 Dear Galactic Beings, get ready for the nerdy's niche topics. The most interesting ideas and the most absurd discoveries from computers, art and the world. Operation Mindfuck, directly from RC3 World to your home and into your minds and hearts. Please welcome your hosts, BleepTrack and Blinry. Hi everyone at RC3, this is BleepTrack and Blinry and we are already back to our yearly little talk about computers, art and other curious stuff. And yeah, we already, we reached volume four this year. So this is the fourth episode of this talk and if you want to watch the older talks, you can find them on Blinry's website, they are all called Operation Mindfuck. And yeah, have fun with them. I think the older ones are, some of them are in German and now we do them in English so more people can have fun. And the talks, work as follows, we have prepared different very small topics and we will explain them in alternating order and today Blinry will start with an interesting variation of keyboards. That's right. It's not the kind of keyboards you might be thinking about right now, but it's about musical instruments. So this is about isomorphic keyboard layouts. In the beginning of this year, I was starting to learn how to play the piano and I was researching a bit of how that sister works basically and started getting a bit frustrated with it for the following reason. I can't give you a whole intro about music theory right now but what you need to know is that these little keys on the piano keyboard are specific notes and the distance between them is always one semitone, one semitone between them and they are arranged in this linear fashion basically. And then if you want to play some part, what you do is that you count the right number of steps between these notes. So for example to play a major chord, what you do is always you start at the base note and then you count 1, 2, 3, 4 for the second note of this chord and then 1, 2, 3 for the third and you press those three together and then you have a major chord which sounds like this pleasant positive chord. But then there is this weird property of this keyboard where it's designed in a way so that if you play all the white keys on the keyboard you get the scale in C major. You can just play the whole scale from C to the next C and the black keys are the ones you would skip in the scale and because of that if you start your major chord at a different note like, I don't know, F sharp for example, you do the same counting you would count 1, 2, 3, 4 for the second note and then 1, 2, 3 for the third but now the shape is a bit different. You start playing on black keys and sometimes you have to mix them if you start playing a D major chord, you have one black key and two white ones for example which is a strange property of this keyboard I thought because often when you play a song you play it in a specific transposition. You start playing it in a specific tone and you start by moving all of the notes up and down by a specific amount and then you have to kind of to relearn how to play all these chords and the melody because they will have this different shape. Your fingers have to do different things and I thought this was really weird and I researched a bit about that and the first thing I found I think was this instrument which is called the Dodeca which is just the name the company is giving this thing where actually all the semitones are arranged next to each other without a specific shape. I think still the black keys here are like the C, the middle C or something here to give you an impression of where you are in the scale but then you have the 12 semitones until the next C just arranged in a linear fashion meaning that if you know the shape of the major chord for example like you count 4 and you count 3 you can move this shape anywhere on the keyboard to like move it up and down which I think is pretty cool. Back then I asked a specific person who knows how to play keyboards really well in the VikiData community what might be the reason for this strange layout and they gave me two reasons. One was that if you have this shape with a black key sticking out you can kind of feel where you are on the keyboard when you play it makes sense I guess, sure. And the other reason is that like the classical music notation also uses that system where like notes which are directly on the lines or in the gaps of this like classical music notation are the white keys on the piano keyboard and if you put a B or a cross in front of it you would use the black keys so that kind of fits together and to change the layout change the past few hundred years of music notation which I think might be worth it. But yeah, there are some even more advanced ways to arrange the notes and they use hexagonal keys which I think is really cool. So this is the harmonic table layout where like you arrange the notes according to this diagram here. If you are at a specific tone like a C here and you want to go to a C-sharp you move like one key to the right over these columns here. And like if you go diagonally up to the right you do a major third which is four semitones and if you go directly to the left it's three semitones basically to play a major chord for example you would push the base key like the C and then in addition you go four semitones up to the E right and then this one above it is always seven semitones up so to play a major chord you would like kind of you can play this with one finger you press your finger in the middle of these three and then you have a major chord and to do a minor chord which is like this sad sounding sound you can press your finger at this corner here this would be a C minor chord and this is a really cool property. The harmonic table layout has some properties which make it pretty weird for example to go an octave up you have to do a really big jump you have to jump from this C up to all the way over here which is inconvenient so people also came up with another arrangement called the wiki-heiden layout I think this was invented in the 19th century already where if you start at a specific key you go a whole step to the right this is like two semitones and then if you go diagonally up to the right you have seven semitones and to go an octave up you go two rows up and this is a pretty nice layout and I can just show you how this works actually because people made like a web-based demo on this so you get this hexagonal grid if we start at a D for example and want to play a major chord now what we do is we go four semitones up so we end up at the E and then we add one that is seven up from the original base note so it's a G and you can actually play this on your keyboard by pressing the E and G you have a major chord and now again you can move this shape around anywhere so if I start here and press the sounds it's a major chord another one here here and yeah the minor chord is just another symmetric version of this so starting at C we add this one and this is minor this is major and you can start like start transposing specific keys up and down like this is the first inversion of the chord and yeah this is for me this was really surprising to see that you can build a structure like this and then if you remember the shape of the melody you can just transpose it anywhere which is cool people are actually building hardware for this so this is something people call a jammer keyboard and if you're interested in this you will find a small community around this who like build their own input devices like this and also while preparing this talk I learned that accordions specifically accordions also use a structure to places where you put your hands and one of them is used for playing chords and the other one some of them use like a piano key layout but some others like this one also have like an isometric layout where I think it's another variation of this where if you move diagonally up it's one whole step and to go up means to go two whole steps basically and that defines this layout but then it's again really easy to play a melody and move it someplace else and play it another key Bina, what have you prepared next? Alright, so I like a lot to work with generative art and tiles and tiling is a super simple way to make really fancy pattern and two years ago I looked a bit deeper into dredged tiles and it's still really fascinating to me so I thought it might be a nice topic today to show you a bit around structured tiles so this was basically the first version so the idea of structured tiles is that you have rectangular tiles that are not symmetric along their X and Y axis and for this example the first proposed structured tiles are these four tiles on the top that are basically made of that are rotated by 90 degrees so you get all the variations that you can make out of them now you can use these tiles to make larger patterns so you put them in a large grid and you have different possibilities to do so the left version the mouse is recorded for example the left version you can just throw in always the same tile and you get a very nice repeating pattern but maybe it's a bit boring and you wouldn't really need tiling for that but that's also possible but you can also say you go an alternating route and switch them every second place so you get a bit of a mosaic shape and you can also play around more with that and place them in very certain ways and directions to create bigger patterns and that's usually what I find really interesting and of course you can just place them randomly like the example below here which also makes a really intriguing pattern to me it's maybe a bit like it's not so quiet sometimes a bit exhausting to look at but it's fun to see pattern emerge that are not planned so this is the earliest version of the Trudger tiles and I think this version here alright this is basically every word of the tiles that I just showed you maybe you know that one this is called tenprint this is basically a super famous way of pattern generation where you just put diagonal lines of triangles and in this case you have basically only two tiles you have that line that is flipped to the right and you have the line that is flipped to the left side and you can place them randomly and this tenprint pattern became so famous because you can just write more or less a one liner in nearly any coding language and this came up in the area in a time of basic where you can just write a one liner in basic your whole screen filled with a random nice pattern so this is also every word of Trudger tiles actually but these are the ones that I think most people know when they think of Trudger tiles it's a version where you don't work with rectangles or lines but you have parts of like quadrants of circles placed in the edges and in this case you can't make four tiles you can only make two if you rotate them by 90 degrees third flip so you can only get two and when you place them in a random order that's the example you can see below you get a super fancy pattern that basically contains of either you can accidentally basically form a whole circle or like parts of circles that get entangled and form super long lines and it looks really fun and this is also the first picture that I saw of Trudger tiles and I found that very intriguing and well you can turns out you can do even more cool stuff with that for example I need to find my mouse, here we go you can basically you can start scaling the pattern in different ways and for example you can use it for dithering so here the background image is the image of Mona Lisa as you might have recognized and you can take the image darkness and then scale your pattern accordingly to that point on your image so you get sort of a dithering and it looks super fancy and what I also found recently what I think is exceptionally good looking is a very special way of scaling Trudger tiles by Christopher Carlson and he published a paper at Bridges Bridges is a super nice math and art conference not sure if it's a whole conference more like a workshop but they have super nice papers so if you're interested in like these intertwined math and art stuff look into these papers they're super cool and Christopher Carlson came up with a nice way and a nice aesthetic of having these scalable Trudger tiles and you can see these are three scale sizes so this is basically the original size and then you go one step smaller and you can see that in his case he works with white and black areas and you can now combine them in ways for example this is a super quick and easy example so here on the left side you have that large tile and you add on the right side two of the smaller tiles and you can see that the positive for the big one let's say the dark one is the positive space that your white space or your negative space here becomes the positive space in the next smaller scale so this is also always iterating when you go one scale step smaller and now you can think about how can I combine these different scale these different scales and he had he prepared some examples so for example the left one it's more or less like a quadree so you can just choose a rectangle and divide it by four and you get one scale smaller he can do this recursively randomly basically or you can also do it in the form of a pattern or maybe in a certain shape so when you want to approximate certain outlines you can go smaller there to reach a certain shape and when you fill that in with these tiles you get this result and that looks super fancy especially the left one for my taste is super awesome and looks really really nice and he even in his paper he even goes one step further and thinks about different additional motifs that he could do with these different scales so I'm not sure if these would be considered tracheotiles because they lose this not symmetrical attribute in some occasions like the TS version here that would be symmetrical along this axis so not sure if these would actually be considered tracheotiles but it looks nice so who cares so he made different versions that can also be applied or added to that set of tiles so you just have basically you have these four entry or exit points like on the top bottom left and right and you need to have at least a circle there or connect your entry or exit points in different ways and he just tries out different shapes and if you add this to the regular scaling tracheotiles you get these results and it looks super fancy because you have very very nice fitting shapes that are still super randomly distributed and yeah so this is where I think I should stop maybe talk about tiles but if you want to fall into a rabbit hole we have tools prepared at the end also but if you want to go further into tiling especially maybe check out penrose tiling this is such a huge and fancy and complex topic that I think that it would feel several of its own talks but if you want to dig further I can also highly recommend penrose tiling that's it so I will give back to Blinry yeah penrose tiles might be a topic for some exploration in the future yeah this section is titled what even is art I'm often really fascinated by like art works and art installations which kind of push the boundary of what's still considered to be an art work and I wanted to show you some of those for example last year there was an Italian Maurizio who just bought a fresh banana at a grocery store and like taped it to the wall of a museum and then declared this as art the title is comedian and because Catalan is rather well known and popular this was also worth a surprising amount of money I think this was like 120.000 US dollars was what an American couple paid for this art work to buy it and after this sale took place the following thing happened another man walked up to this artwork and like explained to the people watching and recording this that this was an art intervention called Hungry Artist and just said it was very tasty and that he didn't want to be disrespectful to the original artist but this was an intervention and this artwork came with a kind of certificate that said that you had really bought it and that it's yours now and it specifically mentioned that you can replace the banana as needed so this happened it was just people bought a new one and taped it to the wall again and it was repaired but I like this combination of these two artworks interleaving with each other I think this artist was like he was asked to leave the museum but nobody pursued legal action the next artwork I'm going to show you has to do with this material which you might have heard about it's called Wanta Black and it's one of the darkest materials known to humankind it's a specific on a microscopic level it has nanotubes which are parallel and kind of sticking up from the surface where this paint is on and then if the light ray falls on the surface between these little tubes and can't escape anymore which is why it looks so pitch black I think there are numbers where people state that this swallows 99.4% of visible light or something and yeah this was developed a few years ago by a company for pretty diverse applications but there was an artist who was really interested in this Anish Kapoor a British Indian artist who was interested in playing with black color anyway and they came to an agreement where they said that Kapoor was the only artist allowed to use Wanta Black in artworks so one example is this one Descent Into Limbo which Kapoor had already made installations of many years back but in a recent revival of this artwork he actually painted the inside of this with Wanta as a whole that several meters deep and because he was using this special paint you can't really see the shape of it and at one point there was a visitor to this artwork who tried to look into this whole and didn't believe that this was actually a whole and tried to step into it and fell in and had to be rescued after that so this situation where only Kapoor is allowed to use this color made several people really angry for example there's another artist called Stuart Sample who's making his own like pigments and he designed the world's pinkest pink one time and this is like the store website where you can buy this pigment which states that it's available to everyone except Anish Kapoor kind of a revenge action and if you like click on buy it now button you actually have to verify that you are not Anish Kapoor and you have no plans to share it with him well sometime later Anish Kapoor posted this picture on a social media channel so apparently someone had broke in this contract and sent Kapoor some of this pigment well and yeah I think Stuart Sample was really really angry and disappointed about this and asked him to give it back and he also didn't have really any means to take the election against this you might have heard of Banksy who's an English street artist who like chooses to remain anonymous and he's like well known for making graffiti on just walls in the street somewhere but at this point he also is so famous and well known that he's starting to like sell his artworks for example this is a painting like with a girl with a heart tape balloon and this went up for auction in an auction house some years ago and yeah because Banksy is such a mystery and so popular this is also worth a surprising amount of money I think over one million US dollars was paid for this at this auction and after like the hammer fell and this was sold the following happened I can show you the video or the thumbnail kind of gave it away there so this is being sold and then like a loud beeping noise was heard and this artwork just was sucked into the frame of itself which shredded the artwork and actually Banksy had prepared this stunt in several years in advance and built like the shredding device into the frame probably he or someone he was present at this auction and press the remote control button to activate this system yeah so this is an example of self destructive art which maybe not so surprisingly made it even worth even more I think at this point it's valued at around 3 million US dollars so yeah also it was supposed to shred itself completely but apparently some of the mechanism failed and so it's now half shredded and yeah I think I had that on the slide here it's now called love is in the bin after the stunt this is an artwork for the last one I want to show in this section by the German artist Joseph Boyce who has been working with unusual material and yeah this is an artwork consisting of several kilograms of butter it's called fat echo which translates to fat corner literally and he just took the butter put it in the corner of the museum and let it stay there for many years which I'm pretty sure developed an interesting smell but yeah and after Boyce died the custodian of the gallery where it was exhibited accidentally cleaned it up you might have heard of that before he didn't know what it was about and just removed it and put it in a trash can and one of the students of Boyce was really angry about this went to the trash can and recovered it and treasured the remains really deeply and I think also received a payment from the custodian because of this structure yeah and then I also learned that not very long ago a couple of artists got these remains of the butter and distilled a liquor from it I have a picture of it here like this even another artistic intervention on top of this yeah so this is a really strong liquor I did it and said that it tasted really strongly of cheese that's all the strange artworks I wanted to show you in this section Pina amazing I think that's where the German question comes comes from is it out or can I remove that oh perfect yeah let's stay with art so I really a lot enjoy watching machines work and especially pen plotters and they are perfect to produce art and I never in an operation mindfuck talk I never showed you different types of pen plotters and realized that's actually really interesting because they are quite different constructions so let's let's do a small walk through the history of pen plotters and this is to my knowledge one of the oldest pen plotters it's a Zusegra format and this one I took the photo in the technical museum in Berlin it's an exhibition there and I think it's in a permanent exhibition sadly it's not running but I think they can run it at least that piece of paper that is in the machine which to me like they plotted it on place it could be I'm not really sure but it would be extremely awesome and these are what you can't really see in these photos is that these are like huge devices if you stand before that it's like over a meter long over a meter deep I guess and it's like I think it's also maybe a bit maybe like about a one meter square like it's super huge and it just can grab a pen and draw it's nothing else that it can do but of course it's also a quite old machine and there is a person called Georg Nies who worked at Siemens in the 60s and 70s and he was one of the pioneers of generative art and plotter art and he bought one of these Susie Grafomart machines for Siemens at that time and it was extremely modern and futuristic thing to have like a machine that can plot you must imagine there were no printers everything was also in architecture was of course still drawn by hand so these machines that can draw extremely precise lines this is totally fancy and what you can also see are these pens and ink on the bottom these isograph pens you can still buy them and they are still extremely expensive but they are really nice for pen plotting because they work a bit different than most other pens they have a metal nib a very flat metal nib and along this nib the ink will get sucked out or runs down and the nib is completely flat because the pen is meant to be used like on the point and dragged along on the point because most modern pens like roll tip pens will not really like that if you use them like directly in 90 degrees on the paper so these are the Grafomarts are the basically the first drawing machines and a few years later you will find machines that were more usable for companies and they have precise like of a regular printer or maybe a bit bigger for A3 plotters and this one is from HP and you can see that our HexPace had quite a lot fun with it and tried to to get it to work again and in this model for example works in a way that the paper is moved forwards and backwards and the pen that's the blue that's the blue thing you can see here and this is basically ah, right there too you can store one and you can put one pen in this device and the pen can only like move left to right and the paper will be dragged along along with two little wheels basically these are here and here and then you can plot and these are one kind of the devices that you can find a lot still on your local craigslist and these are the other ones this one is a rolling pen plotter and it completely moves along to axis so the paper stays in place and these rolling plotters they have some really nice features for example you can see that the plotter is standing up a bit and the bed is an electrostatic bed so you can put your paper on press a button and a paper gets sucked to that bed that's super fancy and also on the left side here oops, I lost my screen sharing for some reason ah, it's back sorry, yeah, I'm not sure, it's back like on the left side here these are like basically parking stations for pens so the pen plotter can color or exchange different pens on itself, that's super fancy and if you want to get one of these older pen plotters make sure that they are not too hard to communicate with and make sure that they can do the thing that you want them that they can do because for example these older HP plotters that was really hard to talk to because it did only speak a very sort of proprietary language and only the newer HP plotters started to speak HPGL and the Roland plotter also can do this for example and Roland also has its own language so just make sure you know what the device wants to speak to with you because this can make your life a lot easier yeah, and these older plotters they also often have a nice function that they have a direct text mode so you can, you need to boot them in a certain way like flip some switches on the backside and they will boot into a text mode so you can just send a text over over serial and it will just write that down has its own matrix of letters and its own font and that's super fun and makes a great tutorial plotter for example and then there are also a lot of yeah DIY homebrew sort of plotters and this one is maybe the one that's the easiest to build you can find them under either under the name Michelangelo or Polagraph, I think these are the two most common names for these and they work super differently so on the left and on the right side on the top here and over here you have two motors and also you need some sort of a control device or a little computer and around these motors you will find a string that is attached in the middle to to a gondola that can hold a pen and that gondola usually also has a servo motor that can push away the gondola from your drawing area so you can lift and put down your pen and to make this more stable usually you put down some weight on the left and right side so that the string has some force on it and works better yeah these are super easy to build and there are really nice communities around them and the very positive thing about these construction is that they scale extremely well because like the way the old rollout plotters for example work you have these two axes that can move and you are very defined on how long these axes are but with this you can basically scale it indefinitely and I've seen some installations where they like plot it over a whole 5 meter wall with these because you just need to have a very long string and that's basically all. That's super fun so if you want to build one yourself this is a very nice way to go but there are also new commercial versions that are quite fun. This one is called Linus it's super tiny and basically only consists of I guess two servo models and a little Arduino or something and it can only draw a super tiny area and it's also it's so wiggly it can't no matter what it can't draw a straight line but it's super cute to watch and super easy to take with you and has some nice APIs and it's quite hackable so that's also a really neat device and well this is basically I think the most professional one that you can buy up to date which is called Axidraw but I've also seen some self-build versions of this. You also have your two axes there's a little controller board over here and the fun thing here is that you can put in very different types of pens here for example is a fountain pen but you can basically put any pen in that you want that's different to the old plotters they had very specific very little specific plotter pens and they are really expensive now if you want to buy them and with the Axidraw you can basically use whatever you want and you can also put your pen in a certain angle and that's especially nice for fountain pens that are sort of brushes and I've seen a lot of people not only using pens but also going to use acrylic paint or very different materials or also I've seen one example where someone just basically put in a sort of a toothpick and drew onto some sort of flat clay and made pattern in that and that's super fun so you're not limited to going you're not limited to use pens but be creative and use all kinds of stuff so if you ever come around some sort of pen plotter try it it's super fun for a very quick nice creative coding output I really love how plotters combine this kind of handmade aesthetic which imprecisions and stuff with this digital input that's a cool gesture and I think people sometimes joke that it's easier to get these plotters to run and to do something compared to actual printing devices we would use currently printing on a piece of paper because of driver issues and stuff and these are very clear defined languages yes I wanted to show you some RFCs that abbreviation is short for request for comments and it's a really common way to define protocols for the internet works for example TCP and IP would be defined in RFCs and HTTP and how mails work and stuff and there are several thousand of those and sometimes people publish RFCs on April Fool's Day and these are sometimes really interesting to read one really well known for example is RFC 1149 IP over avian carriers which suggests to use carrier pigeons to carry information from one place to another so it specifies that you should put your information on a piece of paper and roll it around the leg of a pigeon and then send it off its way and it will fly to the target maybe and then you can retrieve the information there and this RFC states some very good technical properties systems like this have for example that the carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance system which increases availability or that multiple types of service can be provided with a prioritized packing order so this could be used to prioritize certain types of information over another it says that with time the carriers are self-regenerating which is a nice property to have for a network and a different property is built in worm detection and eradication and some time ago a user group a Linux user group in Norway actually implemented this system and they got the pigeons and they sent up all of the required infrastructure and then tried doing a ping command from one node to the other and this is the result you will see that they tried to send nine data packets here and the run times of these ping commands are most often over an hour or something for the pigeon to go to USB and return so here and only four of these packets arrived back so they state here that they have 55% packet loss but it works another hour see is 6,592 the null packet this specifies null packets which are neither sent nor acknowledged when not received there is like an informal definition where they say that the null packet is a zero dimensional packet and that it exists since it is non-self-contradictory definable then this specification follows the formal definition but it's a zero of the reference null and the end of this document there is like a list of references and related work and there is like the key null which points to an empty string so this is all you need to know about the null packet it goes on and lists some properties of this packet for example that it is inherently good the null packet cannot have the evil bit set by definition consequently it is undeniable that the null packet is harmless having no evil intent now what is the evil bit RFC 3514 let's look at that one the authors of this RFC notice that the definition of an IP fragment this is about IPv4 has a single bit which is not used for anything it's just undefined it doesn't carry any meaning and the authors thought we should change that and apply some meaning to this bit so here is the layout of this field it's the first bit in this sequence and they give it like this shorthand e e4 evil bit it can have two possible values if it's set to zero the packet has no evil intent hosts, network elements and other should assume that the packet is harmless and should not take any defensive measures and another possible value is one if this bit is set to one the packet has evil intent and secure systems should try to defend themselves while insecure systems may choose to crash to be penetrated etc and then this RFC goes in great detail about how exactly and in which situations this bit should be set for example if you are doing pentesting on a system trying to attack it you should set this bit so that the recognizing that the receiving system will recognize that this packet has evil intent and can take defensive measures you must do this if you are attacking yes and yeah here's just a list of some more fun RFCs if you're interested in this stuff check them out this one is the hypertext coffee control protocol which gives some specific HTTP requests for example to make sure that a coffee pot which is connected to the internet that you can request to know its status whether it's empty or full and how full it is and this is also where the HTTP code 418 comes from which says I'm a teapot if you try to send a packet like that to a system which is actually a teapot can reply with this and this is an error sure there is an RFC for TCP options to denote packet mood this allows you to set a specific mood in a TCP packet if under some circumstances I don't know you're building a software and the software notices that there is a lot of delay in your communication and stuff it could set a annoyed mood in the packets it's sending to let the other system it's communicating with no and then the system could respond to that accordingly and there is an RFC called scenic routing for IPv6 which suggests that traffic should be sent over specific very nice pathways along nice landscape and in a lot of fresh air for example it says to prioritize communication channels that are wireless for example to give the data like a very scenic pathway to its destination that's the RFCs I wanted to show you you will find in like a Wikipedia article with a list of April Fools RFCs if you're interested there are like several dozen of those you can take those out I especially love the packet mood when we think about upcoming AI that might be interesting so it can communicate how it feels I don't know maybe that's good maybe it's not good who knows alright so I wanted to dig a bit into game development and in-game development and while doing some research I stumbled upon some people who coded their own fancy their own interesting interesting applications and so there are three short videos I wanted to show you around a bit and all three of them I think are very interesting because they try to implement game worlds that could not exist in our world and are very different and that's quite mind-bending if you walk around there and interact with stuff so this is the first one it's called non-euclidean game which I think is not really correct because I think it would be still euclidean distances and an euclidean room but as you can see you can put that photo in the scene and suddenly everything appears there and that's it's super mind-bending and super fun to play around with that so far I've just found that video and no really playable version but maybe there's one now and here also for example gravity gets applied to stuff that it plays in the scene it's just super fun and crazy crazy to watch I think it would like this scenario would be a really nice puzzle game that's the first example second one is this one and this is actually really a non-euclidean room basically you can imagine it works a bit like for example Hermione's bag or the TARDIS something looks small from the outside and very big from the inside so he made some tunnels that have this effect so this one looks super large from the outside but actually when you walk through it it's quite short or this one this is the opposite one it looks super small from the outside and extremely large from the inside and I think the youtube channel is called CodePen and he has a lot of different versions of that so this is also a nice example so you have rooms and you can walk in a circle and the longer you walk you start to realize it's just three rooms there's just the blue one the red one and the green one but the shape of the let's say house lets you think there should be at least four rooms but it's just three so you can do these these crazy effects and yeah I don't I'm not sure I don't want to spoil you too bad ooh I made something full screen but I didn't want to have full screen give me a second here we go yeah just I think it's Code Parade so check out the videos because he does a lot of fun examples if you continue here he also has a version where he still has these tiles but some let's shrink everything when you go through it so everything gets bigger that's also super fun and I can see making super fancy puzzle games with that and we're already at the last one which is a world in hyperbolic space and it's also it's really fascinating for me to look at because when you walk around here everything is so weirdly because when you think you could look at the sky it's just wraps around you so you see I don't know the other end of the world on top of you and this is just so crazy to walk around there they always have a bit of problems with motion sickness and I think this would not make it better for me but it's so fun and also I think in a few seconds he will also check out the house more when you start to walk into or in front of that house it's just crazy and it's hard to imagine why it should look like now he's moving backwards and then he reaches a point where he's basically from the world side on the opposite side of the house so the house starts warping around him that's super funky and I think game engines and games are a perfect are a perfect medium to experience such mathematically fun ideas that you can have and I think some operation mindfuck talks back Linri also explained a 4D puzzle game in the very first one yeah exactly and I think that goes in the same direction as these games and these test engines alright I heard that it takes a long time to build these types of games because there are basically no pre-made tools for you, you have to do everything yourself what all for dimensional object or hyperbolic one you have to code your own tools for that basically yeah it's really fun to look at I also have some geometric things I wanted to show you related to topology that's a field of mathematics where you are looking like more at the geometric structure of the object and not its concrete precise like dimensions for example there's this joke that for a topologist there's basically no difference between a coffee pot and a donut because if you have all substance which you can squeeze and pull you can kind of transform the cup into a donut without making any cuts or without gluing anything together that's often the worlds in topologic transformations that you cannot create additional holes and because this shape only has a single hole going through it in the middle of the donut or in the handle of the cup these are basically the same object topologically speaking and yeah then you can do interesting observations with this a really well known example is the Mobius Strip where you take a long piece of paper and you glue the ends together and if you do that you rotate the strip like one end of the strip once and then you paste it together and then this is an object that has an interesting property it only has one side if you would take a pen and start drawing on the top of the surface here then follow it along the strip you would get behind the ring here and draw and then get on front here again and then as you wrap around you are now at the backside of the strip and you are kind of opposite to where you started but you're still not done you're still drawing you can go behind here and then under this and on the top side on the backside of this and then if you wrap around where you started and you made a long line and you would do all of the surface in one stroke basically it's really fun stuff that happens if you try to cut into this strip I have a video and can try to find a good point where I can see it so this person is taking a maybe a strip and then using scissors to cut along the middle line of the strip something to cut and after cutting around the strip once it doesn't fall apart into two pieces it's still a single strip single strip surprise yeah the same thing could be done if you took a strip of paper and twisted it twice before doing it together and then you start cutting in the middle I really touched for yourself if you're interested it's another really surprising thing that happens if you do that but the thing I really wanted to show you is this one this was in a tweet I found the other day and I thought I have to note this down into the list of ideas for Operation Mindfuck because it's so surprising this tweet stated that if you have this like double donor shape and there is a long rod going through one of the holes like this is an infinitely long rod where you can't go over the edges of it then the tweet said that it's possible to transform this shape so that the rod goes through both holes and I said what there's no way this is possible and then I clicked on the tweet and looked at the video let's do that let's look at it again it's seven seconds so by pushing and squeezing in the right way you can actually get to a state where this rod goes kind of to both of these holes and this is not a trick this is really like a property of this shape that you can transform it in this way this is kind of a proof by example which feels a bit unsatisfying to me and this really makes me want to learn more about topology to kind of in a formal way state what's going on there but I guess the trick to kind of understand why this works is like somewhere in the in the middle of this transformation you get to the state where you have this shape that's basically like a symmetric it's rotationally symmetric if you hold the bottom and the top part with your fingers then you can imagine that the middle of this object is hollow and there are three holes going in from the side one is from the front one is from the back left and all of these holes connect to the interior of this hollowed out shape and this rod is now going through two of those to the back to the tube and at this stage it's up to you to choose in which direction you want to go you can either take the front hole and pull it out and stretch it to make it really large and kind of disappear into the image of the shape and then you get in this situation where you have this rod peeking through both holes at the back basically and the front one you can't really see it anymore but you can also, if you were at this at this position you can choose to take kind of like the right handle of this shape and push it inwards to go between the other two handles and then it's the situation where you arrive finally at the shape like this one where it appears to go through only one hole but this is just this weird property of this object that you can do topologic transformations to go in both directions and I think that's really fascinating and not very intuitive and there's a second thing like that where you start with this kind of pretzel-like shape like interlinked into itself and then the question is can you transform this in a state where the handles are free and in terms of that you can which is also again really surprising and this is like this diagram shows how to do it, you would start taking these two holes which interlink and start stretch them out stretch them down and make them larger until they almost touch at the bottom here there's this thing, string of material which you can still remain between these two holes and then you're at a state where you have this little twists in the material then you can just start untwisting this you twist once here you twist twice and then it's free and then you can make the hole smaller again until you are at this stage and I think that's pretty cool and yeah, that's the top logic I wanted to show Bina that's so cool, oh man I could look at these forever also that clay animation with the rod, it's nice to have really an animation, it's a bit easier to get this into my hand still after looking for 10 times it's crazy yeah, like you can yeah, completely alright, we already reached our last section which is about PCB art so this year I tried to learn more about PCB design and electronics and I found that nice little community about people who like to make very artsy PCBs for example, he's a person who made a very nice schematic and image what possibilities you have with PCBs so if you if you, I'm not sure maybe you have had one in hand a PCB usually has a base plate which has a yellowish color and on top and on the bottom of this plate you have a copper layer and on top of these you can have a solder mask which is some sort of plastic coating that you can cover contacts because you don't want to have a lot of copper traces be open to the air or open to touch so you might want to cover that so this is a solder mask in this example this would be the purple the purple color and also maybe you can have some screen printing on top this is usually in a white or in a black color in this example is white so you can have a lot of different combinations of these materials like you can have the copper for example and you will get a lighter color this is the number 4 in this case and if you mill away the copper and just put the solder mask onto your base plate you will get usually the darker color and this would be the number 5 and then also you can have either just the base plate I think in this example it's number 3 and you can also get this open to the air or to touch usually gets a coating often this is silver, gold or some what's it called in English when you solder yeah which is also like a silverish color and the screen printing which is white or black so these 5 sort of colors are your color palette that you can play with and when you get different manufacturers you can also get different solder mask colors I think the very typical one would be green this example is purple you can also get blue or black or white whatever you want and yeah get your stuff manufactured that's super easy and there's also some nice examples what else you can do because you have these 2 layer PCBs with copper on both sides you can leave only on certain places and leave it out on the other side completely so you can get a very fancy shine through optic of course when you work with electronics you can very distinctively place some light sources on your board if you want to play with certain ways of lighting and also as you can see on the dried image you can choose your cut out shape anyway you want the manufacturers to be quite open and can do most of the shapes and they can mill in extremely fine details especially if they want to mill the copper on the copper layer and that's super interesting because when you design PCBs you often want to have very extremely fine traces and this is interesting for out of course because you can ingrain extremely fine details for example of a half broken down leaf where the copper layer is used to have the fine veins that are still intact and a solder mask is used to have a bit of like whole leaf cells that are starting to break down and the yellowish color that you can see that's the color of the base plate so you can create extremely fine details that's super fun and then there's for example a bold port I can highly recommend bold port it has a lot of extremely crazy PCB art and this one I think is also very nice it's a chameleon and he uses the PCB not only as the base material but also he uses it in a very innovative way I'd say because he uses it upright this is quite unusual and you can see that he soldered the LEDs on the edge of the PCB to give that chameleon a nice LED back row of lights that's super fun and he also somehow got two solder mask colors on one PCB I'm not sure who he contacted to get that that's rather unusual but it seems that it can be done and he also used resistors for little feet that's also really nice so he thought about integrating parts into the shape of the end design that are usually more functional and not used aesthetically and that's really interesting and he has a lot of these projects and I think you can also buy them as DIY kits and that's really nice and if you can combine all these layers this is a project that I came up with because as I said I really like to do generative art and of course you can then start to write code that generates shapes and patterns that you can put on your PCB for aesthetic reasons and these boards that you can see here they were produced or created generatically or procedurally would maybe say and these three planets they act as capacitive touch buttons so you can touch on them and it gets recognized on the board and yeah it was it's really fun for me when I work with generative art to find a new material but you need to figure out how to use it and PCBs are just for me a super different material than paper or other stuff and it's also really nice that you get these high quality coatings like gold or silver that makes stuff a lot more valuable and really nice to look at so yeah I can highly recommend the hashtag PCB art on Twitter and Instagram where a lot of people are posting really really nice stuff alright and I think it's time for us to wrap up yeah on our last slide we thought because we are sending you into all kinds of rabbit holes anyway that's what we're trying to do we might as well list some of them and very quickly mention them and maybe see what sticks in your in your heads because it's very mean so mechanical keyboards there are huge communities around building your own keyboards like picking different different keycaps, different switches different layout look into that some people are really interested in skincare and look into like what different products do and their ingredients there's communities around this amateur astronomy you can, if you know how to look you can find some really cool things on the galaxy which you can just see without any instruments if you're in a good environment you can try baking your own bread you can like make your own sourdough with bacteria just from the air and use a tool to bake your bread some people are into to optimize for weight so they try to have equipment that weighs as little as possible so that they don't have to carry as much and then come up with really interesting shapes for their tents where they spin these thin tarps basically between trees for example with ropes to sleep under that oh yeah and if you're into cooking and you have these dull knives which you're always annoyed about you can get wet stones like which is this abrasive material and you put water on it and then you can like remove material from your knives to make a chop there are really good like YouTube videos about that yeah and with that we say thank you for listening to this good things to the future I guess I hope you're having a good remote chaos experience right now and yeah you have a link to the slides here if you're interested in any of those and I guess yeah thanks for being here and see you soon bye