feel good anyway + they might be giants: meet the elements.

I just dweebed out on this sumpin’ awful. I feel both shame and exileration, simultaneously. Like the first time I poured vinegar into my baking-soda filled papier maché volcano, I’m about to gush forth with excitement.

Behold one of the best examples in history of how good design can take something technically burdensome and turn it into a thing of illustrative beauty. There are few things that rival the efficient usability, universal clarity, hip factor, epic design goodness, and monumental geek caché of the periodic table of the elements. Seriously. Let’s be honest; chemisty is boring and nobody but chemists would disagree. But somewhere along the line two next level thinkers named Dimitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer came along and laid that shit out so sweet that people not only finally understood what a noble gas was but they will proudly wear it on a tee shirt. That’s skillz. With a “z.”

I had to totally wiki who those two guys were, by the way. This is an art blog, after all. I hope you didn’t think I actually knew that. But I like to give credit where credit is due, so there you go.

So, basically the periodic table is rad and now there’s a song to make it even radder. Boosted by nerd darling They Might Be Giants, whose latest DVD/CD “Here Comes Science” features the single “Meet The Elements”, this inescapably adorable video, directed by the killer Oregon-based shop Feel Good Anyway and debuted at Boing Boing, is a super friendly video intro to the elements that’s cute as a puppy and made me want to go pour something into a beaker and set it on fire. In the name of discovery! Slap a face on a little Xenon molecule and suddenly the whole nature of the universe unfolds, Stephen Hawking-style.

I appreciate the work Boing Boing put into helping create this, but skip to 0:20 to avoid the super annoying interstitial they put in after it seemed like the video was already beginning. Bad Boing Boing, Bad.

Via Antville

semiconductor: black rain.

I flipped out for Seminconductor’s amazing art/sciene visualization film “Magnetic Movie”, where they interviewed NASA scientists and then visually realized the invisible affects of magnetic fields they were discussing. A brilliant collision of fact and visual interpretation.

Now Semiconductor is at it again with “Black Rain”, this time turning their focus from the Earth’s magnetic fields to all the sounds of the universe itself…

Vodpod videos no longer available.

“Black Rain is sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO. Here we see the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME’s (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth. Data courtesy of courtesy of the Heliospheric Imager on the NASA STEREO mission.

Working with STEREO scientists, Semiconductor collected all the HI image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Solar wind, CME’s, passing planets and comets orbiting the sun can be seen as background stars and the milky way pass by.”

nasa + semiconductor: magnetic movie.

I’ve always been especially inspired by the ostensible dichotomy that is the art of science. Or, depending on your view, the science of art. We like to separate our brains and functions and imagine the two as totally separate, and perhaps for many they are, but it’s fascinating to study the two together. There are many ways that the pursuit of fact spurns imagination, and where the beauty of things inspires people to discover the reality of what created it.

Directed by Semiconductor (the multi-disciplinary collaboration of UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) and shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley, “Magnetic Movie” is a subtly brilliant visual augmentation and sonic accompaniment to the accounts of scientists who’ve studied the affects of magnetic fields. A true interplay of science and art, you’re never really sure if what you’re seeing is an artistic rendering of science fact or a scientific interpretation of visual art. In the end, it’s actually both.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Via The Denver Egotist

powers of ten / cosmic voyage.

I think my brain just caved in on itself, and I’m not sure how to recover. I feel a lot like I did in Grade 10, when you still had to take Algebra even if it was clear you were going to be an English major. I remember sitting in the desk and knowing that my mind was on the verge of understanding something, but just wouldn’t completely comprehend it no matter how hard i tried. It’s a lot like being underwater. Or high.

So what’s the source of this mindfuck? Though produced decades apart, I’ve found two films that explore the great polarities of the universe. The outer and inner taken to their complete extremes, they both examine the very limits of distance in both directions: the absolute greatest and the absolute smallest. In the process your brain goes into hyperdrive – how can we comprehend such incomprehensible distances? Both films begin by starting at the centre, ourselves, and then moving outward or inward to the points of infinity.

Created in 1977 by iconic husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames (yeah, the same man behind all those chairs you’re considering paying so much for…) “Powers of Ten” is a classic science film. Not science fiction, but science fact. So classic, in fact, that it has its own day. That’s right – October 10 in Powers of Ten Day, as stated by the Eames Office on the Powers of Ten website.

Thought parts of it are outdated, the journey is universal and timeless:

(If the soundtrack is just too gruesome for you to endure, then there’s a nice version here. Unfortunately the narration is removed, but this version is set to some other-worldly proper ambient from Sigur Rós, which is never a bad thing.)

Charles Eames said “eventually, everything connects”, and that’s exactly what blows my mind about this. No matter how far you go inward or outward, you eventually end up in a big nothingness. There’s a Physics term for this – the way that the universe tends to work in patterns and imitate itself – called “self similarity”. I need Stephen Hawking to explain this all to me one day. I’m sure homeboy’s got this shit down pat.

The script of the narration is fascinating and integral to really understanding the breadth of the film, but the music is just so gratingly awful. Apparently the far reaches of the universe sound like a very dissonant pipe organ. If you’re into it, Nikon Camera created a really interesting mini-site, Universcale, that gives an immediate, interactive way of exploring the powers of size.

It’s interesting to compare “Powers of Ten” to another film clearly inspired by it, the 1996 IMAX release “Cosmic Voyage”, directed by Bailey Silleck. It’s a lot smoother and modern, and a little less trippy. Plus “Cosmic Voyage” benefits greatly from the all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent vocal stylings of Mr. Morgan Freeman. If there’s anything that hasn’t become more dramatic thanks to his narrative skills, I haven’t found it yet. I’m pretty sure that when you die, Morgan Freeman’s voice is the last thing you hear…

So in the end, we’re really just on either ends of two infinite universes – one that grows forever larger and another that gets forever smaller. Literally, everything everywhere is going on forever all around us in any direction you look.

The other thought I’m left with is how mentally limited we are in comparison to the realities of time and distance. The universe is 13 billion years old but 9-5 seems long. The time it’s taken to lift the Himalayas is beyond our understanding, but in the scope of the planet it’s just another rise and fall. A breath. A wink. We’re specks. Motes. Maybe the greatest obstacle to humans truly evolving is our inability to understand our own inconsequence. For the life of our planet is just another blip in the scope of the universe. For everything we think we’ve done, for all our self-importance, for all our history books and great literature and supposed humanity, we could all disappear in an instant and there are a quintillion quadrillion trillion stars that would never even turn to notice.

bluorange… no, i mean greeple… ah, shit.

Phillip Meyer Eberz over at ojohaven.com has set up this colour-based brain teaser at a school in Texas and he’s posted a refreshing-version on his site.

The idea is to speak aloud the colour you see, not the word of the colour. So if you saw BLUE you’d say “red”. Apparently it’s best to do this with someone because you won’t even realize when you’re doing it wrong.

Via Ojohaven

vischeck: shape + colourblind.

My obsession with colour takes many forms: design, emotion, and art are obvious. But I’m also fascinated with the science and history of colour and about how the lack of colour can affect us.

Paul Martin, a web designer in Orlando, Florida (not the former Canadian Prime Minister, though I’m sure he’s looking for something to talk about these days…), posted colour-sighted vs. colour-blind comparisons on his site at Critique Wall. Using a site called Vischeck, which approximates for the rest of us how people with various types of colourblindness see stuff out in the world, we get images like these:

Via Core 77