Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Story of Flowers: this gorgeous botanical animation will make your day.

I'm a huge fan of vintage botanical drawings. This is distinctly different, but also stunningly beautiful.

Watch full screen:


Per youtube:
The animation was developed for kids to show the life cycle of flowers.

Many different flowers are growing beautifully and strongly in this world. Taking their roots in the earth, sprouting, blooming, pollination by birds and insects, living on in spite of rain, wind and storms. They pass on the baton of life, rebirth and decay. Everything is so in a continuous, endless cycle. This is the story and message of this animation.

Sunday, May 24, 2020

How to walk (or run or dance) on water - the non-Newtonian pool

This commercial features a 2,100 gallon pool of the non-Newtonian fluid (wiki) mixture of cornstarch and water known as oobleck: it was filmed in Kuala Lumpur for a Malaysian bank. More information below the video, which you should watch full screen:


You can make your own oobleck using 1 cup water to 1 to 2 cups cornstarch - in my house we call this a slurry and use it to thicken sauces. Add food coloring if you want. More on oobleck at Scientific American, and this Wired article  explains:

British polymath and Enlightenment hero Isaac Newton studied lots of things: optics, gravity, waves, mathematics, astronomy, history, religion and alchemy and so on. Then in his spare time, he investigated how liquids flow and thus got a whole branch of fluid dynamics named for him. Newton observed how common liquids, such as water, flow the same regardless of how much stress you subject them to. Push a stirring stick into a cup of water and swish it around. The water’s viscosity – how smooth or sticky its consistency is – stays the same.
Pretty simple, yeah? Many liquids that we interact with on a regular basis work this way: things like water, milk, oil, or juice. But there are also a lot of common fluids that don’t. These are non-Newtonian fluids; substances whose viscosity changes based on how much pressure you apply to them.