Nietzsche, Python & Geometric art

I recently came across this rather novel way of marrying mathematics and art. "Art can visually express words geometrically: lines as length, colour as dominance, circles as continuity, and triangles as stationery objects in space-time. Words finally have a real visual presence; a new way to be understood and appreciated," says artist-philosopher Apostolos Stefanopoulos. 

Quotes are used from various philosophers, poets and playwrights, musicians and scientists, as per the artist's fancy. Here is one for example, from Nietzsche.

Apostolos uses Python to code the words into art symbols. The results are compiled and printed on fine Hahnenuhle art paper.


It certainly is a new approach, and I am sure immensely satisfying for the artist, who is able to blend his interests in technology, philosophy, maths, art and design all in one exclusive offering.

Jugaad at ISRO

"Jugaad" has entered management textbooks as a word synonymous with out-of-the-box creative solutions. Jugaad solutions to complex problems often come from totally unrelated fields.

To my mind one of the most extreme and innovative examples was when the APPLE (Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment) had to be taken out for antenna-range tests.

ISRO could have used padded trucks for transporting the satellite, but the fact is that the metallic bodies of trucks were interfering with the antennae.

Bullock carts, being made out of wood, presented an ingenious solution. So that is how the APPLE satellite was transported, resulting in this famous photograph, in 1981, of a satellite atop a bullock cart.


http://www.livemint.com/Multimedia/BxbJDpkIU1P9QirjJlt0PO/Isros-long-journey-from-bullock-cart-to-MOM.html

In 1963, a similar "Jugaad" had caught the world's attention. A technician carried the sounding rocket, from the assembly line to the launching pad at Thumba in Kerala. These rockets were small, weighing only a few kilos, so it was possible to do so in those days.

It is this frugal and innovative spirit, and never-say-die attitude that has enabled ISRO to reach out for seemingly impossible goals over the last fifty years. In the eighties, it launched SLV-3 which weighed 17 tons, and placed the satellite Rohini in orbit, which weighed 40 kgs.

And today we are proud of its Mars mission "Mangalayaan" which is supposed to have cost ISRO about seventy three million dollars, a little under the cost of most commercial airplanes!

What a wonderful world!

"I see trees of green, red roses too,
I see them bloom, for me and you,
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world"

I remembered the opening lines of this Louis Armstrong classic, while reading about an interview with Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman:

"I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. [...]

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."

( http://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2015/09/09/science-can-be-as-beautiful-as-art/#5a294fd55483)

I can understand that very well. Why not see the picture at the normal level, and then at the micro or nano level?

I would only add, whether it is at the nano scale, or the cosmic scale, "what a wonderful world"!

The first time I saw this NASA picture of NGC 6302, or "The butterfly Nebula" with its wingspan of 3 light years, I was struck by the beauty of it.

Imagine this huge nebula winging its way through the vast universe just like a little butterfly on earth!

(Image from: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2526.html)

Well, as an artist as well as a scientist, and one familiar with         butterflies on earth, and pictures of   nebulae in the cosmos, 

here is my artist's impression of the "Butterfly Nebula" in oil on canvas!