Category: Life

Life, the Universe, and Everything. Thoughts about Life, Work, Science, Technology, Business, and all their intersections.

Diamond Cubic

Once upon a time I analyzed electron diffraction patterns. They looked like this: These patterns are the inverse of the crystal lattices, sort of. The regularity of the dots represents the symmetries of the physical crystal. To identify the material causing a certain pattern, you compared it with sample patterns in a “database”. I am…
On Descriptive Geometry

I keep forgetting I am writing for an international audience here! Having referred to Descriptive Geometry (DG) often, I doubt that everybody associates similar mental images with it. Anybody remembering the trace of a plane, for example? Learning about the history and culture of Descriptive Geometry, I realize it is rooted in a European tradition…
Coping with the AI Apocalypse

Painstakingly, I was putting the finishing touches on my analog geometric art – when this video popped into several of my social media feeds: We Need To Talk About AI… by Cool Worlds Podcast Cool Worlds Podcast is run by a team at Columbia University and usually features guests interviewed by physicist David Kipping. This…
Unearthing a Time Capsule and Preserving a Fading Cathedral

My first creative endeavors (as an adult) were not drawings or paintings. It was the early web that made me pick colors by hand and stitch together HTML code snippets. The web of the early 2000s was a very different place from the modern social media era, built from many small independent sites and blogs,…
Retention

“Retention” is the name I gave this painting, featuring the retention basin of our village: I am showing the paper still buckled from the water and the brushes still wet as I have just started learning watercolors more seriously. So, this is a “test”! In the next days I want to withdraw from the world,…
$Hello to the Fediverse :)$

Hello to the Fediverse :)

Hello, people out there on Mastodon, Pixelfed, or whatever platform you use! You might have seen a weird collection of old posts reposted by my account today! Sorry :) This has been just me cleaning up minor stuff – not knowing that I have to turn off federation explicitly to avoid blasting out these old…
Circles to Circles – Digital Interlude

I wanted to know: How would it feel to replace ruler and compass with the straight lines and circle tools of drawing software? Procreate (the iPad drawing software) does not have anything like a compass. You cannot measure the length of a line segment either, or parallel transport lines exactly. You can create perfect circles…
Circles to Circles #1. On Descriptive Geometry.

I am not a hoarder. I parted with school memorabilia long ago. When I started reading books on e-readers, the remaining books felt like an odd time capsule. They were not representing my reading self anymore. So, I got rid of most books, too. There was one exception: I still have my high school Descriptive…
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Nostalgia Overload.

The cosmos is all there is, ever was, and ever will be. So he says, standing at the metaphorical shores of the cosmos in episode 1 – The Shores of the Cosmos. All episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos are available on the Internet Archive. I hope I can trust them to have sorted out the…
Let Them Go

Those hyperlinks did a lot for me, in nearly two decades. But I have let them go. There was a time I had opinions on this blog – about the corporate world, science writing, academia. But I trod carefully (or so I think). But there was one subject I was passionate about: Link rot. I…
Lissajous Trilogy 234

There was 123, so here is 234! When you create an axonometric drawing, the two-dimensional projections are lying flat in the drawing plane. But you do not see how the projection would work in three-dimensional space. In 234 I am attempting to add this additional view: Show both the projections as I need them for…
Repetitive!

I told you: It will be repetitive, it will be boring, and it will maybe be weird…. my art blogging, that is! I have opted out of scraping for AI training. Maybe my articles will gradually also fade away in search engines’ indices – when search engines and AI will have become one. Again, I…
“Did you mean element? Or search for elkement?”

This is perhaps the first time I ever want to answer one of WordPress’ Daily writing prompts :-) The title of this blog is what Google says, if I search for my nickname. This has not changed in more than 10 years. So, I have not been a branding genius exactly. Nobody will ever find…
Blogging Anniversary: Art, Not Cyber

Looking at my blog statistics, I see that that post is trending again. The last article on cyber security, written end of March 2023. There is a bunch of older tech blogs that seem to have become evergreens. I cannot do anything against it, sorry. But this has been an art blog for more than…
On Inspiration. Eye of the Harmonograph.

Once, an art platform was asking about who – which artists – have been inspiring me. I want to recapture which artists came to my mind when I filled in that artist profile: ~ Physicist (and noble prize winner) Roger Penrose. I read his book The Road to Reality during the pandemic. Consider it a…
Lissajous Trilogy 123

It is a humble pencil drawing. Created slowly, using traditional paper, pencil, ruler, and compass. Following the principles of descriptive geometry. No need to install something. No need to debug why version x of a tool does not play nicely with operating system y. All the code, all the documentation, all the steps of your…
Drawing Slowly What Code Could Produce Quickly

Why? I am not trying to answer this question. I am just observing. I’ve started to draw – with compass and ruler – what code could generate in seconds. Or does it? I have forgotten all the jargon I learned in Descriptive Geometry classes decades ago. I am enjoying rediscovering the principles, just playing around.…
Sparse Spectral Spaceport: Psi Psi Star

I could say, I am just numbering the artworks in this series by using Greek letters. So this one is item Psi! But I have created a sparse spaceport from diffraction curves in spectral colors. It is not a single Psi, but rather a Psi Psi Star … … the absolute square of the wave…