Tag: Looking Back

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…
Postal Scales Now and Then

I’ve tried to stage it properly. But it just looks sad. Functional – and not inspiring: The white plastic casing already starts to yellow at the top, from years of bombardment with UV photons. Its function in our office had been replaced … by not sending invoices or contracts on paper anymore. Edit: The original…
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,…
Dirac’s Belt Trick Through the Years

2021 It started with a humble sketch. This has been the first time I drew something after decades of not touching pencils or brushes. It kicked off an obsession – with art in general, but also with Dirac’s Belt trick. The trick is a demonstration of the underappreciated weirdness of rotations in three-dimensional space. You…
Circles to Circles #4. Stereographic Retrospective.

Circles to Circles is a series of six geometric watercolor pencil drawings. I have revealed number one, two, and three, and this is number four: On this blog, I have probably said anything I had to say about stereographic projection … using words, mathematical symbols, and drawings. Today, I rather create a retrospective: This is…
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…
End of the Eclipse (and There Is So Much to Unpack)

I am often searching for the simplest, sparsest way to express an idea with code, using lines and limited colors. This was an attempt at maximum simplicity: Just white lines on black! Title: Complex Alien Eclipse (2021). Created with python code, using SageMath, a math framework combining several open source math libraries. It was a…
Remembering Prof. Wilhelm Macke

A recent migration of (some of my) domains made a link on Wikipedia go into the void of a 404. It was a brief, German article on another – now extinct – German website of mine, linked by the article on Wilhelm Macke. In order to keep it alive though, I am copying the article…
“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…