, a fuzzy confusion exists between true and false so that they cannot be teased apart precisely.
Glass frog (or Glassfrogs) is the common name for the frogs of the amphibian family Centrolenidae (order Anura). While the general background coloration of most glass frogs is primarily lime green, the abdominal skin of some members of this family is translucent. The internal viscera, including the heart, liver, and gastrointestinal tract are visible through this translucent skin, hence the common name.
You can say that again!
Penrose tiling is a form of non periodic tiling discovered by physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose in 1974. The fact that it is non repeating means that when shifted it will not be the same as the original - it has no translational symmetry. This type of tiling can have reflection symmetry and rotational fivefold symmetry depending on how it is constructed. It is also symmetrical at large scales and small scales (self-similar).
Image: Oil painting by Urs Schmid (1995) of a Penrose tiling using fat and thin rhombi.
fiery-billed aracari
(photos by jeluba)
Original patent for the LEGO brick
The LEGO toy empire got started in 1932 when Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter, almost went bankrupt. During a depression, he had lost so much carpentry business that he started making wooden toys and selling them from his workshop. Two years later, he named his company LEGO (from Danish words “leg godt” meaning “play well”. Incidentally, lego also means “I put together” in Latin.)
