I am first and foremost a scientist. It is from this passion that my creativity for sales and marketing emanates. One of the most unique science projects I ever participated in investigated Spiders on Drugs.  The task was actually inspired by a young summer student with a love for everything mathematical. At the time, our research group was heavily involved in the mathematical modeling of voronoi grids.  This was a way to add statistics to images that looked like otherwise random shapes. Among the more practical applications one finds is this sort of science is used to lay out voter registration districts. Is anything political really practical?

I digress.

The idea is actually pretty simple. One takes what looks like random multi-sided shapes drawn with straight lines and then starts plotting some of their geometric characteristics. How many sides are there? How long is an average side? What is the area? What are the the same answers for the adjoining neighbors?  It’s a way to take a repeatable peek into an otherwise random looking pattern or image.

We were actually able to do quite interesting work in chemical toxicity testing, creating some interesting tests for chemical toxicity for heavy metal poisoning (like lead, selenium, cadmium, etc...).

We also had a little fun.

As it turns out, it had been long known that spiders have webs that vary with the environment. These spiders had even been flown on Skylab Missions in the early 70s to see what a Zero-G web might look like. The webs also had a strong dependence to spiders being exposed to various pollutants and  even psychoactive drugs.  The problem was that beside the squinty-eyed chuckle and whoooooooa from someone looking at these stoned-spider creations, spider webs created by druggie spiders weren’t of particular use to science...until we sprinkled a little voting district know-how on them.

As it turns out, the patterns formed by these webs had some very interesting correlations to the work we did on the metal-poisoning work toxicity analysis research we were already studying.  It was actually interesting fundamental science. Out of context the headline reads: NASA Studies Spiders on Drugs, because the reality of Using Spider-Webs to Determine Toxicity just isn’t any fun.

But this AMAZING art project was absolutely not imagined when we did this work. I am simply astonished by the beauty of this project and to think of the disruptive evolutionary path our science took to become art in Paris - WOW!

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