Friday 29 April 2011

How round is your circle?


This silent video introduces us to the fundamental engineering technology concepts of the basic and practical techniques of mathematical geometry.

These ideas are elaborated in more detail in the book "How round is your circle? : where engineering and mathematics meet" by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin.

Bryant and Sangwin tackle questions like: When does the width of a saw blade matter to an engineer’s calculations—or for that matter, the width of a physical line? When does a measurement need to be exact and when will an approximation suffice?



"This book builds a bridge across the ordinarily huge chasm separating how engineers and mathematicians view the world. Its innovative approach will be refreshing to readers with an engineering bent, and an eyeopener for many mathematicians. The audience for this book includes just about anyone who has any curiosity at all about how mathematics helps in explaining the world." Paul J. Nahin, author of An Imaginary Tale

Sunday 24 April 2011

Protei, Autonomous articulated Sailing Robot To Clean Up Oil Spills


A collaborative team of sail boat engineers, computer hardware and robot scientists are researching and developing a low cost open source hardware platform or sail boat skimmer to more efficiently collect oil from waterway oil spillages.The sailing boat is being specifically designed to autonomously sail  upwind, intercepting oil sheens going downwind.

"Spilled oil moves downwind from its source following surface currents. Traditional oil skimmers pull oil-absorbent booms and trace random linear paths in a sea of oil. But a better way to capture this oil is to sail upwind, intercepting the oil sheens traveling downwind. Protei harnesses the wind in order to power an unmanned sailing drone, pulling a long oil-absorbent ‘tail’ upwind. A fleet of many Protei will work automatically as a swarm, or be remotely controlled by coastal residents and on-line gamers."

The Protei team need more funds to continue to develop the project and are seeking financial assistance from anyone who either simply wants to donate, invest or even build their own vessels. The video here demonstrates a critical understanding of the issues, the international flavor of the collaboration, and a developmental line of the technology. Although the video suffers from poor sound quality, at least at the beginning of the video, it oughtn't be to difficult for you to do a little knob twiddling whilst watching this ecologically sound and environmentally friendly idea.

Tuesday 19 April 2011

Game boy console beat box jam music video



Mind popping simplicity overtakes our amazement with how profound simple and ordinary things can carry our imagination further.

Basically striking or hitting anything physical will result in a sound. Cool mixer, Sebastian Bender has created this clever music video, by drumming on various parts of his handheld gaming console, where he titillates and entertain us with his well edited four track video mix.

Thursday 7 April 2011

Mergrim's Beautiful Corruption Music Video


is by VJ producer Masato Tsutsui, where the structured mayhem of Mergrim's Beautiful Corruption music meets it's video equivalent - a  polyphonicaly dark and menacing but entertaining motion carriageway.

Masato captured the source video with a Matrox MXO2 mini and Syntheyes camera tracking, and composited it in real-time generated with Max/MSP/Jitter, visual fx software.

The music for which this video was purposely made is the opening track from Mergrim's new album release “Invisible Landscape."


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