Here is an article on medieval Islamic tilework exhibiting decagonal symmetry patterns.
These girih tiles may have been used to generate a wide range of complex tiling patterns on major buildings from medieval Islam, including mosques in Isfahan, Iran, and Bursa, Turkey; madrassas in Baghdad; and shrines in Herat, Afghanistan, and Agra, India.In some cases, Lu found girih tiles used to create patterns of two distinct scales on medieval Islamic buildings. This approach generates infinite patterns with decagonal symmetry that never repeats - also known as a quasicrystalline tiling, a phenomenon first described in the West in the 1970s by famed British mathematician Roger Penrose and more fully explained by Steinhardt and Dov Levine over the past 30 years.
Picture #2 in the article is absolutely gorgeous. Classical excellence!
Here is a link to some unbelievably good two dimensional art that springs alive into 3-d. It is a neat reversal of the idea of perspective, isn't it? I had the chance to see the Duomo in Florence whereBrunelleschi had given his brilliant demonstration incorporating his idea of perspective. This, of course, later went on to inspire other Renaissance artists to use perspective in their own art.
A newly discovered insect has been named Gollumjapyx Smeagol.
Spanish scientists have discovered a new invertebrate insect in certain caves of Castellon province, which they have baptized Gollumjapyx Smeagol in honour of JRR Tolkien who created the character in his 'The Lord of The Rings' trilogy.The new animal is of exterior origin, but has adapted to permanent living inside caves. The new invertebrate has all the properties of a subterranean insect: its skin has no pigment, and it hasextraordinarily large antennae, six feet and measures two centimeters in length.
Three strips from the excellent xkcd :
http://www.xkcd.com/c208.html
http://www.xkcd.com/c205.html
http://www.xkcd.com/c200.html
Bush announced yesterday that the U.S. would send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. Here are the reactions from various media covering the announcement.
Time magazine ran a cover story on the expected announcement entitled "The Surge - does sending more soldiers to Iraq make any sense?". The troops are being sent with a mission not only to control the insurgency, but also to help stabilize the new government, to help local police establish law and order, restore electricity as well as other public utilities, go after Al Qaeda, etc. I couldn't help noticing a certain discrepancy in the actual number of additional troops to be sent versus proposed numbers :
"To create "the surge", Kagan and Keane proposed extending combat tours in Iraq to produce an additional 30,000 troops in Iraq over the next 17 months. Army tours would be lengthened from 12 to 15 months, and Marine deployments would stretch from seven to 12 months.'
Brad DeLong caught this, but apparently, the discrepancy between the proposed and the actual is even more :
But the original Keane-Kagan-Kristol "surge" plan proposed last fall said that we needed not 20,000 but 50,000 additional combat troops were needed to break the vicious circle of insurgency in Iraq. 50,000 is a "surge." 20,000 is more like a "wave".
...
Keane, Kagan, and Kristol appear to have scrubbed the American Enterprise Institute website of their original 50,000 number.
Nevertheless, I am astonished that I cannot find a single mainstream news reporter who finds the cutback of the proposed "surge" from 50,000 to 20,000 worth mentioning, even in passing, except for Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times