Tile Sets

I have my Air tiling program under control, and I'm using it to generate asymmetrical tilings from tile sets I design myself. The tile sets are all periodic, could be used to generate a variety of symmetrical tilings, but I arrange them in asymmetrical and non-periodic tilings.

Tiling No. 2

Possibly out of control. From the same tile set as No. 1.

Tiling No. 1

This is the first successful test of a new tiling program. The program allows me to create custom tile sets, and tilings from the tile set. This is still just a preliminary test of the program, to show that the code generally works, so the colors are not important

This particular tiling is one I tried to draw by hand. The tiling could be extended to fill the plane. It's non-periodic, but the tile set itself is not aperiodic. This is a great improvement on my previous tiling program, which generated only radially symmetric, dart-rhombus tilings. Having the ability to do asymmetric tilings is liberating.

This is my first program with AS3, my first Air program, and my first OOP program. I'm excited.

Nanotube Forests and Diatoms

Compare these images of carbon nanotube arrays, created by John Hart, of the University of Michigan, with the Ernst Haeckel drawings. Last year I covered a Scientific American magazine article on the 2008 BioScapes Photo Competition: story and photos, and the Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition. There are more amazing scanning electron microscope images, including nanotubes, here.

And, in the latest Scientific American on line there's a scanning electron microscope slide show by University of Georgia digital media professor, Michael Oliveri.

For another view of things small see SnowCrystals.com.

The 4th plate from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904), depicting diatoms (Diatomea).

Here's a gratuitous image, possibly tube-shaped like the nanotubes, from my sinusoidal grids project:
References
Bourzac, Katherine (2009). "Growing Nanotube Arrays", MIT Technology Review online, March/April, 2009.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22095/?a=f