This post over at Hack N Mod is titled “World’s Most Stunning Data Centers.” In point of fact, only two are mentioned, but the photos are pretty stunning. Shown uppermost, the Skynet system core Microsoft Chicago Data Center (of which more and better pictures are available here), and immediately above, the Stockholm facilities of Bahnhof, one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, which are located in a Cold War-era underground nuclear shelter. A video tour is available here.
So the bragging rights I mentioned in Monday’s post about the newly-discovered single shape that tiles the plane aperiodically go to mathematician and artist Edmund Harriss, aka Gelada, who produced these beautiful renderings of the Socolar-Taylor tile in Blender and uploaded printable 3D models to Thingiverse. There’s more info and images on Harriss’s blog, Maxwell’s Demon. [Thanks, Edmund!]
I don’t often blog promotional giveaways, but this one is pretty sweet: Minnesota’s Proto Labs offers injection molding in a bunch of different plastics. The really cool part is, if you’re in North America and you register at their site, they’ll send you a free 4x4x4 unit polycube puzzle, with nine pieces, each molded in a different color and from a different polymer resin. There’s green HDPE, white polypropylene, mauve ABS, clear polycarbonate, yellow polycarbonate/ABS blend, orange polyoxymethylene, red polyester, blue nylon, and black glass-filled nylon. And purple horseshoes! I already snagged mine!
Bill Keaggy, who’s something of a list-artist (his collections of found grocery lists and sad chairs are also pretty amusing), brings us this periodic table of periodic tables. I’ve blogged about the vast number of alternative representations of the periodic table before, and while, apart from the division into themed “blocks,” there doesn’t seem to be any meta-logic organizing Bill’s meta-table that would correspond to the real logic that organizes the real periodic table, it’s definitely an entertaining notion. Static images are available from Bill’s Flickr stream. [via Boing Boing]
Theo Watson cooked up a chunk of code with OpenFrameworks that types a smiley face into your text chat, email, etc. when it recognizes that you’ve smiled. =] Auto Smiley
Epoxyworks is a free magazine published biannually, and archived online, by Michigan’s Gougeon Brothers, Inc., who use it to promote their West System brand of epoxy resins, which I have not used and have no stake in, but it’s chock full of tutorials, tips, and techniques for working with composite materials that could probably be “de-branded” and used with whomever’s products you prefer. Shown here are photos from one article that caught my eye (PDF), by J.R. Watson, showing how to form straight and curved rigid composite tubes in carbon fiber, kevlar, fiberglass, or other braided material by laying the composite up over a mold made from split foam pipe insulation. It also covers techniques for joining the finished rigid tubing sections. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]
If you’re interested in materials science, design, architecture, and/or chemistry, and you live in Austin or the central Texas area, you should not miss the UT Austin School of Architecture Materials Lab, located in room 3.102 of the West Mall Office Building on The University of Texas Campus. They’re closed this week for Spring Break, but are normally open from 9-5 every weekday. It’s open to the public, and is chock-a-block with physical samples of all kinds of exotic materials that would otherwise be difficult to get your hands on in small quantities. Anyone can poke around, and registered students can check out samples just like a book-library.
If you’re not in the area, the UTSOA Materials Lab is building an online database of its collection organized by composition, form, properties, process, and application. And although they don’t have photos of all the samples uploaded yet, it’s still fascinating browsing.
