 From Euan:Chris Corrigan has been doing some interesting bloging recently about circles and quotes this from Danish polymath Piet Hein:
Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily - physically or mentally - around things made with round lines.
Spookily I read the following this morning from Alan Watts:
Civilized human beings, and Westerners in particular, are always trying to straighten things out and put them in rectilinear boxes. This arises out of the Greek superstition that there are three dimensions of space and from Euclid's brutally oversimplified fantasies of a world consisting of points, lines, surfaces, circles and cubes. It is hard to persuade and educated Westerner that Euclid was simply a fantast and that his so-called geometry had nothing to do with measuring the earth, but only with working out the rules of his own rather rigid and simple mind. Earth wiggles, water streams and waves, and nature in general dances and swings, but Euclid's mind never reached the biological level. It stopped in the purely crystalline stage of evolution. This is why generation after generation of school children have been bamboozled into the notion that a straight line is simpler, and thus more intelligible, than a wiggle. Ever after we have been trying to subjugate all experience, knowledge, and action to the supposed clarity and intelligibility of straight lines.
from Alan Watts' essay What On Earth Are We Doing? Here's to wiggles!
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Ha, this is cool. Aerogel is a weird and wonderful material that looks like solid smoke and is the lightest solid substance we know. Only a little heavier than air. 0.003 grams per cubic centimeter. 1000 times less dense than glass. And it is made of 99.8% air. But yet it is the most efficient insulator we know, 39 times more insulating than the best fiberglass insulation. And it is very strong, able to carry 2,000 times its own weight without damage. And non-toxic. It was invented in the 1930s, but was largely forgotten until somebody at JPL in the 1980s needed a material that could gather comet particles that might be moving three to six miles per second, without destroying either them or the collector. Now it is being used frequently in space probes, and you can get arctic clothing that uses it as insulation. Articles: NY Times, SpaceDaily, and JPL has information and some cool pictures. And here's a company selling it. It is still very expensive, though.