I'm always on the lookout for a good screensaver. And mathematically-defined flames just seem too good to pass up. These tasty little bits of eye candy are based on the work of Michael Barnsley from Georgia Tech (One of my freshman calculus instructors, incidentally) who invented Iteratted Function System fractals, which were used by Scott Draves in 1992 to make artificial flames. These examples were made by rajah, and you can see many more examples and animations here and here.Now you can go and make your own artificial flames with a freeware application called Apophysis that runs on the Windows operating system. Donwload it here. If you'd just like to check out some animations and images, look here.

Check out this blackboard photo of Caryn Babaian's anatomy lesson at Bucks County Community College.

Harvard University recently commissioned XVIVO's animation studio to develop realistic computer graphics animations of biological processes for instructional purposes. Some of their first work was presented at Siggraph 2006. Check out "The Inner Life of the Cell" In the meantime, here are some stills from the mini-movie. High cool.

Or, How to Make Your Camera Work More Like Your EyesAnyone who has ever tried to snap a few photos with a modern camera has probably felt the frustration that the camera often fails to get the exposure quite right, with things that you can see clearly either washed out and over-exposed, or invisible in the shadows. The intrepid among you may have even gone so far as to turn the switch to manual, only to discover that it is really hard to do too much better than the automatic system. You end up with these types of exposure-bracketed images: The sky detail is only visible in the lower exposure (faster shutter speed) and the building detail is only visible in the higher exposure. And yet when you look directly at the scene, everything is clearly visible to the naked eye. The reason for this is that through an amazing combination of the iris' aperture dilation, and the logarithmic response of the photo-receptive neurons in retina, the human eye automatically adapts to an incredibly broad range of illumination intensity as it scans across ...

I'm always a sucker for nifty data visualization hacks and I particularly enjoyed these globe projections from the San Jose Technology Museum.Life Expectancy Life expectancy is a core factor in the human development index. With 82 years Japan has the highest life expectancy. All 35 countries at the bottom of this list are located in sub-Saharan Africa; their citizen's average life expectancy is between 52 and 39 years.Mountains of DebtPollutionDark red circles indicate oil spills and gray-shaded areas indicate sea pollution and land pollution from chemical fertilizers. Shown is only a small part of the entire pollution spectrum in 1988. At an average of every three months this globe becomes obsolete due to yet another major oil spill.Satellite Blind Spots The public service Landsat System has blind spots over territory and time. However, personal satellites may soon be purchasable for about the price of a Mercedes, and space junk is increasingly hard to track.Check the web site above for hundreds more!

I've always been a little skeptical about the sensationalism and obvious bias in much of the news these days, but I was rather surprised to come across several reports of photo manipulation of several images that had caught my eye in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Times over the last few weeks. Here is a site that compiles several of the recent Reuters photo frauds in Lebanon over the last couple of weeks. I suspect that this sort of thing is hardly unique to the Middle East, but sheesh. You can't even believe your eyes anymore. Digital editing, retouching, misleading captions, and staged photos all abound and seem to appear as NEWS in accredited sources generally held as reliable in the US.Here is but one example from the site. Many of you may have seen the following photo either online or in the paper. It's pretty dramatic stuff, pulling bodies from the rubble and all. It certainly caught my attention when I was perusing the paper the other morning.Well, check out the following photo from the same roll of film:Recognize the guy in cap and cammie shorts? Pretty hale and hearty ...