Some of the best science writing I have read recently was in the novel Red Plenty: Inside the Fiftie’s Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford. There is a passage on the behaviour of electrons in a vacuum tube that is vivid and beautiful (Part Two, Chapter 2), and a rather frightening description of lung cells mutating under the influence of carcinogens (Part Six, Chapter 1). The novel overall is a fascinating treatment of science and economics at the height of the Cold War in the USSR.
Here’s a Soviet joke from Spufford’s website:
Yuri Gagarin’s daughter answers the phone. ‘No, mummy and daddy are out,’ she says. ‘Daddy’s orbiting the earth, and he’ll be back tonight at 7 o’clock. But mummy’s gone shopping for groceries, so who knows when she’ll be home.’
So check this out: http://funnymike.posterous.com/creative-artist-makes-artworks-with-gps-maps
This guy from Baltimore, Michael Wallace, uses his GPS to create art using the waypoint information! Check out his images. I ride and run with a GPS watch all the time but never thought to get creative with my routes to this extreme.
It’s funny, you can buy the hardware to do this for about what you would spend on art supplies to make traditional drawings!
And a good time to mention that GPS is the only practical application of special relativity I know of. Without the time corrections required by the special theory the GPS satellite system would be useless.
A beautifully rendered video by digital-artist Cristóbal Vila that illustrates the facility of geometry as an explanatory tool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKPzDFDnmuw
Set to music (“Often a Bird”) by Belgian composer Wim Mertins.
I notice embedding has been disabled; do follow the link though, and I’ll see if I can work around that later =P
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