Gone With The Wind

Behind a TED-Ed Lesson: Animation + Inspiration

To celebrate George Seurat’s birthday today, we thought we’d do a deep dive behind the scenes of one of our animated lessons, How do schools of fish swim in harmony?, which is about the concept of ‘emergence’ and whose animated style just so happens to have been largely influenced by the paintings of George Seurat and his contemporaries.

Emergence refers to the spontaneous creation of sophisticated behaviors and functions from large groups of simple elements, and can be used to explain the movements of ants, fish, and birds, as well as how the tiny cells in your brain give rise to the complex thoughts, memories, and consciousness that are you.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, George Seurat (1884–86)

It’s kind of like a pointillist painting. When you zoom in real close, it’s just a collection of chaotic brush strokes. But take a few steps back, and you’ll see that all of those brush strokes are working together to illustrate a complex and detailed scene.

Pointillism stems from Impressionism, and depending on the artist’s technique, the size of the brush strokes vary, but are always visible. For example, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night uses larger brush strokes in the night sky. Both the above and below concept designs show the animator of this lesson testing out how different brushstrokes interact to create depth within a scene. She decided that the swirling waters would make sense as large brushstrokes, which also offered contrast to allow the small fish to stand out.

George Seurat also employed a technique called ‘divisionism’, sometimes known as ‘chromoluminarism’, in which colors were separated into individual dots or patches which interacted optically. So, rather than relying on mixing colors, painters like Seurat and Paul Signac juxtaposed contrasting colors to allow for optical mixing - which in theory would produce more vibrant and pure colors than the traditional process of mixing pigments.

Circus Sideshow (Parade de Cirque), George Seurat (1887–88)

While designing this TED-Ed lesson, George Seurat and Paul Signac’s paintings provided inspiration not just for the brushstroke technique, but also for the color palette.

This GIF of the brain and it’s neural connections draws many of its colors from Seurat’s circus series palette, while the brighter colors - such as the ones used in the title GIF above - are drawn from the more vibrant colors commonly used by Paul Signac, like in the painting below.

Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles, Paul Signac (1905-06)

Animating this lesson was an opportunity to renew a sense of wonder in our ever complex universe, whether studying it up close or from afar. We hope that watching it might do the same for you!

From the TED-Ed Lesson How do schools of fish swim in harmony? - Nathan S. Jacobs

Animation by TED-Ed // Lisa LaBracio

Good vibrations no longer needed for speakers as research encourages graphene to talk

A pioneering new technique that encourages the wonder material graphene to “talk” could revolutionise the global audio and telecommunications industries.

Researchers from the University of Exeter have devised a ground-breaking method to use graphene to generate complex and controllable sound signals. In essence, it combines speaker, amplifier and graphic equaliser into a chip the size of a thumbnail.

Traditional speakers mechanically vibrate to produce sound, with a moving coil or membrane pushing the air around it back and forth. It is a bulky technology that has hardly changed in more than a century.

This innovative new technique involves no moving parts. A layer of the atomically thin material graphene is rapidly heated and cooled by an alternating electric current, and transfer of this thermal variation to the air causes it to expand and contract, thereby generating sound waves.

Read more.

Dutch trains now all powered by wind energy

All Dutch trains have become 100% powered by electricity generated by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said, making it a world’s first.

One windmill running for an hour can power a train for 120 miles, the companies said. Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and the two companies signed a 10-year deal setting January 2018 as the date by which all NS trains should run on wind energy. ‘We in fact reached our goal a year earlier than planned,” said NS spokesman Ton Boon, adding that an increase in the number of wind farms across the country and off the coast of the Netherlands had helped NS achieve its aim.

They hope to reduce the energy used per passenger by a further 35% by 2020 compared with 2005.

Do you know anyone prone to pleonasm?

Read the full definition here: http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/2016/11/16?param=social

Warrior of the grassland - Anup Deodhar - The Comedy Wildlife.

Self-assembling particles brighten future of LED lighting

Just when lighting aficionados were in a dark place, LEDs came to the rescue. Over the past decade, LED technologies – short for light-emitting diode – have swept the lighting industry by offering features such as durability, efficiency and long life.

Now, Princeton engineering researchers have illuminated another path forward for LED technologies by refining the manufacturing of light sources made with crystalline substances known as perovskites, a more efficient and potentially lower-cost alternative to materials used in LEDs found on store shelves.

The researchers developed a technique in which nanoscale perovskite particles self-assemble to produce more efficient, stable and durable perovskite-based LEDs. The advance, reported January 16 in Nature Photonics, could speed the use of perovskite technologies in commercial applications such as lighting, lasers and television and computer screens.

“The performance of perovskites in solar cells has really taken off in recent years, and they have properties that give them a lot of promise for LEDs, but the inability to create uniform and bright nanoparticle perovskite films has limited their potential,” said Barry Rand an assistant professor of electrical engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton.

Read more.

SoCal, home.

14-year-old Richard Pierce, Western Union messenger, works from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m, Delaware, 1910

via reddit

“I want to empower women through dance. I think you can build confidence through movement. When a woman starts moving her body, and becomes comfortable with herself, and realizes that she can do the steps — it connects back to life. Because all of life is movement. Technically we’re dancing every day. And it doesn’t matter how you look. It matters how you move.”