November 27 2009

I am still alive and kicking, since my sister was in town besides the standard schoolwork I have had the subject GRE and applications for graduate school keeping me busy. Getting pretty close to the end game now, though.

Weather has been very grey as of late. It is surprisingly warm (or not cold) for the end of November, which is nice. I wonder if I will see any snow before I head home?

Anyway, my girlfriend was in Europe (ostensibly for international law stuff, in practice to eat a lot of Belgium chocolate) and is here for a couple days, so I took her to the Ludwig museum today and then a concert by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, which was very good. I finally visited the little gallery inside the Ziggurat at the Palace of the Arts, which is very very cool.

Once upon a time I designed a house with a spiral ramp around the outside and rooms in the middle; this was pretty much the exact realization of my dream!

In any case, one of the exhibits at the Ludwig blew me away. All by one guy, Csörgő Attila, who must have some mathematical background. I really wish I had come up with some of the ideas, they are brilliant.

There were four incredibly awesome photography ideas: One used mirrors and a medium format camera to simultaneously take a long exposure of a bouncing ball with a strobing LED in it from all 6 sides. Another one recorded an image on an emulsion coated hemisphere (not sure if it was glass or not). Another used motors to swing the camera around in a way to record the image as a Möbius strip, and the last one used motors to record an image on an interestingly shaped strip like the rind of a peeled orange, so it could then be wrapped around a sphere.

There were other cool things, including intricate machines which decomposed shapes and then reorganized the pieces into new shapes. One took two tetrahedrons and morphed them into a cube and back continuously. There was also a room with fans balancing various geometric shapes as they spun and hovered in place. Very very cool

Some more info here :
http://www.c3.hu/~acsorgo/angol/felter1.html

November 3 2009

Some more photos :

Another view from the cupola at St. Stephen's Basilica, taken by my sister.


Parliament, also taken by my sister.


Foot of lamppost at the Opera.


Another face at the Opera.


Chain bridge lion.


I hope my sister doesn't go into photography; I don't need her being better than me at anything else!

November 1 2009

My sister came to visit this weekend, so I stopped working on math for a while to go around town with her. We finally used my digital camera, so you can get some idea of what the city is like. I have film versions of many of these shots, or will some day when I develop the film...

bastion.

roll.

rampant.

budapest.