Give this video at least a minute and you'll see some spectacular shadow art. I particularly like the last style (1:15) using sculptured mass to create recognizable form:
More like this
You know the song. It's instantly recognizable, even without the slightly daft religious lyrics. The fuzzed-out guitar, the chugging riff, the weird little noises in the background. But who recorded "Spirit in the Sky" (now playing in a Nike commercial near you...)?
Alex Palazzo is talking about open questions in cell biology — in this case, control of organelle shape.
Last week, in the class I'm teaching, we talked about the basics of deterministic finite automata. In week two we moved on to more interesting and slightly less basic material.
That is awesome! (almost unbelievable, really)
Assuming it is real, I wonder how they do it.
Probably use a supercomputer to figure out where all the junk goes (not).
perhaps they just make a heap, illuminate it from different directions and see if anything pops out, and then refine what does. or perhaps they actually have an idea from the beginning? (Much harder)
In some regard, this reminds me of holography. The hologram itself looks like a randomly exposed photographic negative with no recognizable image on it (sometimes with a bunch of gray rings). But when you illuminate it and then view it from slightly different directions, you get a different view of an object.
What would be even cooler (but even harder) is if you could somehow make a junk pile that has shadows of several different recognizable things when illuminated from different directions.
Another interesting experiment might be to see how many pieces of junk could be removed from each pile without making the image unrecognizable.