How Aesthetically Pleasing Is Your Country’s Diffraction Pattern?

You may be wondering how aesthetically pleasing is your country’s diffraction pattern. This new physics study proves that Albert F. Rigosi shares your mental hobby: “Analysis of Fraunhofer Diffraction Patterns’ Entropy Based on Apertures Shaped as National Borders,” Albert F. Rigosi, Optik, vol. 172, November 2018, pp. 1019-1025. (Thanks to John Ng for bringing this […]

Audio-Based Caricature Exaggerations (new patent)

  ‘Caricaturization’ (the act of making a caricature of someone/something) can now be performed automatically – and not only that, it can be set to music. Matan Sela and colleagues at Prof. Ron Kimmel’s Geometric Image Processing Lab, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, have developed ‘A novel caricature generation framework for surfaces’. Computer Vision […]

How to Make Any Shape Zippable [research study]

Mathematics comes to the rescue of anyone who wants to make almost any shape “zippable” with a single zipper. This study has details: “Shape Representation by Zippable Ribbons,” Christian Schüller, Roi Poranne, and Olga Sorkine-Hornung, arXiv:1711.02450v1, November 7, 2017. The authors, at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, explain: “We observe that the assembly of complex 3D shapes […]

Why Are Bird Eggs Bird-Egg-Shaped? [New research from an Ig Nobellian]

Mahadevan, who won an Ig Nobel Physics Prize in 2007 for studying how/why wrinkled sheets become wrinkled, has a new study out about how/why bird eggs become bird-egg shaped. The study, by Mahadevan and several collaborators, is: “Avian Egg Shape: Form, Function, and Evolution,” Mary Caswell Stoddard, Ee Hou Yong, Derya Akkaynak, Catherine Sheard, Joseph […]

Morphometrics maven: morphometricians must and can do better

A grizzled morphometrician casts a cold, gleeful eye at his field, and urges himself and his fellow morphometricians to do better. Morphometrics is the the continuing attempt to carefully measure and compare shapes and sizes. This morphometrician’s happy diatribe is in the form of a long, new paper: “The Inappropriate Symmetries of Multivariate Statistical Analysis […]

About-Face on Face Shape?

A new study about faces implies than an old study about faces (which we wrote about way back when) should not be taken at face value: “Lack of Support for the Association between Facial Shape and Aggression: A Reappraisal Based on a Worldwide Population Genetics Perspective,” Jorge Gómez-Valdés, Tábita Hünemeier, Mirsha Quinto-Sánchez, Carolina Paschetta, Soledad […]