Your lucky Friday the 13th Edition

News

• It would’ve been hard for you to miss this but cloud-based CAD provider OnShape has launched in beta. A good overview is provided by this blog post.
• The 2015 FLOW-3D Americas Conferences, for which abstracts are due 07 August, will be held
  • 22 Sep in Denver
  • 25 Sep in Montreal
• CFD is a component of Siemens’ Data Center Clarity platform.
• From Visualizing Data comes the best of the visualization web for January 2015.
• One trillion cells [not a typo]. Tecplot continues blogging about the challenges of visualizing exascale CFD solutions.
• Here’s an update on NAFEMS’ benchmark challenge.

The Case for STEAM (In which A stands for Art)

“In this busy age of industry and greed, we are all liberally tarred with the stick of commercialism. It tinctures our acts and judgments, and all but blinds us to the fact that we have time for anything but business.”

Overwork. Lack of (or is it myth of?) work-life balance. We’ve all probably felt this way at one time or another. But take heed. These sentiments are from an article originally written in 1910.

Over a century ago. What’s old is new again. The more things change the more they stay the same. Makes one wonder how we make any progress at all. Or probably more accurately, we should take a broader, more reasoned view of popular issues du jour. [Millennials anyone?]

What was the original author’s point? “In the foregoing I have sought to point out that the engineer’s inclinations and vocation cause him to ignore the creations generalized under the name of art; that such ignorance deprives him not only of a vast pleasure, but a positive benefit; and that he actually needs this benefit in his daily work.” [Ladies, please pardon the pronouns; I simply cut and paste. Take into account the vintage.]

Presented for your “vast pleasure and positive benefit” is a Ding Yi painting from his solo exhibition Ivory Black at ShangART Singapore. Some insight is provided by Daily Serving (where I first encountered Yi’s work): “Stripped of intellectual backwash, Ding’s canvases are simply cleverly interwoven threads of pure color, a sublime configuration of grids and crosses in which subject and object can lose themselves.”

Ding Yi, Appearance of Crosses 2013-3.

P.S. If you prefer more science in your art/science sandwich, see Scientific American’s SciArt Week.