Biologically Inspired Network Design

1. Tokyo rail network designed by Physarum plasmodium

2. Slime Mold Physarum polycephalum networking on a map of the United States

3. Physarum Polycephalum solves Traveling Salesman Problem

Transpersonal Psychology

A lecture given by R.D. Laing (1927-1989) and Leo Matos February 10 1982 as a St Görans Lecture in Stockholm. Introduction by Prof Lennart Wetterberg. Note that this is not a Stockholm Psychiatry Lecture, these can be found at http://www.youtube.com/psychiatrylectures

Kestrel's Eye

This intrepid documentary by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Kristersson follows two European falcons as they go about their daily activities. Two years in the making, the film is shot without any supplemental audio, allowing the two birds to be the sole focal point. As the birds hunt for food and care for their offspring, viewers are treated to a literal bird's-eye view from their nest at the top of an old church steeple. (Netflix)

Dark Current

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I am delving into dark currents, the scientific poetry of video.  This is what mimesis seeks to screen out: the medium.  Or more specifically, the primacy of the pheno-text.  I would even call it the accountability of the image.  The video image is imagined as immaterial, and yet the material itself is expressive — literally.  As Roland Barthes put it, "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs." (IMAGE/MUSIC/TEXT, p.188)

In physics and in electronic engineering, dark current is the relatively small electric current that flows through photosensitive devices such as a photomultiplier tube, photodiode, or charge-coupled device even when no photons are entering the device.  It is referred to as reverse bias leakage current in non-optical devices and is present in all diodes. Physically, dark current is due to the random generation of electrons and holes within the depletion region of the device that are then swept by the high electric field.

The charge generation rate is related to specific crystallographic defects within the depletion region. Dark-current spectroscopy can be used to determine the defects present by monitoring the peaks in the dark current histogram's evolution with temperature.

Dark current is one of the main sources for noise in image sensors such as charge-coupled devices. The pattern of different dark currents can result in a fixed-pattern noise; dark frame subtraction can remove an estimate of the mean fixed pattern, but there still remains a temporal noise, because the dark current itself has a shot noise. (WIKIPEDIA)

The Language of Folding

Robert Lang at TED.

Artificial Hearts

The Discarnate Condition

Marshall McLuhan at John Hopkins University.

Tropic of Chaos

Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
By Christian Parenti 
Nation Books, 304 pages 

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency.  Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

Oritsunagumono

Oritsunagumono ("things folded and connected") by Takayuki Hori.  The artist printed images of animal skeletons and discarded trash onto translucent sheets of paper, and then folded them into origami animal shapes. Hori folds each animal -- both bones and trash -- out of one uncut sheet of paper. (via Fast Co. and Colossal)

Aesthetics of Microfluidics, Part 2