Giles Tran’s amazing rendering of glasses on the counter inspired me to check through my own POV-Ray generated library. Nothing nearly as good, but some of it is still might be useful.
Demonstrating the axial tilt of the Earth, this image shows the Earth at the northern hemisphere's summer solstice.Rotating Earth at the northern hemisphere's winter solstice.
You build 3d models in POV-Ray and then export 2d images from whichever point of view you want, so once you have the model set up you can easily change the perspective or even move objects to create animations.
POV-Ray does not have any useful sort of user interface; you’re usually creating your models with computer code. It can therefore be challenging to use, and, as with any 3d programming language, a bit of geometry, trigonometry and algebra are needed.
However, the final results can be impressive. I’m continually amazed each year by the quality of the work added to their Hall of Fame.
For much easier, quicker and not so sophisticated 3d results, I use VPython, which is also a great way to learn programming that outputs 3d images.
“On average we found that each of us carries two or three mutations that could cause one of these severe childhood diseases.”
–Stephen Kingsmore, physician, Children’s Mercy Hospital in Greenfieldboyce (2010), New Genetic Test Screens Would-Be Parents.
NPR’s All Things Considered had two related articles on last night that deal with the specific topics we’re covering this week: genetic disease and recessive alleles.
The first one is about the latest in genetic screening technology, for determining if potential parents have recessive alleles that could combine to produce children with genetic diseases. Recent research has made this much easier.
The second touches on the ethical consequences of genetic screening. It could lead to an increase in abortion rates and leads us along the slippery slope of eugenics.
What if we engineered for intelligence?
This second story would make an interesting basis for a Socratic dialogue. As would, I think, the movie Gattica, which deals with the consequences of genetic screening and genetic customizations. I see it’s PG-13 so we may be able to screen it. Similarly, I may recommend Brian Stableford’s War Games to my eight graders who might like a military science fiction book that deals with genetic optimization. Alternatively, Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain might offer another interesting perspective on this issue.
art … never simply transcribes what is “out there,” but selects certain details and arranges them into a harmony that transfigures them.
— Frank Wilson (2010) in “Still life and the alchemy of art“.
We might see arrangements like the stuff sitting on the counter every day, but the image/photography/painting becomes art when the collection is view from a specific perspective that transforms them and highlights details.
Aside from its obvious beauty, what really intrigues me about this picture is where it was taken: In the living room of the Menchers’ apartment, just a few feet from where I was standing. I would never have guessed.
When Eric told me that, I turned and looked, and could see where the vase and the other objects had been placed. But the setting was altogether different from the picture. The living room is a perfectly nice and neat space, and I had just been sitting there, but when I looked at it again there was absolutely nothing about it that would have brought to mind that photo.
Note: The image at the top of this post is computer generated Gilles Tran, using the free, open-source, 3D rendering program POV-Ray. I’ve played around with POV-Ray and it can be a bit tricky, but you can do interesting things.
Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.
You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.
I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:
One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.
Rheingold’s social-media class did an exercise that changed the way many of his students interact with Facebook.
Each student projected their profile on a screen with everything but their name or picture. Everyone had to guess whose profile was on display. Estela Marie Go, an undergraduate student in the class, says she suddenly realized that she didn’t like the way Facebook forced her to define herself with a list of interests.
—Sydell (2010) on NPR.
A number of my students have Facebook accounts. I have one too, but I think I’ve used it twice in the year that I’ve had it. Part of my problem is about how it accelerates the loss of privacy inherent to living on the net. However, I also have a very big problem with its insular nature, the fact that it is its own walled-off section of the internet. The two times I’ve used it have been when people I knew from inside the wall wanted to share something and I could not get to it from outside. I also find it difficult to give so much personal information, about my history and my habits to a single company.
So I’m always enthused to see other people coming to the same conclusions, like those in NPR’s recently broadcast story about how, “New Networks Target Discomfort With Facebook.”
I’m just testing out a simple image map created with the GIMP. The GIMP is a free image manipulation software, a bit like Photoshop, not quite as sophisticated, but free. I used GimpTalk‘s very helpful guide. I though it would be easiest if I used something from a previous post as a test.
You should be able to click on the cell walls, chloroplasts, vacuole and nucleus. The links take you to the associated Wikipedia pages, but that’s just because this is a quick and dirty example. Image maps have been around for a long time, but I believe this is the first time I’ve ever created one. Now I just need to animate it a bit.
Unfortunately, this image is not easily scalable, though it should not be too hard to find (or write) a script to do just that.
Synthesizing Cycle 1’s theme of, “What is Life”, I’ve given the students the option of choosing a personal novel where the question of life and sentience are important themes. Frankenstein and Feet of Clay were two suggestions.
For our Socratic Dialogue, I’ve found a nice article (via The Dish) from MIT’s Technology Review, which deals with the cultural differences that affect how Americans and Japanese view robots. They suggest it’s because Americans come from a monotheistic, jealous god culture where only god can create life, while the animism that permeates Japanese culture makes them more amenable to having self-actuating beings around them.
Apart from the theme, the article’s vocabulary is complex enough for lots of marking up and discussion, but it starts with the hook of warfighting mecha.
Renaissance Faire Elf Using Cell Phone. (Image by Zoomar). The caption for the photo is priceless, 'I just want to state for the record that a cell phone at a Renaissance Faire is anachronistic and wrong. Being an Elf, however is 100% historically accurate.'
What are the fundamental needs of life (as we know it)? Energy, water, living space and stable internal conditions. These are physical needs of all organisms from bacteria to plants to mammals. Humans share these needs too, and this was one of the things we talked about in natural world this cycle. However, in social world studies we also discussed how people have psychological needs that, as far as we can tell, are different from those of single celled organisms: celebration, community, entertainment, and, among other things, what my students call understanding, which includes religion and spirituality.
My technophilic students also interjected that we, humans, have a need for electronics.
Electronics? My first thought was that they were being facetious, and they may have well been. But as we talked about all the other needs during our synthesis discussion last Friday I began to realize just how fundamental electronics have become to life as we know it.
Electronics are tied into the way we meet those fundamental physical needs. Organizing shipping and distribution of food requires complex scheduling software and databases. The operation of the pumps that extract our groundwater and deliver it to our houses are controlled by microcontroller. With MRI’s and computerized records our health and well-being (maintaining those stable internal conditions) are increasingly influenced by electronic technology. And in our homes, the elegant knobs and dials of thermostats on furnaces and ovens are giving way to smooth if inelegant digital displays.
Even our understanding of the world we live in, of the effects of global climate change for example, is based predominantly on sophisticated computer models and confirmed by computerized satellite systems (see NCAR for example).
So have we reached the point where electronics are a fundamental need of society, and how long will it be before we as individuals become inseparable from our electronics devices? Are we all cyborgs now? And the ultimate question: Should we be teaching more electronics in middle school?
