Strange Life
chaoticutopia | December 18, 2008
Humans!A film by Three Legged Legs
This snarky little film is my way of saying: I’m back, but I’m still busy--you know, being a human, consuming resources, yadda yadda. Since Christmas is only a week away, I’m going to use this time to post nonsense filler (hopefully some of it holiday-themed) and work on the style changes that are now long overdue. Stay tuned for more!
chaoticutopia | November 21, 2008Ok, this is just bizzarre. If you’re easily freaked out, don’t read this. It might start off nice and pretty...
This story begins sometime in the mid-1990s, when I was still young enough to do stupid things with friends who had too much to drink. It involves a sort of tradition for those of us who grew up in the Front Range of Colorado, a world famous natural amphitheater, and a close encounter with the local flora.
It was late on a warm summer night. A group of us had decided, just on the spur of the moment, to go over to Red Rocks Amphitheater, and see who was playing. Now, this didn’t…
chaoticutopia | September 28, 2008Ok, one more. You can’t leave the party without meeting Otto. He’s an infinite cat. That’s it! Thanks for coming, be it in person or virtually, and most especially, thank you for reading, commenting, and helping ScienceBlogs reach 1,000,000 comments!
chaoticutopia | September 13, 2008After blogging about my experiences earlier this week, I had crows on the brain. So, as I went drifting through fractal sets, trying to come up with something for this week’s Friday Fractal (now a Saturday Set), I kept running across crow-like shapes. One in particular stuck out, perhaps because I found it while adjusting the parameters of a set labeled "flight". It seemed like a crow caught in a superposition of states... one of Schroedinger’s crows, perhaps. Is it a perched crow, glaring down at its foe? Or is it a crow in flight, wings beating furiously against the wind? Before you decide…
chaoticutopia | September 10, 2008
It was a little like Hitchcock; an unconventional dark encounter on an unremarkable monochrome day. My dachshund and I were trailing down the same belt of green lawn, mud, and concrete as the summery day before, and the day and days before that. The skies were cast over with thick clouds, so we didn’t bother to rush under the trees for shade. Instead, we strolled along with a slow, broken pace. I walked in a daydream, pausing every number of yards to wait for the dog to catch up. This was our routine. I walked, I paused; the dog patrolled in circles around me, sniffing the taller patches of…
chaoticutopia | November 15, 2007Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to bite off more than you could chew? Apparently, such behavior is appropriate among some species. Even so, it isn’t necessarily healthy, as this case shows:
A fish whose eyes are bigger than its stomach meets an untimely demise.
Dead fish floating on the surface of the water isn’t really an unusual sight, but when McPherson 'Dorson’ Wright ran across this one in the Cayman Islands, he was quite puzzled.
Mr. Wright said that normally one expects 'big fish to eat down the small fish", but the hungry little fish broke that rule in a big way.
The…
chaoticutopia | November 11, 2007I wrote this one over a year ago. I wasn’t weirding out about educational choices, as I described in a recent post, but aging. Even though the circumstances are different, however, I’m still in a similar mindset. So, while terms like "yesterday" and "this week" are irrelevant here, I think it will fit in well. So, let’s all feel like a bug.
I’m in a Kafkaesque mood, thinking of transformations, the helplessness of watching such change through a unique and uninterpretable perception. Perhaps this is because I’m turning 30 this week, and I haven’t quite come to terms with that fact. (It was…
chaoticutopia | August 31, 2007You might recall a young girl named Alice. Alice liked to contemplate things, such as what would happen if sage advice were ignored. "If you drink much from a bottle marked "poison", it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later," she wisely noted. You don’t have to look into children’s literature, or even for a corrupt pharmacist, in order to find a "bottle" marked "poison". In nature, markings which warn of danger, similar to the crossbones pictured on old-fashioned bottles of toxic substances, are not altogether rare. In animals, and sometimes plants, this trait is known as "…
chaoticutopia | June 26, 2007It isn't hard to spot the aphids in this picture:
Aphids feasting on a maple leaf.
But, we aren't the only ones checking them out:
The aphids are spotted. So is the lady beetle.
(Two-spotted Lady Beetle, aka Adalia bipuncta).
In a matter of minutes, the lady beetle devours half of the aphids.
If the lady beetle is lucky, it will keep on eating aphids. There are plenty more on other leaves in the tree. Of course, it is not alone. There are other lady beetles around, as well. There are also eggs and larvae, promising new swarms to come. They aren't exactly free to take over the tree…
chaoticutopia | June 20, 2007There I was, after moping all Monday and trying to catch up on Tuesday,I found myself looking at Wednesday. Somewhere in there, I had planned to get a few posts up. I may suggest to everyone else that life thrives on the edge of chaos (and we ought to ride the waves) but I often forget to remind myself. Things come up, things get procrastinated, and stress begins to surface. But why stress? That is life... just enough chaos to keep us on our toes. We could cite that old adage, better late than never, but the bit from my banner works for me. So, say it with me... "Ride the Waves"
And here's a…
chaoticutopia | June 11, 2007
Nut or Grain Weevil (Probably Curculio, unknown species)
Weevils wobble but they don't fall off the lampshade.
I found this little guy wandering helplessly in circles around the top of my lamp. His long, skinny snout is a handy tool for boring into nuts and acorns. Typically, in a forest, that's fine, as there are plenty to go around. In the suburbs, on the other hand, there aren't many nuts lying about, so the weevils bore into other tasty treats, like bags of flour. So, even though they don't bite or carry deadly diseases, these little critters are considered pests. I wasn't too concerned…
chaoticutopia | June 8, 2007It seems that cephalopods, from giant squids and octopi to camouflaging cuttlefish, are all the rage these days. As I've shown before, cephalopods can be quite fractalish (or fractals tend to be tentaclish, take your pick.) I'm not exactly sure why these creatures are so loved these days, but who am I to disagree with popular opinion?
So, for this week's fractal, I took two Carlo Julia sets, and colored them with different variations of epsilon crossing. I then layered these atop a Mandelbrot set, and some fBm "plasma". In other words, this fractal includes just about everything and the…
chaoticutopia | March 22, 2007This is supposed to be my favorite time of year. Things are blooming, memories of winter are fading, waterfalls are melting, and the trees are turning green. It's that last one that always gets me... I've always considered it to be a magical moment when the trees change in spring. Not the gradual show of colors we see in the fall, spring brings an abrupt explosion of color. Not only are the greens striking and vivid after months of winter grey, but the white and pink blossoms on the apple and cherry trees are a crowning touch. I've been anxiously eyeing the tall maple tree (Acer rubrum) in my…
chaoticutopia | March 6, 2007Since we're on the subject of weirdness this week, I thought I'd share this somewhat surreal photograph:
In Colorado, March (like most months) means temperature fluctuations. Snow, melt, warm, repeat. Lately, in between the snowstorms, it has been warming up enough for algae to grow in sunny shallows. However, the snow still hasn't fully melted in the shady spots. This is actually a drainage gutter running along the greenbelt near my home. The gutter is blooming... not the grove of trees. (It has a month or so to go.) This becomes a little more clear when the picture is turned right side up…
chaoticutopia | February 16, 2007What do you get when you cross squid-mania with fractal art? "Mandelbrotopus! Octomandelpus! Cephalbrotopod! Fractalpod! Fractalpus! Iteratopod! Octomandelfractalpusopod!" to quote ScienceBlogs reader and wildlife photographer, Martin Richard. Of course, Martin was refering to Mandelbrot sets and octopi, and today we have a bioluminescent squid and a Nova Julia set. So, perhaps we should call it Squidlyglofractolopod! Or Cephanovataninga? Maybe Julioctonovadanae? Well, whatever you want to call it, this week's fractal is quite tentacle-like:
Unfortunately, my fractal tentacles don't quite…
chaoticutopia | November 22, 2006I had so many creative guesses for the complexity puzzle posted the other day, that I decided to pull them altogether into one mosaic:
So... who was right?
I tried to include every answer, adding a few of my own "guesses" as well, to show more similar forms. Thanks to everyone who added their input. Both Chris and kimball had the correct answer, kimball being slightly more specific. The pattern (shown second from the upper left in the mosaic) was taken from a baculite fossil, showing the suture lines, and a fraction of shell. The baculites were a straight-shelled cousin to the ammonites,…
chaoticutopia | November 17, 2006What's so special about a spiral? Why does it catch our eye, inspiring our art and architecture? Why is it even there? This week, I reviewed a program about the emergence of order, showing how organized patterns appear in nature and society, without the guidance of a leader. Spiral forms are an excellent example for this subject... did some creator or guide put these elegant forms in nature? Or do they appear almost by accident, a result of simple, repeated processes? Sounds familiar. Before comparing today's fractal with an image from nature, compare these two definitions:
A self-similar…
chaoticutopia | November 10, 2006 Hidden deep within the layers of the Mandelbrot set, subtle, yet familiar forms can almost leap out at you. This happened to me as I applied the coloring formula (based on Gaussian integers) to this week's fractal. I was merely looking for a pattern that was somewhat spotty. I ended up with this:
Originally, I was trying to mimic this...
...The spotted back of this Vietnamese moss frog, which I admired last weekend at the Denver Zoo:
A Vietnemese Moss Frog (Theloderma corticale)
The moss frog, with a gift for camouflage, can be found along streams high in the mountains of Vietnam,…
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 | August 10, 2006When I wrote about the lady beetle colony in the maple tree outside, I managed to get some great pictures of newly hatched larvae, plenty of pupae, and the beetles themselves. That would be almost the whole life cycle--except my picture of eggs had no actual eggs in it, and the pictures of large larvae were sort of fuzzy. So, when I found these guys, side by side, I figured I should post them:
A larva (Adalia bipuncta, after the 3rd molt, I suspect) and a cluster of eggs (which I'm not as certain about... they are much rounder than typical coccinellidae eggs, which have sort of an ovate…