chaoticutopia | November 3, 2006Fractals, like so many sights in nature, can seem both static and dynamic at the same time. A cloud can change its shape right before your eyes, and so can a slice of the Mandelbrot set, with a slight nudge of the bailout values. Try to find the same spot later on, without the same exact values, and you may never see it again. This fractal, in shades of tangerine, is a typical Mandelbrot set, colored with an "alternative" fBm algorithm using 4n linear arrays. (The algorithm was written by David Makin, whose spectacular fractals can be seen here.) The combined effects of the chaotic,…
chaoticutopia | November 2, 2006While rediscovering an old coffee haunt the other night, I scratched the following words onto a few pages in my notebook. It is probably more of a rather lengthy run-on sentence than a poem, but I'm filing it under "poetry" nonetheless.
Metropolitan Metamorphosis
What it was
(disease ridden corporate corruption
battles over money, money over life,
life passed by living used up under a
bridge forgotten... hazily forgotten)
has everything to do with
what it is
(urban renewal stainless steel titanium
reinforced panels panes of…
chaoticutopia | November 1, 2006
...or at least, the end of any simple theory regarding the extinction of our saurian predecessors. A few announcements from the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America last week concerned the simplicity of mass extinctions. For instance, new evidence suggests the Chicxulub meteor impact was not the sole cause of the end-cretaceous extinction:
The Chicxulub impact may, in fact, have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteors and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years, say Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller and her…
chaoticutopia | October 31, 2006It was ghoulish! It was macabre!
Ok, so it was just my son, "Count" Roland:
He may be the only one brave enough to walk past the zombies and decapitated heads to ring the doorbell tonight. Or, everyone else is home, trick-or-treating in cyberspace. Now you can too! Or, courtesy of the same site, you can sneak into a mad scientist's laboratory in an enjoyable point and click adventure, fun for the whole family. Enjoy, and have a happy Halloween!
chaoticutopia | October 31, 2006Ok, so, I may have made my porch a little too spooky this Halloween:
So far, I haven't had a single trick-or-treater. That means... all the candy is mine!!! All mine!!!
Oh... wait... there's a knock at the door...
(Be right back)
chaoticutopia | October 31, 2006I've kept this research paper in the archives for too long. Converging topics as diverse as bioethics and Gothic literature, it was one of the most enjoyable papers I've ever had to write. What better day could there be to bring it out of the shadows, than Halloween? Even though I wrote it over a year ago, it seems as relevant as ever. It summarizes a warning that we all must heed: If we prevent legitimate, honest scientists from studying stem cell usage or cloning, we may be leaving the irresponsible and dishonest to continue the work. Is biotechnology really something we should force into a…
chaoticutopia | October 30, 2006 In order to make up for my recent shortage of Friday Fractals, I've assembled a few at once, with a Halloween-ish theme. I browsed over the Mandelbrot set, seeking the spookiest angles. What seems freakiest is the unending depths of the set... I could have been wandering through forever. It is sort of like a dream of falling, but never hitting the bottom.
I began using the same set of colors displayed in my Halloween banner, and soon found images reminiscent of monsters and insects:
Freaky Fractal I-Monsters
That was slightly unsettling, so I brightened things up with shades of orange.…
chaoticutopia | October 23, 2006Witches, stew, and a battle...
A well-timed meme floated into ScienceBlogs over the weekend, asking what advice we might have for our 12-year-old selves. This began as John Lynch at Stranger Fruit borrowed the survey question from Fark.com. Soon, others began to respond, including Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science and Chad at Uncertain Principles. Why is this well timed, you might ask? Or, what could advice to a younger self have to do with witches and other figments of a Halloween-infused imagination? Well, take my answer, and season it with the spice of battles: youth versus…
chaoticutopia | October 22, 2006You awaken in a gloomy, unfamiliar hotel room, unsure of anything--even your own identity. You can search the room, or the dark alleys beyond, and discover the answers, but beware. Each clue may only serve to deepen the mystery, and you'll soon discover, there are only 8 Days.
This week, talented French game design team Anode and Cathode released the first chapters of their latest creation, 8 Days. I discovered their games a while back through my favorite game review site, JayIsGames. After playing a few of their games, such as The Museum, I signed on to their mailing list, to hear about…
chaoticutopia | October 21, 2006(/lurk)
As a fan of the dark and eerie, a student of the strange, and a writer of creepy tales, I'm delighted by the approach of Halloween. It sort of snuck up on me, as those dark little twists tend to do. Usually, when my various research projects lead me to those shadowy alleys of the imagination, I'll lurk. (I'll admit, a lurking blogger is a contradiction of terms, but explains the recent silence.) This time of year, however, everyone has a chance to partake. So, for 10 days, I'm going to set philosophy and science aside. (But not too far away.... remember, some subjects have a way of…
chaoticutopia | October 13, 2006Is a place timeless? Is a hill the same hill after a hundred years, or a thousand? For instance, this black and white photograph on the right shows a canal along the Front Range. But how old is it? Does it matter? In many of the photographs I've compared lately, there have been striking or subtle differences appearing over time. This scene, however, has hardly changed in the past 150 years. Before then, there wasn't a canal here, nor a lake in the distance, but there weren't cameras around to capture the scene, either.
A few centuries back, we might have seen a herd of buffalo grazing along…
chaoticutopia | October 9, 2006In the early 1900s, Louis Charles McClure, who studied under the famous pioneer photographer, William Henry Jackson, followed the construction of the Denver Interurban Railroad. In or about 1908, he took a number of landscape photographs highlighting the railroad's journey between Denver and Boulder. I've been following the same tracks, trying to see the landscape through McClure's lens, and comparing the changes over the last 100 years. (My quest was, in part, inspired by John Fielder's work, which is well known for matching Jackson's photography. While Jackson and Fielder were mostly drawn…
chaoticutopia | October 6, 2006To compare this evening's fractal with nature, take a walk. Look beyond the scaling patterns in the autumn leaves, the branching trees, the billowing clouds, and up into the darkness of space. If the time is right, you'll see a familiar shape, similar to the following image. This, of course, isn't a photograph, but a computer-generated set of patterns based on numbers. This Julia Set has been trapped within a spherical shape and slightly randomized, then highlighted with nature's palette:
In case you can't find the Harvest Moon in the sky tonight, try this picture, taken by Bev Brink in 2003…
chaoticutopia | October 5, 2006Continued from: "Taming the Great American Desert"
John Frank Church was born in the Wild West--a young cowboy on the Front Range. He used to help his Pa, George, with the harvest and driving cattle across the continental divide each spring to graze. The famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Buffalo Bill used to stop by the ranch to visit the family. President Grant and his daughter once spent the night, as well. Passengers on the Overland Stage Coach frequently dropped in on their way to Denver or Boulder. Frank's mother, Sarah, was always ready to greet the road-wearied…
chaoticutopia | October 2, 2006Do I have an aversion to technology? It seems absurd; I adore my computer and my microwave, my vacuum cleaner and my Ipod. So, why, then, do I hesitate to write about the impacts of technology on local history?
I've been working on a series looking at the development of the Front Range, fervently delving into local history. This isn't the first time I've indulged myself with the subject. Outside of classes, I've read books summarizing world history from various standpoints. Every time, when I approached the industrial revolution, I've backed away. Strangely, I met the same block while…
chaoticutopia | September 28, 2006As the length of the day in the northern hemisphere wanes, so, it seems, does the prolificacy of blogging. I haven't posted anything in about a week, after an already reduced rate. Some of my SciBlings, other bloggers here at ScienceBlogs, have reported taking a similar rest. What's going on? Is there nothing to write about? Hardly. If anything, there is a surplus of information out there, waiting to be pulled into the blogosphere-new discoveries, upcoming elections, reviews on books and films, stories, ethical debates, and so on. I have a series to finish, and a few other items on my "must…
chaoticutopia | September 22, 2006Deep within the pockets of a Mandelbrot set, delicate branches display endless variations. When highlighted with the colors of autumn, (since today is, after all, the Autumnal Equinox,) patterns of exquisite beauty emerge:
These patterns can remind us of many forms in nature, including a grove of quaking aspen:
Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)
Aspen are members of the poplar family, along with their cousins, the cottonwoods (featured in last week's fractal.) While they are known for their brilliant foliage in the fall, the species has another claim to fame: the world's largest organism…
chaoticutopia | September 21, 2006Continued from: "Wedding Bells and Wagon Wheels"
The arid, sweeping prairie at the foot of the Rocky Mountains was a challenge to early settlers in Colorado. While most people were drawn to the rugged mountains, captivated by the promise of gold, they brought limited resources. The mountains, while rich in mineral, offered a poor variety of dietary selections. Being raised on home-baked breads, it was easy to grow tired of meals of buffalo steaks and berries. The Front Range needed agriculture.
William N. Byers, who founded the Rocky Mountain News, recognized the need for agriculture. He…
chaoticutopia | September 18, 2006
In May of 1861, George Henry and Sarah Church set out on their honeymoon, into an unfamiliar frontier. They loaded their cart with a variety of comforts, from a stack of homemade potato pancakes to Milton's Paradise Lost and a tome of "Grecian mythology." Then, hitching up their team of oxen ("Buck and Bright, Tom and Jerry") they headed west. Along the way, others told them to head back. Colorado was a bust, they heard. "There was no gold and no farming as it never rained." They wouldn't give up.
Sarah looked at the bleak weather outside, where rain had been pouring for weeks. "It would be…
chaoticutopia | September 15, 2006The other day, I put up a small question about history. What better place could there be to put my answer, but in the form of a fractal? Patterns seem to almost repeat themselves. Sweeping changes result from a single, initial circumstance. Each point is connected to another, within the same set. Are these descriptions of events in history, or the rules defining a rippled Julia set?
Or perhaps the rings of a tree?
The trunk of a cottonwood tree, showing rings formed over many years. Cottonwood trees (below) line the bank of Walnut Creek, which appealed to Sarah H. Church when she arrived…