Blue-Ukulele

3rdrudy: imsarahcate: 3rdrudy: timewarp-grrrl: ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ what...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 07:32:55 -0500

imsarahcate:

3rdrudy:

timewarp-grrrl:

‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’

what if i cut off your left leg

would that make you stronger

would it

Finally the Monty Python fandom awakens

We were never asleep, we’ve just been out trying to find the right shubbery.

storyboard: Black History Is American History Think of Black...

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:07:44 -0500

Nat King Cole in New York, June 1947. Photography by William P. Gottlieb / Wikimedia Commons.

Nat King Cole in New York, June 1947. Photography by William P. Gottlieb / Wikimedia Commons.

Nat King Cole in New York, June 1947. Photography by William P. Gottlieb / Wikimedia Commons.

storyboard:

Black History Is American History

Think of Black History Month, and chances are you think in turn of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., maybe Marcus Garvey. It’s a familiar group — and that, says Alex Pierce, is precisely the problem. “It’s become a way to pack a few hundred years of history into one 28-day month of the year,” the Texas-based designer and art director says. And so this month, Pierce launched Black in History, a blog to highlight the accomplishments of influencers like Gerald Anderson Lawson, the inventor of the video game console, Roy L. Clay Sr., the “Black Godfather of Silicon Valley,” and jazz great Nat King Cole. We talked to Pierce about his love/hate relationship with Black History Month.

Your day job is in advertising. Has that made you a cynic?

I would say I’m more sensitive than some to the strange relationship advertising has with black people. It’s not all bad, believe me, but I do cringe when Black History Month comes rolling around and a few brands decide to change their jingles to soul-R&B music and feature more colorful people in their broadcast spots and print ads. My family laughs about it all the time. I get it — it’s a great way to tie your brand to an important message while selling some stuff. I’m not necessarily against that. It’s just when it’s done bad, it’s pretty bad. Black history in a lot of advertising has become a way to say something without really saying anything at all.

Read More

the-absolute-funniest-posts: yourpointofviewismedieval: kselig: ...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:25:41 -0500

the-absolute-funniest-posts:

yourpointofviewismedieval:

kselig:

Your plan has now been foiled. MWAHAHA

MATH HUMOR IS THE BEST.

My lovely followers, please follow this blog immediately!

martinekenblog: Ukulele Design - The Sea by vivsters Artist on...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:33:44 -0500

martinekenblog:

Ukulele Design - The Sea by vivsters

Artist on Tumblr

10knotes: Follow this blog, you will love it on your dashboard

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:05:59 -0500

10knotes:

Follow this blog, you will love it on your dashboard

Photo

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:26:33 -0400

Original post.

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:49:08 -0400

Original post.

kaleidoscopicmind: Saturn Saturn is back!

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:47:26 -0400

kaleidoscopicmind:

Saturn

Saturn is back!

discoverynews: likeafieldmouse: Alejandro Guijarro - Momentum...

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:46:26 -0400

discoverynews:

likeafieldmouse:

Alejandro Guijarro - Momentum (2010-12)

“The artist travelled to the great quantum mechanics institutions of the world and, using a large-format camera, photographed blackboards as he found them. Momentum displayed the photographs in life-size.

Before he walked into a lecture hall Guijarro had no idea what he might find. He began by recording the blackboard with the minimum of interference. No detail of the lecture hall was included, the blackboard frame was removed and we are left with a surface charged with abstract equations. Effectively these are documents. Yet once removed from their institutional beginnings the meaning evolves. The viewer begins to appreciate the equations for their line and form. Color comes into play and the waves created by the blackboard eraser suggest a vast landscape or galactic setting. The formulas appear to illustrate the worlds of Quantum Mechanics. What began as a precise lecture, a description of the physicist’s thought process, is transformed into a canvas open to any number of possibilities.”

1. Cambridge (2011)

2. Stanford (2012)

3. Berkeley I (2012)

4. Berkeley II (2012)

5. Oxford (2011)

i guess my teacher was right… math is art.

Photo

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 17:09:43 -0400

the-absolute-funniest-posts: Follow this blog, it’ll make your...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:00:08 -0400

the-absolute-funniest-posts:

Follow this blog, it’ll make your dash light up with unicorns and freakin’ magic

physicsphysics: Listen to the Higgs Boson. Who would have...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:41:35 -0400

physicsphysics:

Listen to the Higgs Boson.

Who would have thought that the sound of God would tune on a habanera rhythm?

Researchers say they have “sonified” the data from the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, making it possible to “hear” the newly discovered Higgs Boson-like particle, dubbed the “God particle” by Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman.

The result is a melody which resembles the dotted rhythm of the habanera, a Cuban dance which became popular in Spain in the early 19th century.

On Wednesday July 4, scientists at CERN announced that they had found a Higgs-like particle after analyzing results from the Large Hadron Collider. Researchers detected a “bump” in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), consistent with the Higgs Boson, which is believed to give mass to all other particles.

“As soon as the announcement was made, we begun working on the sonification of the experimental data,” Domenico Vicinanza, product manager at Dante (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), Cambridge, UK, told Discovery News.

Vicinanza led the Higgs sonification project collaborating with Mariapaola Sorrentino of ASTRA Project (Cambridge), who contributed to the sonification process, and Giuseppe La Rocca (INFN Catania), who was in charge of the computing framework.

“Sonification worked by attaching a musical note to each data. So, when you hear the resulting melody you really are hearing the data,” Vicinanza said.

The researchers mapped intervals between values in the original data set to interval between notes in the melody. The same numerical value was associated to the same note. As the values increased or decreased, the pitch of the notes grew or diminished accordingly.

“In this way any regularity in the scientific data can be naturally mapped to the melody: if the data are periodic (they are marked by a repeated cycle) the sonification will be a music melody which will have the same periodicity and regularity,” Vicinanza said.

In the sonification, each semiquaver corresponded to an increase of 5 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). The detection of the Higgs-like particle around the 126 gigaelectronvolt mass-energy range (GeV), was then expressed by a peak made of three high notes (about 3.5 seconds into the recording).

The bump corresponding to the new particle is represented by an F note which is two octaves above the preceding F note, a C which is the most acute note in the music (also two octaves above the subsequent C note) representing the peak of the Higgs, and a E note.

“The discovery of the Higgs-like particle is a major step forward in our knowledge of the world around us. By using sonification we are able to make this breakthrough easier to understand by the general public,” Vicinanza said.

Amazingly, the sonification produced a habanera-like music.

“After hearing the piano solo version, I created another version, more in tone with the resulting melody. I added bass, percussion, marimba and xylophone,” Vicinanza said.

Particularly useful when dealing with complex, high-dimensional data, sonification requires enormous amounts of networking and processing power to produce results. To create the Higgs melody, the researchers relied on high-speed research networks including the pan-European GÉANT network, which operates at speed of up to 40Gbps (it will become 100Gb/s by early 2013) and the EGI grid computing infrastructure, which works by linking together multiple computers in different locations via high speed networks.

“Neither the discovery of the particle or this sonification process would have been possible without the high speed research networks that connect scientists across the world, enabling them to collaborate, analyze data and share their results,” Vicinanza said.