Sunday, November 15, 2009

Formation of Intensity


Moldavite glass was formed 15 million years ago during the impact of a giant meteorite in present-day Nördlinger Ries. Splatters of rocks that were melted by the impact cooled while they were actually airborne and most fell in central Bohemia - traversed by Vltava river (German: Moldau). As such the glass can be found in the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany.






Source: www.wikipedia.org

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Univocity


Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being."[1]
Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. He claims that it is the organizing principle of the Dutchman's philosophy, despite the absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism".[2]


Source: Wikipedia

Image: Andy Fischer, Chicken Retina,Technique: Epi-fluorescence Widefield

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Making knowledge computable

WorlframAlpha's computing engine has come alive today. According to the website its goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. With an aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. The goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Affordance


Affordance is the perceivable possibilities for action seen in objects. Perception theorist J. J. Gibson claims that we perceive possibilities for action. i.e. surfaces for walking, handles for pulling, space for navigation, tools for manipulating, etc. In general, our whole evolution has been geared toward perceiving useful possibilities for action.

Diagnosing the ramification of this theory in the functionality of objects and furthermore spaces, provides us with the understanding that human requirements for inhabiting spaces are beyond the systematic means of Corbusiean measurement, which in essence has provided the base for accepted building code standards around the world.
This theory also illuminates the field of human-space interaction and the interpretation of architecture as interface, which will be discussed in another post.

image: www.nmda-inc.com


Sunday, May 3, 2009

Quantum Biology

A sea slug neuron may tap quantum forces to process information. In humans quantum physics may be integral to thought.
Dylan Burnette/Olympus Bioscapes Imaging Competition

"Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. Then, as now, the prevailing notion was that the sensation of different smells is triggered when molecules called odorants fit into receptors in our nostrils like three-dimensional puzzle pieces snapping into place. The glitch here, for Turin, was that molecules with similar shapes do not necessarily smell anything like one another. Pinanethiol [C10H18S] has a strong grapefruit odor, for instance, while its near-twin pinanol [C10H18O] smells of pine needles. Smell must be triggered, he concluded, by some criteria other than an odorant’s shape alone.
What is really happening, Turin posited, is that the approximately 350 types of human smell receptors perform an act of quantum tunneling when a new odorant enters the nostril and reaches the olfactory nerve. After the odorant attaches to one of the nerve’s receptors, electrons from that receptor tunnel through the odorant, jiggling it back and forth. In this view, the odorant’s unique pattern of vibration is what makes a rose smell rosy and a wet dog smell wet-doggy."


by Mark Anderson from the journal Discover - January 13, 2009

As einstein concluded his general relativity based on the hypothesis that the geometry of space explains further dimensions and oddities in the laws of classical physics, yet he was unable (and unwilling) to match his theory with the, then young, quantum mechanics theory. The M-theorists furthermore have tried to provide a link between the two theories by explaining phenomena in light of vibrations rather than matter. All this concludes the interesting relationship of geometry to spatial phenomena as non-static and quatumly viable.

Friday, April 17, 2009

On the Complex vs.the Complicated


Above: 100 stocks in the USA equity markets: M. Tumminello, T. Aste, T. Di Matteo and R. N. Mantegna, A tool for filtering information in complex systems, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 102, Num. 30 (2005) 10421-10426.

"Regulation should not prevent innovation, rather it should ensure that innovations are sufficiently transparent and understandable to allow consumer choice to drive good market outcomes, [...]When complexity reaches the point of reducing transparency, it impedes competition and leads consumers to make poor choices. And, in some cases, complexity simply serves to disguise practices that are unfair and deceptive."

Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke 4.17.09


Once deconstructivism appeared as the antagonistic tour de-force sequel to post-modernism's 'Complexity and Contradiction', it became clear that with any unstructured complexity, we are exposing the systems architecture to infection, where integrated diversity is shadowed by an external force that is able to modulate and hijack the system entirely as it was witnessed in the economic crash of 2008. The same can be true with the formulation of geometrical systems, where lack of processed organization can lead to the disintegration of social assemblage.

Monday, March 23, 2009

if

"If architecture is an act of organization, the building is an organism: the incorporation of a spirit, and the inspiration of a body. The organism is the optima forma of a certain vital function, it has organized all differences in a heterogeneous and sovereign Whole that finds it's legitimization only in itself, as an internally coherent efficiency without a goal."
(Kant)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Beauty should be edible, or not at all*

* Salvador Dali Los Angeles-based artist Carolyn Mason uses frosting as material to make edible rooms.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Is Pixelation Stereotyping?




"A stereotype is a preconceived idea that attributes certain characteristics (in general) to all the members of class or set. The term is often used with a negative connotation when referring to an oversimplified, exaggerated, or demeaning assumption that a particular individual possesses the characteristics associated with the class due to his or her membership in it. Stereotypes can be used to deny individuals respect or legitimacy based on their membership in that group." 1


In this case pixelation (generally caused by compression)is created by averaging the color information attributed to a digital picture. As HD programming becomes more relevant in the film industry, the question arises as to whether we can extract information, previously hidden from the process of pixelation and generalizing data.This is similar to the process of data sampling in statistics and how conclusions are derived about a population of concern.




Both pixelation and stereotyping assume negative connotations specially in the digital age where collecting and refining the size of the sample rate and analyzing massive amounts of data is increasingly achievable. (see DNA sequencing). However the question still remains whether generalized information can extrapolate hidden information about a process, previously unknown?




Artist Florian Cramer puts this to challenge with some interesting outcome in his project "Floppy Films", where he has compressed all the 2009 Oscar nominated movies into floppy size gif animations (at full length). Can we quantify all the qualitative data of a feature film by studying its pixels?


Sunday, February 22, 2009

Symbiogenesis

The biologist Lynn Margulis, famous for the work on endosymbiosis, contends that symbiosis is a major driving force behind evolution. She considers Darwin's notion of evolution, driven by competition, as incomplete, and claims evolution is strongly based on co-operation, interaction, and mutual dependence among organisms. According to Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking."[31]

[source: wikipedia]

Proton Collision


A computer representation of particles produced by protons smashing into collimators* at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN.

[image courtesy CERN via New Scientist article]

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Monday, February 16, 2009

Production Design

The subtle yet important difference between architecture and production design is that one is about making spaces and one is about discovering them.

Pattern Mining


"Pattern mining" is a data mining technique that involves finding existing patterns in data. In this context patterns often means association rules. The original motivation for searching association rules came from the desire to analyze supermarket transaction data, that is, to examine customer behaviour in terms of the purchased products. For example, an association rule "beer => chips (80%)" states that four out of five customers that bought beer also bought chips.
In the context of pattern mining as a tool to identify terrorist activity, the
National Research Council provides the following definition: "Pattern-based data mining looks for patterns (including anomalous data patterns) that might be associated with terrorist activity — these patterns might be regarded as small signals in a large ocean of noise."[9][10][6] Pattern Mining includes new areas such a Music Information Retrieval (MIR) where patterns seen both in the temporal and non temporal domains are imported to classical knowledge discovery search techniques.
Source: Wikipedia.org

Saturday, February 14, 2009

This is Architecture

Theories after theories and scholars and history. What is Architecture?
Here is a brief answer:

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Geometry of the Brain


consciousness, intelligence and the role of neural networks in their formation.


Connectionism is an approach in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology/cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units. There are many forms of connectionism, but the most common forms use neural network models. The central connectionist principle is that mental phenomena can be described by interconnected networks of simple units. The form of the connections and the units can vary from model to model. For example, units in the network could represent neurons and the connections could represent synapses. Another model might make each unit in the network a word, and each connection an indication of semantic similarity.


source: wikipedia.com

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Façades: expressive, responsive, interactive


An interesting study of buildings that assume controlled electronic skins can be found at this link. Above is the model image of the project at 8941 sunset blvd in west hollywood that me and reza designed in 2005 using central electronic control to apply pixelated imagery to the LED units that are mounted on the structure that itself is performatively dynamic. (project pending budget approval)

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Quantum Dots


A novel QD-molecule system is realized using metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy growth. The dots are tunnel coupled via connected quantum wires (QWRs). The stronger tunnel coupling in this integrated QD-QWR system allows the hybridization of both electron and hole states, yielding direct-real-space excitonic molecules (see image). The structure holds promise for nanophotonic devices for quantum-information-processing applications.

Qing Zhu, K. Fredrik Karlsson, Marcin Byszewski, Alok Rudra, Emanuele Pelucchi, Zhanbing He, Eli KaponPublished Online: Jan 20 2009
interscience.wiley.com

Deep Sea Architecture

Mexican walking fish (Axolotl salamander)









treehugger.com

Saturday, January 10, 2009


"Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not"
F. Neitzche

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Letters to a young poet #1

“Things aren't all so tangible and effable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are ineffable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more ineffable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

ParisFebruary 17, 1903
Rainer Maria Rilke