Hello blackWorm and X and Pat and broomhead
Friday, December 19, 2003
I appologize for the dificulty I have making sense. That last post is hopless so I will move on to today: Stars! I spent today blowing up star pics and messing with the brightness and contrast. I am going to put them on a tshirt for my band. We play Guitar pedals and don't have a name yet but we already have a number of complaints.Shana, you could probably tell us what Astronomers can find out by tweaking the color information in light. Do Astronomers use super filters?
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Cherry writes:
"did he really just cram six different ideas into a single sentence or is he nuts"
I'm afraid I make the nuts look bad just being in the same sentence with them. My post didn't make any sense, but I will try to explain.
When I jump around holding a pumpkin and tense my arms just enough to keep the pumpkin moving with me, I can feel the pumpkin moving like a gyroscope. I know there are no spinning parts on a pumpkin but I think the pumpkin is deforming elastically so that its two centers of mass move gyroscopically in relation to eachother. The deformation stores energy like a spring so the pumpkin always sort of "wants" to go in a certain path just like a gyroscope.
The pumpkin acts like it has two centers of mass, so if I wanted to 3Dprint an object with similar properties I would have to make it have two heavy parts conected by a light part. To smooth is out I could gradually vary the pixel density from heavy to light and back to heavy.
So things in nature almost never have an absolute break -- its always some kind of a gradation, which give nature the low performance material advantage.
Anyway, I think this low performance material advantage is why you don't see any wheels, gears etc. in nature. They were voted out of office a long time ago in the natural world. Wheels are like republicans. They work really well as long as there is no communication between their contituents. A wheel has two contituents, the rolly part and the axle. Republicans have themselves and all that lays outside these castle walls. Wings, on the other hand, are like democrats, they adapt to the situation and they look good. This is because God made them.
So as I was massaging the pumpkin, I remembered using a hand gyroscope as a kid and thought, since rockets use gyroscopes to navigate and the Segway uses gyroscopes, that I must be using my body's natural gyroscopic navigation system to guide the pumpkin. This thought felt very good and made me laugh so hard I almost dropped the pumpkin right on the doorstep of the campus police station.
All motion is gyroscopic. When I swing a dumbell-shaped object around, the path it wants to follow forces my wrist to go back and forth from one side to the other, like a baton twirlers'. So it isn't rotating, as much as it is wobbling back and forth -- like a sphericon!! Inside a material the same thing happens, just faded or out of focus -- so that there is no deffinite boundary between the dumbell and "not the dumbell."
So I thought that changing the density or the shape of an object might make it act more or less like a gyroscope. Springs would work. The pumpkin felt like it had a lead golf ball suspended by springs for a center. A 3D spring might work. Is there such a thing as a spherical spring or a globular spring? Why dont they have crazy springs that make cool complicated motions all over the place? Playing around with some wire I made a sort-of 3D spring, and then I thought about those twists in old telephone cords. I saw one in the tendrils at the tip of an orchid once. Those tendrils corckscrew out until they find what they are looking for and then they go back down the center of the corkscrew. I remember thinking that the tendril must have had to do a telephone twist to back up like that, but I'm not sure if I actually saw where it did it.
So -- a spherical spring. Its pretty interesting but I think there's something about springs that reminds me of wheels, they seem really powerful in one way but you know they're giving it up somewhere else, like in the wheel's lack of ability to remember how many times it's gone around.
In summation -- I would like to appologize to the nuts for any association with me that this blog may bring upon them. Cherry you are the greatest.
Ok, back again. Anyway, I'm really into the biofeedback thing. I wish everyone would wear them out loud in public so that everyone else knew how they felt, all the time. I'm convinced that all the world's problems stem from people hiding stuff, either on purpose or not. Maybe what would be cool is this:
img src="hmm I can't seem to get the pic up"
an air bag made of high-memory material, and a flute. The sound could be really quiet and maybe different chords for different pressures. Volume could be controled by closing or opening the air way.
Another idea is this "lung" with a wearable, deformable, artificial vocal tract made of foam or rubber.
Wow Xuan that guy is cool. He figured out the solution to Leon Theremin's problem of "how do you make a machine that translates full body movement into sound." Theremin's attempt (a full sized theremin) got bad reviews because dancers said it just made noise. I wonder if they were moving too fast. I am totally interested in the idea of biofeedback. Cherry knows I used to carry a springy piece of aluminum and a mallet around with me all day at pearl making funny beats. I would hold the metal against my stomach, really close to my diaphram and beat on it with some regular beat and then when my diaphram contracted abmormally there would be a little change in song in the repetitive beat. It would always happen when there was a hot chick passing by, or my boss came around the corner. Actually I think that whole thing started when Tim lent me his lie detector, remember that? You wear it around for a week and pretty soon you can stand stark naked in the middle of central square and maintain a zen-like trance.
I have thought a lot about those Z-flutes attached to wings, kites, clothes and other things as biofeedback. Maybe Cherry can pitch in on this one. She inventeed the masterpiece Z-flute, the "Player Flute" as described below. Oops gotta run, more soon.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Hello Peoples. Here is what I'm thinking today: 3D-curvature springs! Maybe this will work as my Mom's birthday present. It would be a present that she could shake around to try to determine what was inside... for ever and ever! I was thinking about density varience in materials and how to 3D print it on a Zmachine - a scafolding with varied thickness I guess, and I remembered this animation I saw on the web of a whole bunch of cubes inside eachother - with just a little give inbetween each one - so that the littlest one had more freedom to move in 3D than the big ones. Then I thought maybe you could do that with a regular old spring by varying the curvature in 3D. It's sculpy time!
Monday, December 15, 2003
Here is where that Teddy-Bear-modern-art idea came from: Keith Haring's 3D objects. I think they are so cool because the 3D surfaces are individual objects but the patterns are more like an infinite and magical fungus and the two together make me think of the Identity problem in Philosophy and how the Internet is showing us how the boundaries between individuals are just communications bottlenecks (that call for Shana's WD40 skills). Maybe we should get rid of all our pronouns. Is a person with Google worth more than a person without?
I used to dip bottles in gesso and paint paterns on them. The patterns make your eye see the curved surface in a new way. If you move this page up and down you will find that the Haring pictures below do funny things to your eyes. I think this is becuase your eye gets sort of confused by them. The middle of this pic would buzz like a heat mirage when you looked at it in real life. Your brain must have to switch compression algorhithms when there are too many dots per unit area.
The last time I saw that picture in real life, it was winning mute praise from the apartment mates of Dan the 19 year old drug dealer and graffitti artist who worked in -- and brought home half of -- the pen department at Pearl, so that he could save money on drugs by huffing the stinky pens.
By the way, Cherry, I emailed the address of the animation artist you sent me on to Colin "sphericon" Roberts and he returned his extreem gratitude so I am passing it on to your extremities.(?) Did I say Happy Birthday? I forgot my Mom's birthday on Dec 3. I had to give her an IOU for "one masterpiece" which I've now got to think up. Happy Day.
