Spinning Ice

Octodecacopter

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/11/e-volo-vc200/

Greg Asner: Ecology from the air

http://www.ted.com/talks/greg_asner_ecology_from_the_air.html

Logical Car

Soylent

Future of food?

I'm in St. Johns Newfoundland at the moment, visiting Renee.  Looking at lots of awesome ships in the harbour... so link dump of Offshore Supply Vessels seems appropriate.

Boston Dynamics Quadriped Robot

Moving Projection Mapping

by: http://www.botndolly.com/box

Seabreacher

Thesis Maps at Musagetes Library!

Thank you John and Sarah for inviting me to display the maps from my thesis at the Musagetes Library!  They are still up... last time I checked.

-g

16 million cycle journeys across London

Bobbit Worm

Terrifying... can grow to 10ft in length...

Pyrosomes and Salps

Weird:



from the "about" of the video:

"Pyrosomes and salps are pelagic (free-swimming) tunicates or sea squirts. All species are open ocean animals that rarely come close to shore, and all are colonial, although many salps can also be solitary.
Pyrosomes are colonies of tiny animals that form hollow tubes sealed at one end - the species in the first part of the video is giant pyrosome Pyrostremma spinosum - it can reach 30m in length! Pyrosomes get their name (Pyro = fire + soma = body) from their ability to emit light (bioluminescence) - colonies can glow of flash light at night, particularly if touched.
Salps have much larger individuals than pyrosomes, individuals pump water through themselves. Colonies are formed of chains of individuals. Salps can form very high densities under good conditions, and are an important oceanic food source for fish.
These animals were filmed off the Tasman Peninsula in Tasmania, Australia - one of the few areas in the world where a wide range of oceanic gelatinous plankton, including ctenophores and jellyfish, comes close to shore, and is easily seen while diving. Filmed by Michael Baron"

Defence Date

Happily I have a defence date for my thesis...

http://waterlooarchitecture.com/bridge/blog/2013/08/20/ariadnes-thread-a-letter-to-descartes/

Drunken Roboto

Wind Turbine and Rotors for propulsion

http://www.thiiink.com/



rotorship: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/rotor-ship

Personal Helicopter

Help Map a Human Brain's Connectome

Solar Power to Electricity via Sterling Engine

neat

Kite across Atlantic

"... Anne Quéméré headed out under the Golden Gate bridge in her tiny boat to kite sail her way across 4,350 miles of Pacific ocean..."

via http://yachtpals.com/kite-sailing-boat-quemere-3095

Programming Update

Finally getting the hard-coding of .dxf files out of Processing down... below is the density map of 500,000+ GPS points for four people in Rome that I collected last year.

Evolution of F1

As a child I always thought it was intersting to follow the changes of cars year after year... I mentioned this to Matt and he sent this:

GPS Maps

Update on the progress of the maps (in processing).

Worked on integrating both velocity of travel (squares) and density (circles) in combination with gps traces.

Atomic Stopmotion

"Custom" Roller Coaster?

looks fun/terrifying...



g

Pantheon - Different View

I've been trying to figure out how to communicate to those people who may not be familiar with the Pantheon, or its interior: the nature of the space... its proportions and configuration, and then also the path that people took while inside of it.  

 Here's a quick sketch of what I'm thinking:

Work continues on the maps of the gps traces and sketches for the thesis.  I'm hoping to defend in mid-June. 

G

Man of War's

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/04/aaron-ansarov-man-of-wars/?viewall=true

Evolving Robots

Thanks to Matt for the link.

Jamming Robot

Million Person Study

"Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) are recruiting a million participants to join a decade long heart health study"

http://singularityhub.com/2013/04/03/a-million-smartphones-will-drive-biggest-heart-health-study-in-history/

Colin Ellard

Going to see him speak on Friday in Toronto at the Goethe Institute, 5-6pm.  http://www.goethe.de/ins/ca/tor/ver/en10376198v.htm

Thanks to Nicky for this!

G

Pantheon and Surroundings

Finally making progress on the maps of the Pantheon as well as the other churches of Rome again, after getting the copy of the Nolli Map from the Vatican Archives scanned at 1200dpi (I'll post link to download the full-size high-res Nolli map when I get around to it).   Here's where I'm at:

-g

Salamander Robot

via http://singularityhub.com/2013/03/27/amphibious-salamander-like-robot-swims-in-water-crawls-on-land/

Nike

As a memorial to a nurse, my father and I were commissioned to create a sculpture of an angel.  We based the sculpture on the Nike of Samothrace, which currently is in the Louvre. Instead of marble we used 1/4" sheets of plate steel which we will let rest into an umber-ocher patina.  It is at 1:1 scale.

The initial sketch:

Emerging in the workshop: 

We're excited to see it mounted in the hopsitals garden come spring!

-G & G

Comet and Moon

via http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/pan-starrs-time-lapse/

Three Minute Thesis

As part of my participation in the Three Minute Thesis Competition at uWaterloo, we had to choose a single slide to represent our thesis (and present it in under 3 minutes). I decided to use one of the first plots I did of the GPS data collected from the uWaterloo Pedestrian Traffic Map study that I completed late last year. Curious to see how the event goes down tomorrow.

 -gc

Big Dog with Prehensile Head

Neural Inosculation

for later... “We basically created a computational unit out of two brains,” http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/rodent-mind-meld/

uWaterloo Pedestrian Traffic Map

As part of my participation on the uWaterloo New Student Services Building Project Committee, I ran a research study to collect GPS points from students on campus over a 2 week period at the end of last term.



To do this we developed, tested and launched a custom built mobile application in 3 weeks. Students downloaded the app, filling out information about themselves, such as their faculty and expected year of graduation, and then let it run the background over the study period.  By leveraging uWaterloo's social media presence  as well as via word of mouth, videos, and an informative website, we had 367 students log 382,200 GPS points, which exceeded our goal of 1% participation of the student body.

To communicate results of this study, in the form of maps of campus, I developed an interactive html5 web app (see below or visit site here) that allows users to plot the GPS data in various ways.  This tool allows stakeholders of all technical abilities to engage and use the data to make more informed decisions.

 This "map app" shows how data can be made accessible and actionable to all stakeholders. My inspiration for this was from a project my friend Matt did which allowed a client to design their own suspended ceiling (here).





I'm interested to hear any comments or suggestions!

Borges - To the Son

It was not I who begot you.  It was the dead -- 
my father, and his father, and their forebears, 
all those who through a labyrinth of loves
descend from Adam and the desert wastes
of Cain and Abel, in a dawn so ancient
it has become mythology by now, 
to arrive, blood and marrow, at this day
in the future, in which I now beget you. 
I feel their multitudes.  They are who we are, 
and you among us, you and the sons to come 
that you will beget.  The latest in the line
and in red Adam’s line.  I too am those others. 
Eternity is present in the things
of time and its imaptient happenings. 

-AR.  Borges. To the Son.

Fertilization

Honourable mention in the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge:



Tons more great animaions from Nucleus Medical Media can be found at their youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/nucleusanimation?feature=watch or here: http://catalog.nucleusmedicalmedia.com/nucleusindex.php?

via: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/science-visualization-winners/?pid=6148&viewall=true

Also check out the Cell in HD: http://blog.geoffchristou.com/2012/10/the-cell-hd1.html

Processing and Moires

For the course Arc h652- Specifications and Code, we were asked to design a statue backdrop... thanks to Carlo's peer pressure, I used Processing to create a moire effect cedar wall screen.

Based on how easy it was to work parametrically with Processing to generate 3d forms, this seems like a good approach.

I would have liked to write a script to automate the layout and dimensioning of shop and construction drawings for the wall screen... but that will have to happen on some other project.

Cheers,g

Processing and Meshes

I'm using Processing for a few projects right now.

Here is a screenshots of a test I was working on today:

Now time to apply this script to the 380,000 GPS data points collected during the recent uWaterloo Pedestrian Traffic App study (see earlier post here).

Geoff

America Revealed - PBS

Similar to Britian from Above but for the USA.

Watch The Dining Galaxy on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Connecting People on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Flight Data on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Flight of the Honey Bee on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Crop Spraying on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

Watch Wind Power on PBS. See more from America Revealed.

link to site: http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/

Thanks to Malex for the link.

G