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Wednesday 29 June 2011

Friday 24 June 2011

Air Mail



Adelaide - Edinburgh
Par Avion

Friday 10 June 2011

Being a Mollusc...

In short, there were no limitations to my thoughts, which weren't thoughts, after all, because I had no brain to think them; every cell on it's own though every thinkable thing all at once, not through images, since we had not images of any kind at our disposal, but simply in that indeterminate way of feeling oneself there, which did not prevent us from feeling ourselves equally there in some other way.
It was a rich and free and contented condition, my condition at that time, quite the contrary of what you might think.

...

A Desperation filled me, a desire not to do anything special, which would have been out of place, knowing that there was nothing special to do, or non special either, but to respond in some way...



The shell in this way was able to create visual image of shells, which are things very similar – as far as we know – to the shell itself, except that the shell is here, whereas the images of it are formed elsewhere, possibly on the retina. An image therefore presupposes a retina, which in turn presupposes a complex system stemming from an encephalon. So in producing the shell, I also produced its image - not one, of course, but many because with one shell you can make as many shell-images as you want – but only potential images because to form an image you need all the requisites I mentioned before: and encephalon with its optic ganglia, and an optic nerve to carry the vibrations from outside to inside, and this optic nerve, at the other extremity, ends in something made purposely to see what there is outside, namely the eye.


In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become and image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image.



Excerpts from The Spiral
The Complete Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino

Tuesday 7 June 2011

7







Split Screen



Split screen monitors on U-Bahn in Berlin.
One for each eye.

Monday 6 June 2011

Super-K





Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory under Mount Kamioka in Japan.

"The observatory was designed to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos, and keep watch for supernovas in the Milky Way Galaxy.
A neutrino interaction with the electrons or nuclei of water can produce a charged particle that moves faster than the speed of light in water. This creates a cone of light known as Cherenkov radiation, which is the optical equivalent to a sonic boom. The Cherenkov light is projected as a ring on the wall of the detector and recorded by the PMTs. Using the timing and charge information recorded by each PMT (photomultiplier tube), the interaction vertex, ring direction and flavor of the incoming neutrino is determined.
The ability of the Kamiokande experiment to observe the direction of electrons produced in solar neutrino interactions allowed experimenters to directly demonstrate for the first time that the sun was a source of neutrinos."


More information here and here.

Images courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo.

Note: Thanks to Katy for showing me these super cool brain nuggets.

Friday 3 June 2011

Two places at once.



"Physicists are used to the idea that subatomic particles behave according to the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics, completely different to human-scale objects. In a breakthrough experiment, Aaron O'Connell has blurred that distinction by creating an object that is visible to the unaided eye, but provably in two places at the same time. In this talk he suggests an intriguing way of thinking about the result."