cubing the sphere

Via Waxy we learn that after months of work, Marc ten Bosch is releasing a toybox of four dimensional playthings that one can experience in a virtual setting and discover the “physics” of how such pieces interact.
This unstructured form of play allows users, taking wobbly baby-steps, to discover how these hybrid hyper-shapes work. The added dimension is a physical one, and not an aspect of passing time that we pretend to intuit or at least be better acquainted with, because while these forms may be impossible to render in our reality, our mechanics can be scaled algebraically to any number of extra dimensions and is only limited by our imaginations. I’ll bet that this is a pretty mind-expanding experience to immerse oneself in and recommend that you give it a try.

corona radiata

Our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari informs that among other happenstance for this date, Queen Elizabeth II had her coronation ceremony in 1953, an event broadcast for the first time to a home audience.  Even though the technology for replaying the event did not then and does not now really exist, the BBC had the foresight to record it in three-dimensions for posterity. The queen’s reign presided over the terms of fourteen prime ministers from Sir Winston Churchill (vested in Parliament by Queen Victoria) to Theresa May. One hundred and sixty years prior to the accession of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror took place and in between in 1924, the United States of America magnanimously grandfathered in Native Americans as US citizens under president (the Queen has seen eleven of them come and go) Calvin Coolidge’s Indian Citizenship Act, though most weren’t granted suffrage or universal recognition until decades later.

botany bus

Filed unfortunately under fleeting wonders as this traveling installation is only a temporary one, mass-transit passengers in Taipei are being treated to a perfusion of lush, living plants and moss-covered seats in a special forest livery roving the concrete jungles of the metropolis. For a week, commuters get the chance to commune with Nature courtesy to an experiment carried out by local florist and designer Alfie Lin. The ride looks absolutely magical and we’re hoping that it inspires other metro-systems to try providing similar, enduring experiences.

6x6

of salterns and sinkholes: a look at the buried salt deposits that drive the geology of the Gulf of Mexico and we will drill at our peril

kit and kiln: captivating, hand-crafted art tiles from Ann Arbour, Michigan

flower shankar: machine learning tries its hand at coming up with band names, via Waxy

while my guitar gently shrieks: Dangerous Minds interviews Missus Smith, the heavy metal, conservatively-dressed busker who can really shred it 

sensory substitution devices: look with your brain, not with your eyes—via TYWKIWDBI  

bloop: the international scientific collaboration Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected the echoes of a massive merger of three black holes