TED Talks are available in 100 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 9,400 volunteers have created the upwards of 40,000 translated talks. To celebrate this huge accomplishment, every week the TED Blog will be bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, meet Elena Montrasio…
AN: As one who relishes inspiration in many forms , lo, much that is inspirational comes from the people who are and exercise their creativity….. Fast Company has compiled a representative list of 100. Peruse and enjoy !
” “Black Hole” is a series of images, which shows paint modeled by the centripetal force. The setup is very simple: Various shades of acrylic paint are dripped onto a metallic rod, which is connected to a drill. When switched on, the paint starts to move away from the rod, creating these amazing looking structures.
The motion of the paint happens in a blink of an eye, the images you see are taken only millisecond after the drill was turned on. To capture the moment, where the paint forms that distinctive shape, I connected a sensor to the drill, which sends an impulse to the flashes. These specialized units are capable of creating flashes as short as a 1/40000 of a second, freezing the motion of the paint.”
AN: amazing shots and creative thinking to even conceive this form of photograpic artistic capture imagery.
“In ancient times, Julius Caesar painted his fleet of reconnaissance boats entirely in a blue-green wax — including the sails, ropes and even the crew — making the vessels virtually invisible against the sea. In a sense, camouflage is the original invisibility cloak, one that animals have evolved to such stunning perfection that they can disappear before our very eyes. It’s a marvelous trick for survival.
But beyond hiding from the view of hungry predators or opposing soldiers, the idea of invisibility has long captured our imagination, notably the imagination of “Harry Potter” fans and random physics geniuses who strive to create real-life invisibility cloaks. One such brainiac, Baile Zhang, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, showed off his “invisibility cloak” on Monday at the TED2013 talks in Long Beach, Calif.
Presenting as part of TED Fellows Day, a day when young researchers, artists, and other assorted brilliant minds are selected to give four-minute talks, Zhang awed the audience with his awesome cloak.
Zhang’s device is in its early stages; just a small gizmo in prototype phase — but it works. Speaking to Carla Sinclair of Boing Boing, Zhang explained that the cloak is made out of two pieces of natural calcite (optical crystals) that are joined together. The calcite bends light and suppresses shadows, tricking the eye into seeing nothing.
Sinclair writes of the demo, “The cloak’s ability to conceal an object so that both the cloak and the object become invisible was astonishing. Zhang placed the cloak over a bright pink Post-it note and voila! Nothing! The pink paper disappeared. And the cloak itself wasn’t really visible in the first place.”
As inventors generally have a purpose in mind for the innovations they conjure up, it’s logical to assume that Zhang’s extreme camouflage machine is being developed for the military or some other high-end application, but no. When asked what his plans were, he said that it had no purpose, he “just created it for fun.” Such are the hobbies of whiz-kid wizards.
AN : writers have written, concocted the thoughts and ability of invisibility from comic book characters to science fiction. It is not altogether beyong capability, as this TED Talk participant demonstrates. If one thinks about it, the visible spectrum of light is what we operate in….yet the electromagnetic spectrum is much broader than just our visible light receptor spectrum . Think , for example, infrared spectrum. We cannot see that spectrum but with instrumentation, we can “see” in the IR range. It should not surprise that we then can de-visualize. The applications of this are intriguing.
“The view from the top of the Shard: London panorama of sights and sounds – interactive
To mark the opening of the Shard, we’ve produced a 360-degree, augmented-reality panorama of London’s newest view, from the building’s public observation deck.
Read Antony Gormley, Tony Benn, Diana Athill and other famous Londoners on their favourite places, find the capital’s landmarks, listen in to the sounds of the city and gain a new perspective from the viewing platform of the EU’s tallest building.”
“The Wuppertal Northern Railway in Germany retired from its original function in the late 1990s and the ‘Nordtrasse’ was officially reopened as a cycle and pedestrian path in June 2010. The ten mile route is maintained by the Wuppertal Bewegung Association e.V., an Eingetrangener Verein or registered charity, that continues to look for exciting ways to use the space (which is sensible considering the success of New York’s High Line). Enter street artist MEGX.
As part of the redevelopment, Martin Heowold (MEGX) transformed 250 square meters of grey concrete into several giant toy bricks. MEGX is a street artist with a real interest in projects that can help people to perceive their surroundings more positively. In this case, paint has proved to be a relatively cheap way to transform a dull bridge into a talking point…..”
AN : do look up the reference article and see the before and after pictures. Public Art can be constructive and transformational !
