Drinking Water From The Sea And Sun
This is the Eliodomestico, a beautifully designed distiller that can produce 1.3 gallons of fresh water a day from seawater. The solar-powered unit requires no electricity, filters or maintenance. The brainchild of Gabriele Diamanti, an industrial designer based in Milan, the distiller won its creator a spot on this year’s list of Global Public Interest Design.
On his blog, Diamanti writes that his terra cotta and metal water still is “intended to bring good drinking water to the families in the developing countries at no operating cost, starting from the sea water.”
He expects it to be half the cost of a normal solar still and produce nearly twice as much potable water.
Tracks
Lichtenburg Figures and “Captured Lightning”
Lichtenberg figures are branching, tree-like or fern-like patterns that are created by high voltage discharges passing along the surface, or inside of, electrical insulating materials. The first Lichtenberg figures were actually 2-dimensional “dust figures” formed as dust in the air settled on the surface of electrically-charged plates of resin in the laboratory of their discoverer, German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799).
The branching patterns of a Lichtenberg figure look similar at various scales of magnification. This “self-similarity” strongly suggests that Lichtenberg figures might be mathematically described through a branch of mathematics called fractal geometry. Lichtenberg figures are naturally created by lightning strikes. For example, lightning strike victims often have a tattoo-like Lichtenberg figure on their bodies.
The images above are sculptures created by Stoneridge Engineering. Click here to read about how they are created!
The ballistic ellipse
This is something I found when I was playing around with ballistic trajectories. I wondered what shape you would get if you connected all the apex points of all trajectories, if you only changed the angle and kept the same initial speed.
Surprisingly, you get an ellipse!
EDIT: Also, here it is in 3D! Naturally, you get an ellipsoid.
The equation for the ellipse is:
x2 / a2 + (y - b)2 / b2 = 1
Where a = v02 / (2g) and b = v02 / (4g). Naturally, v0 is the initial speed and g is the acceleration due to gravity.
In another curiosity, the eccentricity of this ellipse is constant for all values of v0 and g, and this value is e = √3 / 2.
Obviously, I wasn’t the first to find this. A quick search revealed a paper on arXiv from 2004 describing this. Still, it’s a nice little-known curiosity of a classical physics problem.
Bonus points: for which angles does the trajectory contain the foci of the ellipse?
Bellini, Barocci, Caravaggio, Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata.
Piękno matematyki
(Fonte: nicconoh)
Japanese Exhibition Flyer: Tadanori Yokoo’s Showa Nippon. 2013
Can our brains see the fourth dimension?
Most of us are accustomed to watching 2-D; even though characters on the screen appear to have depth and texture, the image is actually flat. But when we put on 3-D glasses, we see a world that has shape, a world that we could walk in. We can imagine existing in such a world because we live in one. The things in our daily life have height, width and length. But for someone who’s only known life in two dimensions, 3-D would be impossible to comprehend. And that, according to many researchers, is the reason we can’t see the fourth dimension, or any other dimension beyond that. Physicists work under the assumption that there are at least 10 dimensions, but the majority of us will never “see” them. Because we only know life in 3-D, our brains don’t understand how to look for anything more.
In 1884, Edwin A. Abbot published a novel that depicts the problem of seeing dimensions beyond your own. In “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions“ Abbot describes the life of a square in a two-dimensional world. Living in 2-D means that the square is surrounded by circles, triangles and rectangles, but all the square sees are other lines. One day, the square is visited by a sphere. On first glance, the sphere just looks like a circle to the square, and the square can’t comprehend what the sphere means when he explains 3-D objects. Eventually, the sphere takes the square to the 3-D world, and the square understands. He sees not just lines, but entire shapes that have depth. Emboldened, the square asks the sphere what exists beyond the 3-D world; the sphere is appalled. The sphere can’t comprehend a world beyond this, and in this way, stands in for the reader. Our brains aren’t trained to see anything other than our world, and it will likely take something from another dimension to make us understand.
But what is this other dimension? Mystics used to see it as a place where spirits lived, since they weren’t bound by our earthly rules. In his theory of special relativity, Einstein called the fourth dimension time, but noted that time is inseparable from space. Science fiction aficionados may recognize that union as space-time, and indeed, the idea of a space-time continuum has been popularized by science fiction writers for centuries. Einstein described gravity as a bend in space-time. Today, some physicists describe the fourth dimension as any space that’s perpendicular to a cube - the problem being that most of us can’t visualize something that is perpendicular to a cube.
Researchers have used Einstein’s ideas to determine whether we can travel through time. While we can move in any direction in our 3-D world, we can only move forward in time. Thus, traveling to the past has been deemed near-impossible, though some researchers still hold out hope for finding wormholes that connect to different sections of space-time.
If we can’t use the fourth dimension to time travel, and if we can’t even see the fourth dimension, then what’s the point of knowing about it? Understanding these higher dimensions is of importance to mathematicians and physicists because it helps them understand the world. String theory, for example, relies upon at least 10 dimensions to remain viable. For these researchers, the answers to complex problems in the 3-D world may be found in the next dimension - and beyond.
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Solar System Print (60x80 cm)
Claude Elwood Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948
The IBM Harvard Mark I, or the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), an electromechanical computer built in 1944 for use by the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships. The machine was built out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches and weighed approximately 10,000 pounds.