Rather than a standard “About this site” paragraph on a separate page, SpaceCollective has several videos at the top of the front page describing their mission and the site content.

Here is the introduction video:

Bonus video: Charles and Ray Eames’ “Powers of Ten” used in the intro of the SpaceCollective video:

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If I had 300 hours, 500 fast processors running in parallel, and a PhD in fluid dynamics I still probably wouldn’t analyze golf balls. But a team of researchers from Arizona State University and the University of Maryland did.

Up to now, dimple design has been more of an art than a science. For many years, sporting goods companies would design their dimple patterns by simple trial and error, testing prototype after prototype against one another. The new study takes a different approach, asking how to design dimple size and pattern based on mathematical equations that model the physics of a golf ball in flight. Working out the solution to these equations — even on the fastest personal computers today — is not feasible since it would take more than 15 years of computing time just to get a glimpse of the flow around the golf ball for a fraction of a second.
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In the end, they produced a model that reveals the physics of a flying golf ball with the greatest level of detail ever seen — the first step in achieving the project’s long-term goal of optimizing dimple design to realize the lowest drag possible. The next step, says Smith, is to extend the work by comparing different dimple designs.

Check out the video on the Newswise article page. Pretty nice.

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"According to NCCS, key projects that will benefit from the Jaguar upgrade include, the Climate Change Initiative, which “aims to accelerate discoveries about Earth’s climate system through lab-wide engagement of scientists and engineers from diverse directorates encompassing energy, environment, computing, and national security” and ‘Tap it and Trap it,’ a project aimed at separating Carbon Dioxide from power plant emissions and pumping it deep underground."

{via CleanTechnica}

Posted by email from the Idea Collector’s posterous

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Simplified Spectrum from Fourier Analysis

It worked, to a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found,” he explains. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”

…

Dr. Brown deduces that another George—George Martin, the Beatles producer—also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in the literature about the song to date, which is one reason why Dr. Brown’s findings garnered international attention. He laughs that he may be the only mathematician ever to be published in Guitar Player magazine.

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Atomic Type

Their technique, documented in today’s issue of Science magazine, makes use of an earlier discovery: that within a certain proximity, individual atoms from the silicon tip of an atomic force microscope will exchange with tin atoms on the surface of a semiconductor. “It’s not possible to write any smaller than this,” said researcher Masayuki Abe, which sounds like a challenge to me: I can already think of one way to make letters that are 8% smaller, using the team’s own technique.

In his next post Hoefler goes into detail, discussing the history of small type, space efficiency, and trigonometry.

Just as the hypotenuse is always the longest side of a right triangle, an angled letter I will always be longer than an upright I of the same height. This can be a nuisance when designing type families, since an especially slanted italic will have ascenders and descenders that feel too long, and shortening them would undercut a fundamental visual relationship with the matching roman. But where there is no matching roman, as in Aldus’s case, these strokes can be retracted at will, offering the additional benefit of shortening the alphabet’s overall height. And it’s this technique that suggests a solution to the atomic alphabet challenge: by reckoning letters on a rotated grid, in which there are upright vertices instead of horizontal ones, it’s easier to make letters that can be both shorter and more tightly fitted. A final benefit of the rotated grid is the ease with which it can render horizontal strokes, which are crucial to the Latin alphabet, and otherwise impossible in a hexagonal matrix. —JH

Click through for the full story complete with scale diagrams of Hoefler’s solution.

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