The Golden Cut of the Apple

Since Steve Jobs officially resigned from the top of apple (rumors of his death are still exaggerated) I’d like to make my tribute. Like him or not, he had an impact on the world of computers and beyound like few others: The story of the design and evolution of the apple logo is an interesting one – especially since most of the myths of hidden/deeper meanings are – you might have guessed – myths. Although they didn’t have Alan Turing in mind when they designed it, there is some mathematics behind it: recently I came across this outline giving an idea on how the proportions are related to the Golden Cut through the approximation of the Golden Spiral by the Fibonacci Sequence.

found via Glaserei.

See this Interview with Rob Janoff, the designer of the Apple, NeXT and other logos for further info.

NodeBox – graph algorithms and visualisation

NodeBox is an open-source, node-based software written in Python. The beta release of version 2.0 is available at http://beta.nodebox.net/ which seems to put more focus on generative art:

“NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie. NodeBox is free and well-documented. […] The NodeBox Graph library includes algorithms from NetworkX for betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality, Connelly Barnes’ implementation of Dijksta shortest paths (here) and the spring layout for JavaScript by Aslak Hellesoy and Dave Hoover (here). The goal of this library is visualization of small graphs (<200 elements), if you need something more robust we recommend using NetworkX.”

Note to myself: upgrade my Python&skills (3.0), then check it out in-depth!

Rethinking the way we publish

In two weeks (15th September, 2011) there will be a webinar on the above topic:

“The scientific publishing world is witnessing rapid change, especially in the speed-of-light world of genetics and genomics. You are invited to join Professor Andre van Wijnen, Editor-in-Chief of GENE and Bart Wacek, Publisher (Elsevier), together with the wider genetics community to discuss how authors, reviewers, and editors can not only benefit from, but contribute to, the editorial process.”

See here for details and registration.

Anatomy: interactive and three-dimensional

Visible Body built an interactive 3D model of the human anatomy now available for the iPad. They also have an interesting collection of celular and other animations / illustrations on their page:

Weekend Music Videos

This one is more about the visuals than the music: The networks mapped onto spheres, a human body and the planet – all rolled into one! Just stunning. On top of that, it’s got “chemistry” in the title and is done mostly in processing. That’s several reasons why this should go onto this blog … Have fun!

Interpol – Rest My Chemistry Video from Aaron Koblin on Vimeo.

Worthwhile to check it out in fullHD on vimeo – which also might run it more fluently.