Need some visual inspiration? Check out the trippy fractals done by Dirk Monteny and Jock Cooper: Some of them look like bacteria, others look like Tokyo, and still others look like someone gave M.C. Escher a 3D modeling program.

The late Dirk Monteny's still-running website is here. The "Mechanical Fractals" done by (available here on his Fractal Recursions DVD) took five years to design and render, and consist of "frame by frame calculations of math equations strung together in a digital format to produce unearthly beauty."

via drb

Here in 2009, we're still victims to hurricanes and resultant flooding just like we were back in the year 1900. But it's fascinating to see the solution devised by residents of Galveston, Texas after their town was devastated by a hurricane 109 years ago:

In her amazing book Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches, Cornelia Dean recounts all too briefly what Galvestonians did to their city after the great hurricane of 1900 killed nearly 6,000 people and devastated what was then considered "the center of commerce for the entire Southwest."

Rather than retreating from the shifting sands to points higher elsewhere, the city instead decided to fence itself off from future disasters with a seawall; raised everything inside--houses, churches, offices, trees, gardens--by as much as 17 feet; and then flooded the revealed negative stratum with silt.

It was a "plan that even in an era of engineering daring stood out for its size, cost, and audacity."

Up top are before-and-after pictures of a raised house. The man in the photo is pointing to the same line marked on a telephone pole, showing that the level of the earth has been raised considerably.

Perhaps the most impressive building that they raised--and bear in mind, this is using technology devised in the 19th Century, as the 20th had just begun--was the 300-ton St. Patrick's Church.

via pruned

"Tapping the world's innovation hot spots" is the title of a recent article in Harvard Business Review just sent to me from Finland. The article looks at different national models of innovation currently in play around the world and evaluates them, ranks them and shares the lessons for business. But that's not the point of this post however, since the reason it was sent to me from the Helsinki School of Economics was in order to point out my own continent hopping tour of the highlighted locations - San Francisco and Silicon Valley from 2005 to 2007, Singapore since 2007 and when tomorrow's flight takes off, Helsinki, Finland from 2009 to ?

We've already covered the emergence of Helsinki's innovative Aalto University this summer before as well had a tour of the multidisciplinary creative space at the Design Factory on Core77. Now we get a chance to be a fly on the wall in this exciting space at such a transformational time. The Financial Times writes on 29th March,

"There are certain fields of technology, design and business where we cannot live without each other and this has been true for the last 15 years or so," says Kalevi Ekman, vice-rector of Helsinki University of Technology. "And the merger is based on the good experiences we have already had through co-operation."
[...]
For Prof Ekman, overseeing progress in the laid-back, cross-fertilising, experimental space of the design factory, the small size of Finnish society and a lack of hierarchical thinking are aids to business innovation.

"We are so small, so far away; we have a bad climate and no treasures in the earth. We don’t have anything except intellectual capital and good education.

"It is often said that Finland is not really a country, it is a club," he says. "Here, if a student is working on a project for Nokia, they can pick up their mobile phone and have a chat with the CEO."

[...]

But the team is convinced that, alongside their mainstream activities, most disciplines can benefit from the happy accidents that result from random, circumstantial encounters with different worlds.

For the students, says Prof Ekman, there will be a real world pay-off in learning through project-based, problem-solving study to respect and communicate and co-operate with professionals who have different mindsets.

"We can’t really explain what will happen at Aalto because we don’t know," admits Prof Ekman, with frank laughter. "But we are trying to build something unique here."

Similarly, I don't know what will happen, what I'll learn and see when I start sitting at my desk at the Design Factory on Monday or working on a research project with the professors at the HSE for Tekes, but it seems like its going to be a great adventure!

Weekly finds from the 3D world.


CAD Nerd Humor Alert (April Fool's Edition)
The new Twitter plug-in for SpaceClaim

Catia, Pro/E, Alias and Rhino
Behind the scenes at BMW DesignWorks

Solid Edge
Convert Solid Edge models to Synchronous Technology (ST) models

SolidWorks
Keyboard shortcuts for BOM generation

Hypershot
Finishing your renderings in Photoshop - Free webinar tomorrow

Rhino
Video Tutorial: Brazil for Rhino

Alias
Video Tutorial: Getting the most out of the Alias prompt line
Autodesk ID Product Manager talks about Alias 2010

Video Cards
NVIDIA's new Quadro FX series on CADalyst
NVIDIA's new Quadro FX series on SolidSmack
NVIDIA's new Quadro FX series on Develop3D

General CAD
Book Review: CNC machining for engineers
CAM software roundup (registration required)

If you couldn't make it to the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York City, here's the video from the Live Greener Gadgets Design Competition session that closed out the day. Judges were Saul Griffith, Jill Fehrenbacher, and Jeffrey Kapec, with Core77's Allan Chochinov moderating. There's a ton of audience participation (turn up that volume!) in the second half, and then we use a clap-o-meter (WideNoise on the iPhone for the record) to measure the audience's final vote!

Make sure to check out the Top 50 Entries at the Greener Gadgets Design Competition Site.