Spiral Turbines
Fantastic Spiral Turbines from the 1930s (special thanks to Paul Dunlop for the heads-up) From Marvelous soft-steam-punk ambiance in the photos. These one are from Germany. Speaking of history repeating (or not) though, these things are still being made. (from has lots of flow-analysis diagrams) You can get them off alibaba Or for small hydro-power applicatiosn – these from the Czech Republic (which is one of my fav places) But back to the age of steam though… (or in this case, steam meets electricity) I love the lighting in these photos. Cinematic – reminds me of THX1138, although the design aesthetic is a 100 years older. Something to do with attention to the light. Anyway – these things are called Francis Turbines – invented in France in the 1800s – James B. Francis (from Massachusetts) applied maths to the design and took the efficiency from 80% to 90%. … So…
Lego Golden Mean Calipers
I’ve got this theory, that everything work making, will sooner or later be made out of lego. Certainly every artifact that’s ever appeared in a sci-fi movie eventually gets made out of lego… and now golden mean calipers have too. (via bricknerd) Originally made by Amida Na… with other photos on flickr Brilliant :)
Apple Logo
As discovered by Szabolcs Bakos from DBN Which is quite a neat analysis – using fibonacci ratioed circles rather than the lines that I alway tend to use. I think I might have mentioned an apple logo before – the cloud? Yea – here. Where I was more interested in accuracy/confirmation-bias etc. My theories about there being about a 3% margin of error – which to be fair, is a number I pulled out of the clear blue sky, but it seems near enough. The sphere-analysis is quite interesting though – I wonder if it’s possible to take any simple shape and reduce it to a series of phi-ratioed spheres. I’ve occasionally thought that human beauty can be reduced to a set of simple quadratic equations. For some reason the spherical analysis reminds me of the way Ancient Egyptians are thought to have done mathematics – they used a kind…
ROUND ART OF π, φ AND e
Really cool circular art made out of generating patterns with Pi, Phi and and e, which (I have on good authority), everything begins with. Absolutely brilliant – I like a bit of generative art me. Especially if it looks like hyper-psychedelic versions of renaissance-era sigil-magic. Something I’d like to see a bit more of – the magic/art thing done by people with real artistic talent. It’s harder than it looks. Not sure why. Too much television I suppose.
Golden Ratio Stuff On Etsy
Some quite cool / fun stuff on Etsy recently… The one that really jumped out being this table which is totally gorgeous, and could (with a massive stretch of the imagination) be made with the building-blocks for kids , here Although I would have thought that golden-ratio stuff doesn’t tessellate terribly well. GOLDEN MEAN COOKIE CUTTERS! For making Golden Ratio Cookies, that get smaller and smaller, like little square fractals until you finally wind up splitting the atom. 3D Printed as well apparently, which means I suppose 3D printers are at last being used for something vaguely useful. I’m not sure if I’ve gone on about this before, but there’s also a golden-ratio balalaika type thing which looks pretty cool: … I’ve started (as I’ve possibly mentioned) making golden ratio (after a fashion) instruments myself (here : http://neoiko.com) – which are alas, FAR too terrible to sell to anyone at…