Turntable.fm

DJ TOGETHER WITH YOUR FRIENDS at turntable.fm. Probably the coolest new website that I've seen in a while, it lets 5 DJs take turns playing songs, and you get points when people like your selections. With the points you can get progressively cooler and larger avatars. There are a bunch of different rooms for different types of music and you can also create your own room. And there's a chat feature. This thing is amazing. All you need is a facebook account, and one of your friends already has to be registered. To keep out all the lame kids, duh. Nah, I think its just to make me feel cool for once in my life.

Topology Meets Art

Topology and art definitely go hand in hand, though it may not seem obvious at first. Mathematical patterns underlie our universe, so it should be no surprise that they underlie our art as well. I found this awesome site with many unique abstract sculptures derived from areas of math including knot theory and surface geometry. The intricate abstract art below is a small sample from from Carlo H. Séquin.

Torus Knot 5-3

Poincaré Double Lace

Annual Eurographics Awards

Knot 7-7

Quad Rose

Scherk-Tower

Giant Bubbles

This video is just awesome. No two ways about. Science stuff: 1) the bubbles are multicolored due to the different film thicknesses scattering the different wavelengths of light to different degrees like a prism and 2) you can see when the bubbles pop that the film is trying to minimize is surface area to volume ratio. A bubble has a very large surface area to volume ratio, while a droplet has a very low surface area to volume ratio.

Tractor Pulling

Though this may seem kind of pointless and bad for the environment, it's still really cool. And racing in all forms is essentially just R&D, just a really cool form of R&D. There are some neat engines toward the end of the video, including a quad-turbine tractor and a tractor that has a 42 cylinder 10,000hp radial engine. If that's not a feat of engineering, I don't know what is.

Electret: The electric field equivelent of a magnet

So, magnets have permanent magnetic fields and electrets have a permanent electric field. Note that this is completely different than an electromagnet that generates a magnetic field due to an electric current. It seems like the main uses for these things are as sensors in microphones and dust collectors in air filters, but I think they have more potential, they just don't get the same attention that their magnetic counterparts do. They are made in an analogous way to ceramic magnets. A highly dielectric material melt is cooled and solidified in a strong electric field which aligns the molecules in the solid creating a permanent electric field.

Granular Materials

Sand. Table Salt. Powders of any kind. These are classified as granular materials and this subject has been studied intensely by scientists and engineers in many fields (mechanical, chemical, materials, etc). From the perspective of a new researcher, this field has been beaten to death. The compaction of powders under pressure (aka jamming) is what differentiates the flow of powder from the flow of liquids. There are some other unique flow properties of powders such as the "Brazilian nut effect" where larger grained materials (Brazilian nuts) can flow to the top of a vibrating container that contains multiple grain sizes in it. So here is a very dorky powder simulation game. I spent more time playing around with it than I expected to.

http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/