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Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
Credentials
  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
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Edward Moyer

Can you guess what this is? We'll give you the answer later. For now, all you need to know is that it's part of an online exhibition celebrating Princeton University's first-ever Art of Science Competition.

The School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Visual Arts and other groups asked the Princeton community to enter "imagery produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science."

As in , the results range from the cosmic to the complex to the cartoonish. But perhaps more mind-bending than the images are their explanations.

One vaguely Lichtenstein-like piece is "a representation of the universal cover of the doubly-pointed Heegaard diagram of genus 1 of a (1,1)-knot."

Another work has to do with the "Taconic Orogeny" and apparently owes its existence to the fact that "the breccia is limestone and forms odd angles due to a partial dissolution before the mud matrix filled in around it."

Still another piece offers viewers an intimate look at "the genitalia of a female spider of the species Nephila edulis."

As for the one featured in our little quiz? Well, that image shows a fractal "obtained by iteratively applying the transformation z <- (z*z="" +="" r*z*c="" c*c)="" s*z*c="" c*c),="" beginning="" with="" z="c" and="" fixing="" r="" s="" as="" two="" conjugate="" points="" on="" the="" unit="" circle."="" <="" p="">

But then, you'd guessed that already, hadn't you?