Osculating

This is a technical term.

The osculating circle is the one matching a curve best. It is a measure of curvature. The principal normal vector points from the point of contact to the center of the circle.

The osculating circle is lying in the osculating plane. The change of the normal to this plane along the curve is a measure of torsion.

I wanted to find a combination of meditative abstract doodling and creating art based on mathematical physics. And I wanted to practice lettering.

So, here is “Osculating”: Three doodled trajectories of hypothetical particles, with osculating circles, vectors for tangents, principal normal, and osculating plane. Plus equations tying them together!

I have created this in the mid of February – before the world started falling apart. Given the title, it could have been my belated Valentine art.

Elsewhere on the internet, it has been likened to an antique globe or map and it has evoked images of the paths of busy little bees.

I encouraged fellow artists to find the Easter Egg: find the circle where I discovered I messed up the cross product after having annotated with ballpoint. But I fixed it in a mathematically correct way.

I cherish these memories of a past that seems joyful, innocent, pristine.

I am using visual art to process what I cannot comprehend otherwise. Usually this helps. But I also need poetry right now.

This poem is based on the search term: “Osculating Bees travel an antique globe”. I am adding filetype:pdf in order to avoid the usual portals and social networks in the search results.

I am picking a “line”, a short snippet of text, from each search result, in the order they appear on Google’s website. I do not click on the links and read the PDF: These “lines” are directly from the short text previews in the list of search results.

~

Osculating Bees Travel an Antique Globe

against the practical utility of
the busy part of the day

A Complete Treatise on
a cityscape that no longer exists

remain innovative and adaptable

unpack more fully the symbolic significance
WITH TEN MAPS TO ILLUSTRATE
culturing invertebrate animals
to the great good, as I believe

on the role of images and objects
There’s even a specialist
I am indebted to

radically destabilized
instruments and preparations
since we launched
twanged and fizzed
in an exhausted glass globe

aesthetics and temporality
convened by the North Atlantic Triangle
it’s a searing indictment of war

celestial globes made prior
Bringing into focus a range of
scientific advice it needs
and retrograde date

National Security
must, therefore, remain tentative

See Class 495 for
The Myth of Immateriality
aware of the vault

Foreign Travel
They must cleanse their hearts from
Animal and Marine Life
ascertaining the volume of
temporal reach … to escape from
the concept of the circle

~