Using stereographic projection, you create a distorted image of the surface of a sphere, stretched out to cover an infinite plane. Each point on the sphere is mapped to a point in the equatorial plane by a projection ray starting at a pole of the sphere. Draw a circle on the sphere, e.g. by intersecting…
Category: Art
I create Found Poetry of my own science articles and of internet search terms. Inspired by the magic of the math underlying theoretical physics, I craft digital art and drawings.
Lines and Circles
I poked at complex function 1/z, and its real and imaginary parts look like magical towers. When you look at these towers from above or below, you see sections of perfect circles. This is hinting at some underlying simplicity. Using the map 1/z, another complex number – w=1/z – is mapped to z. Four dimensions…
Reality and Imagination
Grey and colorful. Cutting through each other. Chasing each other. Meeting in the center, leaning on each other, forming an infinite line. ~ Reality and Imagination: Real and imaginary part of complex function 1/z: ~ The real part of 1/z is painted in shades of grey, the imaginary part in rainbow colors. Plots are created…
Super Motivational Function
I’ve presented a Motivational Function, a while back. It is infinitely flat at the zero point: all its derivatives are zero there. Yet, it manages to lift its head – as it is not analytic at zero! If you think of it as a function of a complex argument, its weirdness becomes more obvious. Turn…
Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape
Found Poetry found me. I started this website as a science blog, but then I saw poetry in mundane texts – just as you see faces in things. I created poems from spam comments, from search terms, from physics textbooks, from book spines, from error messages, from Facebooks ads, from any text anywhere in the…
Secure Poetry: “I have been quite confident”
A poem from snippets of two postings on cybersecurity. Trying to carve words out of jargon. Details on the creative process at the bottom of the post. I have been quite confident I have been inspired In this simple way to find both options take note of an extra stealth factor I hardly ever…
Farewell Pandemic Poetry
I’ve lost many chances to create poetry from pandemic politics. So many metaphors weren’t used to serve the fine arts. But finally I rise to the challenge. Our grand opening-up-anything is being celebrated in each of our provinces. Text snippets from one of these press conferences this week are intruding my waking and sleeping mind….
Have We Changed After All?
A poem from googled snippets of text – details on the creative process at the bottom of this post. ~ ~~ ~~~ Have We Changed After All we’re unearthing the biggest questions Why do we have such strong preferences If we think we know better struggling to believe that God will provide traverse this landscape…
Peter M. Schuster on History of Science
The late Dr. Peter M. Schuster was a physicist and historian of science. After a career in industry, he founded a laser technology startup. Recovering from severe illness, he sold his company and became an author, science writer, and historian. He founded echophysics – the European Center for the History of Physics – in Pöllau…
The Calm Before the Wave
A poem, created from text snippets taken out of a National Geographic article on tsunamis. ~ ~~ ~~~ The Calm Before the Wave as the sea pulls away from the coast We thought we would be safe defenses have improved tremendously false sense of security the uncertainty in that forecast seemed high too…
Poets Who Speak of Jupiter
In the third chapter of the first volume of his legendary physics lectures, Richard Feynman discusses the relation of physics to other sciences. He says that astronomy got physics started, and its most remarkable discovery is that stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth. He adds this famous…
Motivational Function
Deadly mutants are after us. What can give us hope? This innocuous-looking function is a sublime light in the dark. It proves you can always recover. If your perseverance is infinite. As x tends to zero, the exponent tends to minus infinity. The function’s value at zero tends to zero. It is a zero value…
Infinity
New Year’s Eve 2019 seems infinitely far in the past. It was the first day news about this mysterious disease had been published in my country. Yet it seems infinitely far away at that time, somewhere in China. Today we see something glowing at the end of a weird long corridor. Despite horrible news, I…
5470 Data Points
5470 people in Austria have died from COVID to date.
This image is made of 5470 yellow characters.
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.
Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Delta Function Haiku
I have proved that a Lorentzian bell curve becomes the Dirac Delta Function in the limit. Now I want to look at another representation of the Delta Function. As this is a shorter proof, a haiku will do. ~ Infinite numbers of oscillations added. Need to damp them down Symmetrically attach an exponential for each…
The Improper Function and the Poetry of Proofs
Later the Delta Function was named after their founder. Dirac himself called it an improper function. This time, the poem is not from repurposed snippets of his prose. These are just my own words to describe a proof: ~ In the limit the Lorentzian becomes the improper function. In the limit of tiny epsilons it…
Poetry: Dynamical Variables and Observables
The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the second chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition (Revised), Dynamical Variables and Observables. we may look upon the passage for the triple product We therefore make the general rule in spite of this fundamental difference which conforms with…
Poetry: The Principle of Superposition
The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the first chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition (Revised), The Principle of Superposition. ~ one would be inclined to think There must certainly be some internal motion from general philosophical grounds we cannot expect to find any causal…
Edginess: What I Was Searching For
First Spam Poetry since a long time! Every line is an unedited snippet from about 100 spam comments on this blog. Process: View spam comments at random Either pick a phrase from the comment or discard it, then delete the comment. Jump to the next spam comment – spam comments can be processed in any…
Tower in the Middle
To honor Foucault’s Pendulum (the novel), I am creating poetry from it – and in its spirit. Rules: Open the physical book at a random page and point to a random place. Pick a phrase touched by your finger tip. This becomes a line of your poem. Repeat until it feels like the poem has…
When Will It End?
This is internet poetry – “found poetry”. Rules: Google for your chosen title: “When will it end?” Click a random search result, pick one phrase from the text. This is the next line of the poem. Click a random hyperlink on this page, pick a phrase from this text –> next line. It’s not allowed…
Sources of Heat, Life, and Everything
Same procedure as every summer: Science and tech blogging comes to a halt, and the daring ‘internet artist’ is summoned. But also unorthodox avant-garde art is rooted in down-to-earth engineering. In summer elkement leaves the programmer’s cave (a bit) and sees the sun. The local elkemental microcosmos is a fully functional biosphere-2-like ecosystem with lots…
The Subtle Power of the Top Snippet. A New Sub-Genre of Google Poetry.
New game, new rules! I have tried to make the rules tougher! Here is some context and history. Search for your site on Google: site:elkement.wordpress.com Pick the first search result in the language of your site[*] Pick a chain of words, a contiguous snippet from this Google search result (use only the snippet on the…
Bots, Like This! I am an Ardent Fan of HTTPS and Certificates!
This is an experiment in Machine Learning, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, whatever. But I need proper digression first. Last autumn, I turned my back on social media and went offline for a few days. There, in that magical place, the real world was offline as well. A history of physics museum had to be opened,…
Things You Find in Your Hydraulic Schematic
Building an ice storage powered heat pump system is a DIY adventure – for a Leonardo da Vinci of plumbing, electrical engineering, carpentry, masonry, and computer technology. But that holistic approach is already demonstrated clearly in our hydraulic schematics. Actually, here it is even more daring and bold: There is Plutonium – Pu – everywhere…
Tinkering, Science, and (Not) Sharing It
I stumbled upon this research paper called PVC polyhedra: We describe how to construct a dodecahedron, tetrahedron, cube, and octahedron out of pvc pipes using standard fittings. … In particular, if we take a connector that takes three pipes each at 120 degree angles from the others (this is called a “true wye”) and we…
Bing Says We Are Weird. I Prove It. Using Search Term Poetry.
Bing has done so repeatedly: In order to learn more about this fundamental confusion I investigated my Bing search terms. [This blog has now entered the phase of traditionally light summer entertainment.] Rules: Raw material: Search terms shown in Bing Web Master Tools for any of my / our websites. Each line is a search…
Spam Poetry: “Cris-Crossing the Universe”
I have tried my hands at different kinds of experimental internet poetry, and all of the poems turned out to have a dystopic touch or tantalizing hints to some fundamental philosophical truth. Perhaps this says something about 1) The Internet or 2) about my subconsciousness. Since I have reduced blogging frequency, the number of spam…
Self-Sufficiency Poetry
Our self-sufficiency quota for electrical energy is 30%, but what about the garden? Since I haven’t smart metered every edible wildflower consumed, I resort to Search Term Poetry and random images. This is a summer blog post, lacking the usual number crunching and investigative tech journalism. Search terms are from WordPress statistics and Google Tools….
elkemental Force 