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POPSAwesome research/ Homework resource I only found this the other day and mostly I'm clipping it for my own uses; however, it's a great resource and I thought I'd share. The site itself has pretty cool info too. 'Hope you guys like the clip.
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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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POPSThe Physicist Who Figured Out Ballet "To turn your body you must apply a torque, or twisting force, to it, and once you are in the air you have nothing to apply a torque with. If, on the other hand, you begin twisting from the ground up, clasping your legs together at the apex of your leap while raising your arms above your head, you will do a rapid 180-degree turn, which is the object of the exercise. “ :-)
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POPSThe future of science...is art
"But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality. At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, "It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach." The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science
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POPSStunning Science! Science is SO beautiful! Go to the site and enjoy more of these fantastic visualisations of wave functions, quantum resonances, classical collisions etc. It's absolutely breathtaking.
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POPSBeauty and the Brain Future work may elucidate the long-term effects of one's surroundings on brain function and the relationship between aesthetically pleasing spaces and their functionality. What one considers beautiful is, of course, influenced by culture, learning, and experience, and not everything we find beautiful will ultimately be traceable to the structure and function of our brain. The larger question "What is beauty?" still poses a major challenge, but answering it no longer seems so impossible.
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POPS2008: Time to Change Your Mind Wonderful. Just think: you too could be a different person at the end of this sentence than you were at the beginning! May all our life sentences be write.
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POPS“How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” " Like Edison, who built new innovations on top of previous inventions, innovative leaders never declare an invention “done,” Mr. Axelrod says. “Everything ultimately became the source of something new later,” he says. “It’s like the difference between a rich person and a wealthy person. A rich person has a lot of money and buys things. A wealthy person invests in things that make more money. It’s creating ongoing wealth out of your intellectual capital.”
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