Rectified Flowers, and the flickr set
Comment by kottke
Polar-to-cartesian unwrapping of flower photographs is the new flattening flowers between the pages of books. The Processing source code is available. NotCot applied the effect to chandeliers. I dorked around in Photoshop a little and you can get similar results using the “Polar Coordinates” filter…you just have to stretch out the image first.
The history of photography starts at the human scale, with the first picture of a face in 1838 and moves in both directions, culminating in the WMAP cosmic background radiation image in 2003 and the first complete image of a molecule in 2009.
(Is this the first internet use of First! in a nonDickian application?)
That’s not recursion. This is recursion.
Zoom in on a striking weather-related photograph to reveal hundreds more photos making up the original. Then zoom again at each level for an endless array of images, each submitted by users to My Shot.
Iconic photos and paintings recreated in LEGO, with links to the original works as well.
Apparently the Norweian Blue isn’t the only bird who prefers kippin’ on its back.
Behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. flickr: The Order of Things
APOD: 2010 April 25 The Ant Nebula
I will say this: I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords. Because there’s no chance a phrase from The Simpsons could ever become hackneyed.
These are more than alright.
Stunning new images of the sun (photos)
While many people celebrated Earth Day on Thursday, NASA had its eye on the sun.
The space agency released stunning new images of the sun that have been sent back by its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched into space on February 11.
The Big Picture: Journeys to the International Space Station
April 12th marked the 49th anniversary of human spaceflight, when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth in 1961. At this moment, 13 humans are currently in low-Earth orbit, aboard the International Space Station. Several were already aboard the ISS when a Soyuz TMA-18 brought a fresh crew up from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on April 2nd – they were later joined by the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery on the 131st shuttle mission to date (only three remaining launches scheduled). NASA recently signed a new deal with Russia for six more round-trips to the ISS, at a cost of $55.8 million per seat. Collected here are recent photos of the Space Station, its current crew, their launch vehicles, and the views from above. (38 photos total)
Here’s a neat picture from the collection (larger version at the link)
The water bubble acts as a lens and inverts the image, but the air bubble inside also acts as a lens, inverting the image once again. A lens made of air? Well, sort of. Light refracts at the interface of any two media with different indices, so you can look at it as a lens. If we lived in water, we’d probably think of air bubbles in that way. Alternately, you can think of the bubble as dividing the water bubble into two lenses for the light traveling through it, while the light not going through it passes through only one lens.
A variant on this would be if you were to inject a small sphere of a liquid with a larger index inside the water bubble, if you were on the ISS, or use glass with two different indices here on earth.
The Most Beautiful Spider in the World
This little spider disprove the stereotype about spiders being ugly and scary
I can easily imagine many arachnophobes disagreeing with this. And the realization that these critters can jump
Jumper can jump 20 to 60 or even 75 to 80 times the length of its body.
is probably not one that assuages the fear.