Enzymind Labs

Euglena Academy's fall program is out, see below. I'm going to try to get to a couple of the Cozmic Pizza presentations.

Euglena Academy is an independent, college-level school for adults (18+) in Eugene, Oregon offers scientifically rigorous classes (beginning & advanced) and workshops about systems sciences (also known as complexity). 

Here are two videos of hard to believe helicopters, both pushing technological boundaries:

Insane RC helicopter flying

World's smallest personal helicopter

I've been reading a lot of material developed by Alan Kay (e.g. his writings), and others who have been influenced by Kay's vision of what operating systems and software should look like to create a revolution in the way people, in particular children, learn.

This ScienceDaily item touches on the relationship between mood/affect and creativity: 

Video Games Can Make Us Creative If Spark Is Right

David Brooks wrote a spot-on opinion column in the NY Times today, "The Alpha Geeks ". Brooks is an influential journalist, button-down political pundit, and cultural commentator.

Funny you mentioned this "moire" type animation trick. The last couple weeks I've been thinking about a particular motion illusion:

A couple people have asked to use an image of mine, 16 Rotation Ambiguous Cubes, that I am fond of. Kristel Braunius, a Graphic Designer in Holland, asked to use it in "a little book about 'clean language / communication' for the university of Wageningen in Holland." She sent the page proof (below), which is a nice juxtaposition of the image with a diagram of the human visual system.

Griffin, who attends the Programmers Anonymous meetings wrote a nice program to evaluate a series approximation of pi. He used the first n terms of the Wallis product:

Science 18 April 2008 Vol 320, Issue 5874 has a wonderful article about the geometry of music, how  "many musical terms can be understood as expressing symmetries of n-dimensional space, where each dimension represents a voice in the score. Identifying—gluing together—points related by these symmetries produces exotic mathematical spaces (orbifolds) that subsume a large number of geometric models previously proposed."