I usually check monitor.hr with my morning cup of coffee. Although I left my hometown 20 years ago, this is still some kind of umbilical cord. This morning I followed a link to TechCrunch where I learned about this great new movie.
Oct 022011
Aug 132011
The Radioactive Orchestra is a project launched by the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and the Nuclear Power & Safety organisation. In creative collaboration with musician Axel Boman, Swedish nuclear scientists worked to turn radiation into music by translating the different energy levels of individual isotopes to sound frequences.
Our goal is to inspire everyone to learn natural science by making it playful and beautiful. This is a new way to understand radiation and atoms.
The linked project website allows each visitor to compose their own atomic piece.
Melodies are created by stimulating what happens in the atomic nucleus when it decays from an excited nuclear state down to its ground state.
In this process a single gamma photon is released for every step of energy loss. We let the photon play a note where the energy of the photon is represented by the pitch of the note.
This video shows some beautiful details of the process:
Via Laughing Squid.
Jul 272011
Thanks to Boing Boing for posting this TED talk. Just finished watching it and would like to scream/share with everyone. And now I’m gonna watch it again. Enjoy! And don’t be afraid, Neo will save us.
Jul 142011
Harvard University Press published this little gem earlier this summer.
Essentially, the book is a collection of sketches and notes various anthropologists, botanists, paleontologists, ornithologists, and other notable watchmen of nature took while working on the field. It guides the reader into the variety of their observational methods and of their keen impressions.
I am perpetually moved by what seems to be in people an intrinsic meticulous wonder, devoted curiosity, and a wild drive to explore, observe and discover. Asking always, what else is there? Always also just barely being able to bear the weighty ambiguity of the question. This is a rare consolation.
