The left breast of Michelangelo's statue of Night
May Allen
In a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, oncologist James Stark and art historian Jonathan Nelson have hypothesized that several visually obvious lumps and depressions on the left breast of Michelangelo's statue of Night represent an advanced stage of female breast cancer. Since Marc Levoy's digitized this statue as part of the Digital Michelangelo Project, they asked for his help taking measurements from our computer model. Marc and May Allen did the measurements together. Click on the photo at left to see May's writeup, also linked into the "Other interesting body parts" photographic essay of the Digital Michelangelo Project web pages.
Stanford bike traffic
Marisa Macias, Janet Yu, and Xijia Chen
Stanford is a campus of bicyclists, especially during the passing period between classes. Where can you find the most cyclists? The least? How does it vary through the day? And how safely do they ride? Check out this study by Marisa, Janet, and Xijia. Click on the image at left for an enlarged version of the data they acquired, and click here for a Powerpoint presentation summarizing their experimental protocol and their conclusions.
The Minneart Project
Xija Chen
Not content to do one great project (see above), Xijia used the streets, buildings, and waterways of the San Francisco Bay Area as source material for photographic demonstrations of some of the optical effects described in M.G.J. Minnaert's classic book, Light and Color in the Outdoors.
Peculiar Optical Effects Captured on Film
Matt Bentley
Here's another, rather stunning collection of optical effects from Minneart. Actually, there are two collections here - the one Matt made for this assignment, and a selection of photos from his lifelong "oeuvre". Don't neglect to read his captions; they're very informative.