gömböc

From the Hungarian diminutive form of sphere, this distinctive though not uniquely-shaped geometrical construct (see also) has like a Weeble (which wobble but they don’t fall down) or the bumps on the shell of a tortoise the property of righting itself and is defined—when sitting on a flat surface—as having one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium for resting and rocking.

silesian pallas

Polyglot, polymath and one of the most important contributors to stellar cataloguing, star charts and calculating the course of the planets of the early modern era, Maria Cunitz was born in present-day Wołów on this day circa 1610 (†1664).
Her work Urania propitia—generous Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, corrected and simplified the logarithmic tables of Johannes Kepler—which while serving purely for astrological forecasts were rooted wholly in astronomical observation and calculations—and included sections for tabulating future solar and lunar eclipses, computing the mean motion of astral bodies across the firmament and the use of stars for navigation. Aside from the more accessible presentation of methodology, the book’s publication in Latin and German gave it a far wider readership and helped establish German as language of the sciences.

bubble wand

For a few weeks now I had been wondering if creating a force field of soap bubbles or frothy foam might not disable viruses lingering in the air but fretted over the diversion of resources and efficacy versus the very real promoter of effective behavioural shifts in gamification and dressing up, accessorising—and while there still might be elements of window-dressing and gimmickry in some of these entrants in a sponsored competition, I liked how the idea was championed as a way to reframe hygiene in a society learning to deal and cope with COVID. Other honourable mentions included a clever doorbell that dispensed a dollop of hand sanitiser for arriving visitors, proposals for public washing-up stations and disinfectant doses encapsulated in a seaweed membrane so as not leave plastic litter. Learn more about the call for submission from Dezeen at the link above and get inspired yourself.

the united states of voronoi

Named after the mathematician who defined their properties, Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy (*1868 – †1908), a Voronoi diagram triangulates and parses cells or regions (previously) by their spatial affinity to a given seed or site.
Redrawing borders of the continental states, as Jason Davies has done, so that each point within those bounds is geographically closer to its own capital city than the capital of any adjacent polity yields an interesting distribution that somehow aligns with the character of the capitol not being necessarily the largest city and representative of the population as a whole and preserves (with notable distortions) to an extent the shape of the states on the map.

analytical analyser of harmonics

From Pasa Bon! we are acquainted with the with the 1959 breakthrough computing advancement from engineer and scientist Jacek Karpiński (*1927 – †2010) in collaboration with Janusz Tomaszewski, the transistor-powered AKAT-1.
Constructed to solve differential equations for better modelling of heat dissipation in motors and shock absorption in brakes and building off the success of an earlier prototype used to make more precise weather forecasts, Karpiński gave his latest analogue unit a space-age housing and interface that looks like something out of science-fiction. Later achievements in the industry include standardising coding language and a machine called the Perceptron that could distinguish objects by shape and was one of the pioneering examples of algorithmic learning through supervised learning. Normally the AKAT-1 can be visited at the Muzeum Techniki in Warsaw.

chronogram

As much as these days can seem rather untethered, time still marches forward and Messy Nessy Chic brings us a thought-provoking survey of some of the myriad ways that civilisation has tried to regulate and legislate the cycles of the Sun and Moon.
One will encounter some of the earliest attempts to figure human reckoning, superstition and experience with cosmology and the progression of the seasons—and whether indeed time’s arrow isn’t a flat circle that brings everything around again, to efforts to install decimal time (or at least one that followed more regular rules) and the French Revolutionary Calendar plus other ways of resetting the clock. A chronogram, incidentally, is a headstone, plaque or commemoration that one sometimes encounters with those seemingly random capitalised or illuminated letters, like in the more straightforward epitaph for Elizabeth I of England: My Day Closed Is In Immortality—or, MDCIII corresponding to 1603, the year of her death or in lengthier passages called chronosticha on buildings that relate a parable and record when construction was completed.

256 byte boundary

First encountered here, we really appreciated learning about Memories and the economy of engineering that went into coding this MS-DOS demonstration, via Waxy, and wonder if anyone else is practising constrained programming, sensitive to limitations, legacy and backwards compatibility. Considering how enduring Voyagers’ primitive operating systems are or the two-bit viruses that can bring the world to a stand-still, tiny code can have outsized implications.

fünf augen

Chillingly and now the subject of an official inquiry by the Swiss government (whose own intelligence service is formidable and nothing to underestimate), the Washington Post and the ZDF reveal that for decades the CIA and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, see previously) in partnership owned and controlled a communications and information security company that manufactured encryption machines and cipher (see also) devices for intelligence agencies and businesses around the world.
While it was known since 2015 that the firm’s founder had been approached by a field operative in 1955 and strongly urged not to sell the technology to governments not aligned with the West, the extent of America and West Germany’s involvement remained a mystery, and from 1970 to 2018 (the BND dropping out in 1988) conducted operations Thesaurus and Rubicon to distribute compromised machines with a backdoor built in to allow US spies to handily intercept and decrypt secret correspondence. Justifiably wary, the Soviets and China did not use the rigged machines but many governments in the Middle East and Central and South America did, informing and fueling American adventurism and proxy warfare in those regions.

6x6

multiplicands: an interesting demonstration of an ancient method of numerical decomposition that intuits algorithms base-two number systems

still life with daishi: the exquisite three decades of detailed food diaries of a soba chef

bee space: a look at how apiculture informs architecture

enhance: artificial intelligence applied to an 1896 film upscales the Lumière Brothers’ l’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Cioatat significantly

mergers and acquisitions: a clip of two Chinese young men lip-syncing the Back Street Boys’ I Want It That Way in 2006 convinced Google it the YouTube platform could be a promising investment

from sack to shift: Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic Mondrian-inspired dress (previously), including one for Lady Penelope

kryptos

Via the never cryptic and always interesting Nag on the Lake we are informed that a new clue has been tantalisingly dropped regarding the bronze sculpture that adorns the courtyard of the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (previously) whose coded message has for nearly thirty years rebuffed obsessive efforts to fully decrypt it.
Professional and hobbyist code-breakers alike over the years have managed to solve three (the first two are Vigenère ciphers, a method using an interweaving of shifting and polyalphabetic substitution, the third is a transposition cipher with the fourth being a mystery) out of the four puzzles but the last remains a conundrum. The artist behind the work, Jim Sanborn—surprised that the mystery has taken this long to be decoded and perhaps out of a desire not to have it all unravelled posthumously—has issued a few hints first in 2010 with BERLIN, next in 2014 with CLOCK and most recently NORTHEAST with which letters of the cipher the solution corresponds with.

8! x 3^7 x (12!/2) x 2^11

On this day in 1980 at the British Toy and Hobby Fair, the mechanical puzzle (see previously) by Hungarian architect and professor Ernő Rubik had its international debut.
Demonstrating a prototype to his students around 1974 and seeing the positive reception, Rubik sought out a manufacturer, originally calling it his Magic Cube (Bűvöskocka), and licensed the design to Ideal Toys—formerly known for their line of dolls that included Betsy Wetsy and Rub-a-Dub Doggie, in 1979 for wider distribution under the name Rubik’s Cube. Among his influences, the polymath and educator lists MC Escher for grappling with impossible configurations and contemplating the nature of infinity within the permissible. Discounting the strictures of the mechanics of the cube (only seven of the eight corners can be independently articulated and there are only twelve possible orbits for each square, there are forty three quintillion permutations—that is, if a cube were to represent each possible state a stack of them would tower over two-hundred and sixty light-years high, scraping the sky beyond of our Stellar Neighbourhood.

mirrored melodies

A clever musician named Steve Cruickshank, brought to us courtesy of the always brilliant talent scout Nag on the Lake, has created inverted covers of classic rock anthems and other songs to an interesting, engaging and irresolved effect (see also).
The principle applied—that of negative harmony—was part of jazz theory articulated by London artist Jacob Collier and a progression by fifths is reduced and reflected back as one of fourths, converting, for example a C-Major scale into a G scale in phrygian mode. Here’s a sampling with Toto’s Africa but all are worth checking out, especially the Star Wars theme and march.

mécanique celeste

Having so astounded the public at large and his peers within the scientific community with his spot-on prediction of not only the existence but location and general characteristics of the planet Neptune (it was proposed to make the planet’s symbol a monogram of the discoverer’s name rather than the trident ♆, prefiguring some of the controversy over the discovery of Pluto—♇—by Clyde Tombaugh to the consternation of wealthy patron Percival Lowell) using only mathematics and the observations of deviations of the orbit of Uranus counter to the laws of gravitational attraction as set forward by Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler, no one had any reason to doubt the proposition that famed astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph La Verrier (*1811 – †1877) put forward on this day in 1860, reporting that the perturbations in the procession of Mercury and Venus around the Sun (apsidal precession) required an explanation above and beyond classical Newtonian physics. Like with the Ptolemaic model of keeping up appearances, Le Verrier (with the consensus of the scientific community) logically invoked an intervening though purely hypothetical planet circling the Sun below Mercury—Vulcan (Vulcain, see previously here, here and here). In reality, Mercury’s strange observed behaviour needed not another celestial body to account for it but rather Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, formulated in 1915, vanquishing Vulcan by staking its reputation on predictions concerning occultation, planetary transit and the effect of gravitational lensing and finally confirmed in September 2015 with the detection of gravitational waves.

time_t

At the stroke of midnight universal coordinated time 1970, the Unix epoch began. Counting the seconds from that point on and treating everyday as if it had eighty-six thousand four-hundred of them (discounting leap seconds makes the logging events slightly asynchronous with time as measured by atomic clocks but this discrepancy is factored in later in dating), the calendar convention does not have the y2k problem built into the programming from the beginning.
However, under the current conventions for designating a timestamp, Unix will experience its own on 19 January 2038, when the thirty-two-bit integers that seconds are stored in exceed capacity and reset to 13 December 1901. The future implications of this bug weren't appreciated until around 2006 when programmers (a notoriously lazy group) began to realise that their kludge, a temporary solution—a quick and dirty work-around, for computer operations to never time out (substituting forever for after a billion seconds, about thirty-two years) started to cause an overflow error when the tumblers roll over.

herrnhuter stern

We’re getting ready to hang up our Moravian stars as the first festoonery of the season and the process of constructing the lantern and piecing together the paper cones is always an engaging ritual.
The decoration and design originated in the 1830s in a Moravian church (see also) boarding school for boys near the town of Görlitz to impart students with a lesson in geometry—the twenty-six-sided star being called a rhombicuboctahedron. Around 1880, an alumnus of the Pædagogium made the stars and their instruction manuals for sale in his bookstore and his son went on to open a factory in 1897 in the village of Herrnhut under the auspices of the church that makes and distributes the stars to this day.

6x6

four-score: an exploration how the language of counting might influence numeracy

sundowning: museum visits as therapeutic interventions seem to ease symptoms of dementia

look, a fruit-loop: the actual libretto—you’ve been singing Dies Iræ all wrong (see also)

satellite nyetwork: a retired gentleman elaborately decorates receiver dishes informed by traditional Russian folk art, via Nag on the Lake

dataviz: Information is Beautiful curates the year’s superlative infographics, via Kottke’s Quick Links

zero-to-sixty: a century of evolving European motorways as part of the Victoria & Albert’s series on Accelerating the Modern World, via Things Magazine 

intersectionality

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we are invited to explore how one’s content-curators (previously) are driven by the geometry dispensed in Euclid’s Elements, lending a spatial and a quite non-figurative sense to the notion of architecture of choice and the concept of taste divergence.
This illustration of data-modelling and prediction is also a very safe and non-judgmental forum to reacquaint oneself with the maths that we never expected to use again only to find that they’ve been exploiting us through some practical assignments, which are quite assailable despite the fact that they start out like those terribly fraught word problems about trains passing at speed.

visual circuity

The ever interesting BLDGBlog introduces us to the concept from Mark Changizi that supposes a sort of visual vernacular of optical illusions that could be presented and preserved as architectural elements or useful grebbling ornaments to cue viewers to perform a computation—a reminder, encoded instructions or a formula that easier to convey and intuit by sight rather than through words.
Façades, as light and shadow pass over them throughout the day, become engaging and transformative as logical operators—though I suppose could be programmed for propaganda as well. The notion that mathematics can be reified and intuitive recalls both the cymatic diagrams of Friedrich Chladni and the visual proofs of the Pythagorean theorem or quadratic equation.

cascading style sheets or iso 216

Charting outliers on a world map looks suspiciously similar to countries that utilize the metric system versus countries who don’t, but it is worth reflecting on the mathematical properties that stand behind this universal format for paper size that makes each in the series, from poster to letter to brochure and so on, derivative and retains the same aspect ratio—the square root of two (≈ 1.4142857 rounding to the nearest millimetre) to one. When a sheet of paper with these dimensions is folded in half along the shorter axis (widthwise), each half retains the same ratio and is incredibly useful for scaling a job up or down without cutting a part out or leaving an empty margin.

series g

Replacing industrialist partners Matthew Bouton and James Watt of steam-engine fame, the Bank of England’s next batch of £ fifty notes will feature on the reverse mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, whose pioneering work not only helped defeat Nazi Germany by decrypting transmissions between command and control and the front but was also indispensably formative in how we regard electronic cognition and artificial intelligence.
Speaking of his work programming the British Bombe, one of his code-breaking electro-mechanical machines, the bill has the quotation, “This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be.” Although this statement does not amend past missteps—Turing’s contributions only much later acknowledged and rehabilitated and the country’s marked ingratitude, such decisions are consequential and meaningful, standing in marked contrast to the United States, whose money mostly only features dead presidents and the planned roll-out of a black, female abolitionist on the $ twenty note was delayed and deferred over the current pretender’s affection for the observe as it stands, featuring a president infamous as a slavery apologist and for his genocidal treatment of Native Americans.