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| Here’s the data about our pendulum: • 10 pound weight used as pendulum bob • support string/rod 87″ • diameter of the pendulum bob 10″ • 4 feet launch height |
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| Pendulums don’t normally come to mind these days. A short story by Edgar Allen Poe read when I was a child called “The Pit and the Pendulum,” was the stuff of nightmares for an entire winter. I am still uncertain if it was the inexorable action of the device or the fact that the Catholic Church actually sanctioned its use as a method of torture that creeped me out more.
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Apart from the stuff of nightmares, the pendulum was used in time-keeping for hundreds of years.
 Then there is a permutation of the pendulum in Newton’s Cradle: Outside of the zillions of $ that someone made with this show and the desktop toy, the pendulum seems kind of useless today; timekeeping functions (and torture devices!) have all been superseded by silicon. The machine age dies hard. Long live the electronic age! Just like everything else that looks simple, the math relating to the pendulum is complicated. |
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| A few items came up while researching this topic that I found interesting: • Gravitational Potential Energy is defined as the product of Mass*Gravity*Height. • Gravity is measured as the gravitational acceleration of an object near the surface of the Earth at 9.80665 m/s2 • Kinetic energy increases in direct proportion to the increase in mass and with the square of the increase in velocity. • Graphed/plotted the action of the pendulum looks like a sine wave • Given a fixed (unmoving) length, each pendulum possesses a single resonant frequency |
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For some inexplicable reason, I obsessed on solving for the angle of our rod/string once the bob was pulled out at four feet. I don’t know if this is correct, but this is what I am thinking:Using the data for the pendulum created in class the string (rod) measured 87″ and the diameter of massy-bob was ten inches. Literature suggests that the length of the rod be measured from the point of frictionless attachment to the center of the bob (87″ + 5″ = 92″= L). |
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| We set the bob in motion from a height of 48″ which is shown in line AC. Point A-B is defined as AC – the height or 92 – 48 or 44″  |
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| Given side AC = 92″ and side A-B = 44″ Pythagorean theorem: A (squared)+ B (squared) = C (squared) (X) + 44(44) = 92(92) then (x) + 1936 = 8464 then (x) = 8464-1936 or (x)= 6528 (x) = square root of 6528 = 80.79″ Which means we now have the bottom leg of the triangle (BC) measured at 80.79″ or 81″. |
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| arccos= Hypotenuse/adjacent = arccos=92/44 = Theta = 61 degrees. | |
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| With little thanks to troubled years, I have earned a respectful appreciation and antipathy toward pendulum action: | |
| Berta, Branford Marsalis • August Wilson, The Piano • YouTube link
Peter Terezakis |
All posts by Peter Terezakis
Collective Narrative
With more than a nod to EE Cummings and Basho, here’s my six-word story:
Moonbeams
canyon
windows
taxis
never
sleep
.
Peter Terezakis
ITP, Tisch School of the Arts
New York City
Trees and Human Health
Click the image below for the full article:
2013 the quest continued….
When I graduate (or along the way) maybe I will understand why:
• A lobbyist was invited to present to a class whose syllabus clearly states that guest speakers would be, “…leaders drawn from the artistic, non-profit and commercial sectors of the new media field…”
• How the nuclear industry proposes to safely dispose of radioactive waste (for 1/2 of eternity) when society can’t figure out how to properly dispose of plastic picnic utensils.
• Why public utilities are allowed to raise the price per kilowatt hour when ratepayers are using less (not more) electricity.
• Why millions of dollars are spent developing capital-intensive power generation facilities hundreds of miles from consumers: instead of using existing infrastructure to develop power generation and distribution within cities and suburbs.
• How over six billion dollars of foreign investment in fracking operations within the United States is deemed a good investment in the future of our land by elected officials (possibly related to the answer of question one?).
• What the plan is to quickly and safely evacuate Southern California’s Orange and San Diego Counties within a 90 mile radius of the San Onofre Nuclear power plant (built 1964) in the event of a Fukushima style event.
I have a lot of other questions and no answers.
Peter Terezakis
ITP, Tisch School of the Arts
New York City
The devil’s disciple wore a nice suit – excerpt
This is a previously unpublished section written in response to the presentation of a lobbyist who presented to class on election eve 2012:
… Mr. Howard then took a moment to ridicule the “outrageous fine” levied upon a restaurateur whose refrigerator was storing cheese at 40 degrees. Especially deft was his technique of planting the idea that the food product was about to be, “put on a grill” (obviating the need for refrigeration to begin with?).
Stephanie Smith, 22, was paralyzed after being stricken by E. coli in 2007. Officials traced the E. coli to hamburger her family had eaten
During calendar year 1999 seventy-five million people became ill from food related poisoning and another 5,000 died – in the United States alone.
In between full recuperation and death from food-borne bacterial infections are a host of permanent and/or chronic effects.
Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old children’s dance instructor, ate a bad burger manufactured by the Cargill Corporation, contracted an E. Coli infection, had to be placed in a medically induced coma for nine weeks, didn’t die, and can no longer walk due to paralysis from the infection. Her medical condition indicates that she will require multiple kidney transplants. Ms. Smith’s medical bills are in the millions of dollars.
Bacteria grow most rapidly in the range of temperatures between 40 ° and 140 °F, doubling in number in as little as 20 minutes.
There is a lot more to be said about the topic of food safety – all of it based on scientific fact, and common sense. What is missing are ADDITIONAL regulations to keep bits of glass, complex organic compounds, heavy metals and more – out of our food supply chain. New laws with revenue-creating penalties and enforcement are required for new hazards foisted on an unsuspecting and trusting public by multinational corporations who use every manner of deception to increase their profit margins while minimizing their accountability.
Back to Mr. Howard and his introduction….
Peter Terezakis
ITP, Tisch School of the Arts
New York City
Introduction to Computational Media: Reactive Planar Dimension using Processing and a MacBook Pro
In the 1990s I created a series of grid structures using acid-etched industrial steel parts. A sensor was located at each intersection.
They were all connected with a combination of RJ11 and RJ45 connectors and appropriate cable. For ease of touring and installations, I designed six grids to be 48″ x 96″. Plywood, sheetrock, and other building materials in the United States typically max out at those two dimensions. Correctly fabricated the modules would have easily fit in cargo vans, elevators, and trucks. Much to my chagrin, I did not factor in the additoinal length caused by the couplings and the additional offset of the pipe. This caused some extra challenges. But that’s for a different text.
The grid structures were created for people to be able to play music and/or poetry either in a random manner or by controlling where their shadows fell on the grid. In this manner they could then control the placement and pattern of sounds or words if they chose.
I always liked the idea of creating participatory volumes and felt that their must be a better way to get control signals to the computer.
Processing and the availability of low cost web cameras would seem to be one way to update the mechanics of the artwork.
Serial port communication is a lot like it was in the 1990s. Except that it is more robust, runs over a USB (then non-existent!) cable, has relaible physical connectors, and Apple computers which can do things undreamt of back then. The Arduino was essential in making this project work. (This seemed like a heavy-handed solution for the task at hand. I can’t help but thing that a simple 16C58B could have given me the hardware interface I needed for this project.) I used the Arduino because I wanted the experience with the platform as well as the fact that its language is nearly identical to that of Processing.
A screen grab of the Arduino code appears below. In its uncommented out incarnation, the code allows me to see which outputs are firing and when. For the demonstration and testing I am using incandescent bulbs. Due to the heat they radiate, I prefer to have the lights “off” while waiting to trigger them using camera input.
test-test
Clicking on this link will open a new window with a screen cap showing the code testing with the laptop webcam. A white rectangle will appear with contiguous moving black segments, showing where my arm passes in front of the camera. (QT controller is at the bottom of the file.)
The above example is the code portion working. The file at this link shows the lights changing in response to the detected movement.
Peter Terezakis
ITP, Tisch School of the Arts
New York City
Effects of Color
A 1974 chance encounter with a licensed optometrist who used color therapy
in his practice affected the direction of my work, and my life.
Through Yasser Ansari’s Genomics class, for the first time in my life I
have an opportunity to examine and research the effects of wavelengths of light and some of its effects on the human body within an academic setting.
Most people know about “blue” light to treat neonatal hyper-bilirubinemia, broad-spectrum light in the treatment of Seasonal Affective Disorder, and understand that daylight helps to prevent rickets and osteoporosis by stimulating Vitamin D3 production.
What is of interest to me is that there is a growing body of experiential evidence that specific wavelengths of light may be used to treat specific medical problems.
I’d like to continue my research and have it mean something outside of the subjective world of visual art. This will only happen if I can gain access to research grade instrumentation and unbiased experimental support. The past several months I have made contact with medical doctors, engineers, and a physicist at New York University, State University of New York College of Optometry, and the University of California, San Diego.
Phase one of my project involves measuring wavelengths of visible light as transmitted through optical filters from an existing medical device. To do this accurately I need to use a spectroradiometer.
Phase two is measuring physiological responses to specific frequencies of light during a given period of time.
The experimental parameters and procedure for this part of the project will be designed by Dr. Kenneth Ciuffreda at the State University of New York, College of Optometry (http://www.sunyopt.edu/faculty/viewprofile.php?ID=103).
Dr. Ciuffreda is openly critical of the efficacy of light therapy and has volunteered to participate in this project.
I am keeping my contacts at the College of Syntonic Optometry (http://www.collegeofsyntonicoptometry.com/home.html) out of this project for experimental objectivity.
Based on the experiment’s results, I would like to publish the project’s results and create other works of art and healing based upon the research.
The device pictured below is an optical syntonizer built and sold in 1933. Theses units – as well as updated ones – are in use by medical professionals in Europe and the United States. This filters and frequencies used in this unit are the foundation for my research.
(http://www.terezakis.com/fos/fotos.html)
Peter Terezakis
ITP, Tisch School of the Arts
New York City
Shadow Puppets – Stephen Kaplin
Stephen Kaplan’s (Great Small Works and Chinese Theater Works) visit was educational and inspiring. His openining lecture on the genesis of puppetry with a focus on the development of shadow puppets helped to place historical and contemporary work within a greater context. The lecture also helped me to better understand the essential role of performative objects as interpretive agents within a narrative. I was also motivated to go to Wikipedia where I read:
Sitting in a classroom in the 21st century, it was Stephen’s passion for the art and craft of shadow puppetry that gave me a better idea as to why the art form developed to begin with. The history and examination of a technology which employs the simplest, most available of tools (light source, shadow-making object, wall or screen) to create time-based media (narrative) is interesting.
That a technology which sources from the caves of Lascaux (or before) has survived along with the discovery and evolution of radio, television, film, video, and the internet is remarkable.
The fact that puppetry (including shadow puppets) continues to act as an viable agent for the transmission of culture in different societies, possesses cross-cultural appeal, and the ability to spark imagination of young and old alike (for the lowest of budgets!) makes this a medium which is worth discovering and re-examining.
Mr. Kaplin’s transition from puppet history, to his professional work in shadow puppetry, and eventually into the hands-on classroom exercise was a seamless and inspiring teaching process.
shadow puppets
Peter Terezakis
ITP, Tisch School of the Arts
New York City
On election day 2012, the devil wore a nice suit…
| Election Day 2012 happened to fall on our weekly, mandatory class in Computer Applications. NYU professor Nancy Hechinger introduced her surprise guest speaker as, “Philip K. Howard, son of a minister, Founder and Chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan, nonprofit legal reform coalition.” She glowingly described him as a “controversial character because of his commitment to simplifying and thereby “fixing” the nation’s legal system, which is stifling America.” (It turned out that we were being read a branding statement.) With a big smile, we were presented with a silver-haired Jimmy Stewart-looking character engaged in a Quixotic campaign aiming to return the nation to, “regulation by common sense.” |
 While I do not possess Peter Parker’s “spidey sense,” I have seen caricatures of character before in including watching President Bush speak on the floor of the United Nations, selling the world on why we had to go to war.There is a calculated, cultivated look which exploits Hollywood-tested tenets that the public will be more likely to believe what an individual has to say due to their appearance, presentation, speech. Calculated and polished, I have met them when opposing the destruction of Southern California’s last wild river (won), routes of high voltage transmission lines through private and public lands (lost), and the destruction of one of the last native grassland habitats in Southern California (won).Within the first minutes of hearing him speak, it was as if I had been walking home and suddenly saw a rattlesnake in my path. Fascinating in presentation, potentially fatal in encounter: lobbyists are like that. |
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| In response to the one question I asked of a speaker this semester, I was humored with a dissembling, “I’m all for pollution!” In his next breath, Mr. Howard went on to say that corporations should be allowed to create their own self-regulating industry, “because they set the highest standards.“ |
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“Radiation is (already) in your bananas….” SoCal Edison spokesperson
Later in his presentation Mr. Howard cited an “outrageous fine” levied upon a restaurateur whose refrigerator was storing cheese at 40 degrees. He went on to ridicule the law as the food product was about to be, “put on a grill” (obviating the need for refrigeration to begin with?).
Stephanie Smith, 22, was paralyzed after being stricken by E. coli in 2007. Officials traced the E. coli to hamburger her family had eaten
During 1999 seventy-five million people became ill from food related poisoning and another 5,000 died.
In between full recuperation and death from food-borne bacterial infections are a host of permanent and/or chronic effects.
The image on the left is that of Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old children’s dance instructor, who ate a bad burger manufactured by the Cargill Corporation, contracted an E. Coli infection, had to be placed in a medically induced coma for nine weeks, didn’t die, and can no longer walk due to paralysis from the infection. Her medical condition indicates that she will require multiple kidney transplants. Ms. Smith’s medical bills are in the millions of dollars. Cargil was found liable and is paying for her medical bills.
Bacteria grow most rapidly in the range of temperatures between 40 ° and 140 °F, doubling in number in as little as 20 minutes.
Those who remember their high school biology classes already know this. There is a lot more to be said about the topic of food safety – all of it based on scientific fact, and common sense (for the common good). What is missing are MORE regulations to keep bits of glass, complex organic compounds, heavy metals, etc., out of our food supply chain. New laws with revenue-creating penalties and enforcement are what are required for new hazards foisted on an unsuspecting and trusting public by multinational corporations who use every manner of deception to increase their profit margins while minimizing their accountability.
Back to Mr. Howard and his introduction.
What we were not told was that the smooth-talking son of Appalachia is also a senior and founding partner in the law firm of Covington and Burling, LLC (1999 merger) and that their client roster includes every major American tobacco company, Halliburton, Southern Peru Copper Corporation, Chiquita International Brands, and Xe Services (formerly Blackwater).
Mr. Howard’s firm helped develop and coordinate the Whitecoat Project, an attempt to keep controversy alive regarding the dangers of passive smoking by hiring scientists to back up and attempt to give credibility to the tobacco industry’s point of view that second-hand smoke is not a health risk.
It is not difficult to imagine that Mr. Howard may be placing the interests of multinational corporations who pay his estimated at $665,000/year salary over the rights and best interests of the average citizen of the United States.
A quote ascribed to Mr. Howard deals specifically with that pesky, over-complicated, full of rules, business regarding jury trials:
“If you let every case come down to the vote of the jury
you never know where you stand.”
Given the right to a jury trial is part of the United States Constitution exactly whose “Common Good” would be represented by the changes he proposes: the manufacturer of an automobile whose gas tank was known to explode on impact or the human being (or their estate) affected by tragedy: a corporation citizen or the real living-breathing citizen (unless killed by a product or process)?
Allowed to succeed, Mr. Howard’s agenda would allow multinational corporations, specifically big oil and big agriculture, to continue to exploit this nation’s natural and civilian resources without concern of business-changing reprisal.
Power outages, gas rationing, and other effects from Hurricane Sandy brought a number of issues to focus. At the top of the list is that the capital intensive, centralized model of power generation and distribution no longer works. It is antiquated, inefficient, not scalable, and ridiculously expensive to run and to maintain.
A better model for power generation and distribution has its analogue in the internet’s architecture of distributed networking. Wiring already exists to each point of
consumption. With approximately 1000 watts of solar energy striking each square meter of our planet’s surface, increases in efficiencies of solar and wind technologies, it is time to reinvent the model of the public utility such that it actually is a corporation which exists to serve the public.
This is not a model that OPEC, Halliburton, BP, Exxon, Shell, and others, want to see develop for every reason we can imagine – and probably a few others.
Foreign firms, hungry to cash in on the American energy boom, have invested nearly $6 billion in U.S. gas and oil drilling in the last few weeks. – cnn.com
Energy giants from China, France and Spain have snapped up stakes in fields in Ohio, Mississippi, Colorado and Michigan.- cnn.com
An ancient historical text on the use of poison in warfare outlined a simple strategy:
Poison the water, you kill the land. Kill the land and you conquer its people.
Once water from the earth is unfit for human consumption, how much will you pay for a drink of clean water?
The challenges surrounding that of the reliable, renewable, and safe production of energy is what we need to study and to understand. This is also exactly where Halliburton, OPEC, and other clients of Philip K. Howard expect us all to fail.
Click the image below to play Josh Fox’s (Gasland) incredibly important film.
Peter Terezakis
Introduction to Computational Media – Strings
I wqs working on a problem with Strings for this week’s assignment in ICM. For my sins, I was treated to the best error message I’ve seen since “Keyboard Failure: Press F1 to Continue. Screen capture of the error message follows:
”
Turned out what I thought was my incompetence/idiocy was actually a bug in processing.
The traditional way to use a specialized font in Processing is to include the font set within your Processing sketch’s data folder. My experiment was to work with generating text on screen using fonts which were local to the server.
In order to check what fonts are available on the serve, you are running the script below in your browser. At the bottom of your browser window there should be a section with a black background and a list of available fonts. This script also works on your local machine (if run locally).
| <align=”left”> |
You can close that “font information window” by clicking around. (On FIrefox there is an “X” in the window’s top right corner. Click that to get your browser’s real estate back.)
Running the script locally indicated that I had 347 fonts available. I used the script below to and it worked fine. On my browser I had:” sans-serif,serif,monospace,fantasy,cursive ” listed as fonts.
I posted and ran the script below with the expectation that I would not see characters using SYMBOL font; only that I would see something else. Instead of a text character, I saw the ASCII code for each letter. If you click anywhere on the red area and type, you will see numbers appear. That numbers appear and not characters is the issue.
If you did not close the window at the bottom of your browser you will see the intended characters appear as invoked by the println command.
Font used = SYMBOL:
On desktop machine works as expected:
Not working on server.
Font used = SERIF:
Code:
| char letter; String words = “font name”;void setup() { size(640, 360); // Create the font textFont(createFont(“serif”, 18)); } |
void draw() {
background(116,11,11);
// Draw the letter to the center of the screen
textSize(14);
text(“Mouse click on sketch. Type to add to characters to String”, 50, 50);
text(“Current key: ” + letter, 50, 70);
text(“String length is ” + words.length() + ” characters”, 50, 90);
textSize(36);
text(words, 50, 120, 540, 300);
}
void keyPressed() {
// The variable “key” always contains the value
// of the most recent key pressed.
if ((key >= ‘A’ && key <= ‘z’) || key == ‘ ‘) {
letter = key;
words = words + key;
// Write the letter to the console
println(key);
}
}
Peter Terezakis
ITP, Tisch School of the Arts
New York City
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