Stung Eye ::
The Ablest
I have decided that it is about time I learned how to moonwalk. This should take me a month or so to master.
Professional sand sculpting.
Keygrip - "My goal with the Key Grip system is to collapse the process, equipment, and software [required for live broadcast] into a sleek enough package to allow for a 'one man show' to cover a live event on video."
***
For the (aspiring) writers in the house, 3 online books by English and Applied Linguistics professor John Broderick:
The Able Writer - A Rhetoric and Handbook
Modern English Linguistics - A Structural and Transformational Grammar
English Grammar - Patterns and Choices
Also found via wood s lot:
The paintings of Victor Hugo
Gentium - "[A] free multilingual font to bring better typography to thousands of languages around the globe."
Found elsewhere (aka via djmose):
We love you: Free Hi-Res cards to print from youyesyou.
posted by on 2/28/2004 06:09:58 PM [+] - Comment
The fate of drums (Deeper Well)
"HardSID PCI is a great solution for listening C64 SID music, playing games and demos with the original sound and it is the most serious SID based MIDI synthesizer after the HardSID Quattro PCI."
The hardware synth chip from the Commie 64, on a PCI card.
Smooth:
Mario Brothers Flash (Part I)
Mario Brothers Flash (Part 2)
Where's part three?
posted by on 2/27/2004 01:33:02 PM [+] - Comment
behind her smiling eyes
Grey Tuesday quintupled my usual daily traffic (to 503 visitors). I've been in correspondence with both Bill Werde from the New York Times and Douglas Wolk from the Village Voice. (Werde on Grey Tuesday, from today's NYT.) Unlike many other greysites, I did not receive a cease-and-desist letter from EMI. That's the beauty of BitTorrent, for this site was only hosting a small (6kB) torrent file; a gateway into a temporary Torrent community dedicated to serving the Grey Album.
***
Symbolproject - Borrowing heavily from Han Chinese characters, the goal of this wiki is to create a new language based on ideograms. They are still weeding down the root word/concept list.
Wikipedia on Irony.
Where does math come from?
DIY Tessellation.
Yo. What font is that?
The Tibetan Book of the Dead with Leonard Cohen as narrator.
Drum Solos!
The dopest knitting music video, ever.
Classic video game remakes.
Diary of a printmaker (Related: emma clark prints)
Lord of the Blings
Akayism. Check it. The act is the beauty.
*.* lead me to the following:
Easy on the Adverbs...
Wow
Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the discovery of Laura Palmers body.
A quick quote from the US Declaration of Independence:
"[...] all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
posted by on 2/25/2004 10:52:06 AM [+] - Comment
as the sky tries on its uniform of turned off t.v. grey
Today is Grey Tuesday, a day of coordinated digital disobedience.
Some history:
In 1968 at the height of their popularity, the Beatles released a self-titled double album. This came to be known as the White Album.
In 2003, Jay-Z recorded what was to be his final album. This came to be know as the Black Album.
For two and a half weeks in December of 2003, Dj Danger Mouse remixed the White Album with an a capella version of the Black Album. This came to be know as the Grey Album.
I am a fan of both the Beatles' music and hip-hop, this album is astonishing juxtaposition of the two. This isn't a simple case of playing Jay-Z's lyrics over instrumental segments from the White album; the Beatles' masterpiece has been deftly sliced, diced and reworked almost beyond recognition. EMI (the copyright holder for the White Album) is not impressed with the handiwork of Mr. Danger Mouse. In fact, they have been issuing cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album. (Update: They have now begun sending cease and desist letters to websites participating in Grey Tuesday.)
From a press release by Downhill Battle, organizers of Grey Tuesday:
"It's clear that this work devalues neither of the originals. There is no legitimate artistic or economic reason to ban this record this is just arbitrary exertion of control," said Nicholas Reville, Downhill Battle co-founder. "The framers of the constitution created copyright to promote innovation and creativity. A handful of corporations have radically perverted that purpose for their own narrow self interest, and now the public is fighting back."
The reporters and news outlets that reviewed the Grey Album have obtained it illegally from filesharing networks. "If music reviewers have to break the law to hear new, innovative music, then something has gone wrong with the law," said [Downhill Battle's Rebecca] Laurie.
To download a copy of the Grey Album, install a bitTorrent client (Shareaza for example) and then download this torrent file (6kB). Next, double-click the torrent file to begin downloading the Grey Album.
If you are not comfortable using bitTorrent, you can check here for a list of websites which are also hosting the album.
It should be noted that DJ Danger Mouse isn't the only producer to have re-spun Jay-Z's Black Album a capellas. Discover the other remixes here.
(Related: A short stungeye post on samples/sampling.)
posted by on 2/24/2004 01:22:07 AM [+] - Comment
Irony vs Empath
"Good, better, best;
Never let it rest
Until the good is better
And the better best."
She had time for me.
Only she had time for me.
She only had time for me.
She had only time for me.
She had time only for me.
She had time for only me.
She had time for me only.
Never take language for granted.
end
***
Today's Special:
Soupish? - Click to pause/unpause - Press any key to add soup particles
***
Grey Tuesday - DJ Danger Mouse:
"The Grey Album is an art project/experiment that uses the full vocal content of Jay-Z's Black Album recorded over new beats and production made using the Beatles White Album as the sole source material."
"Jay-Z's record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans [...] EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album."
Check back here next Tuesday.
Playing the flute and beat-boxing at the same time.
Pattern and Self-Reference - A look at the fractal nature of individual perspectives and the sum of those parts. I'm going to fire up the printer for this one.
Surrealist Writers (Related: Excerpts from the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" [pdf] - via wood s lot)
textz - A free archive of radical writing.
CTHEORY:
"[A]n international journal of theory, technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as theorisations of major 'event-scenes' in the mediascape".
(There is also a digital library for the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, ctheory books and multimedia.)
Some ctheory finds: The Turntable, Motion Perception in Movies and Painting, Time And The Cinematic Image by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky, who sits on the editorial board.)
posted by on 2/20/2004 12:10:01 PM [+] - Comment
Experimentation. Familiarization. It's all a nature walk.
The following 'sketches' are all explorations of the Processing language. Source code is provided for all of the applets.
The first sketch is a new take on personal horoscopes: Part Rorschach inkblot, part I Ching, part space invaders.
Click applet to pause/unpause the triptych-stream. Your future can be found within your interpretation of the paused invaders:
Space Invader Triptych
Now imagine those invaders as the characters of an alien language:
Alien Eye Chart - Click for randomly generated Eye Charts.
Trigonometry visualized, the beauty of SIN and COS:
The beauty of Trig - Click to start/pause - Press any key to flip spin modes
Invaders in a Strange Land - Click to start/pause - Press any key to flip spin modes
The last two were adapted from the example source for 3d rotation. The results are rather hypnotizing:
Click to view The Spinners.
Click to view The Spinners at a higher resolution.
***
Philosophy and the Public
Kant's Wild Years
Michi Online, Journal of Japanese Cultural Arts - Perceptions of the Shadowy World
Under Construction: (Re)Defining Culture and Community in Cyberspace
Everyday Matters - "Do not fear mistakes. There are none."
lightcycle.org - processing, java, postscript and c++ experiments
Then he decided it would be a good idea to get punched in the face on purpose.
Hey... those are my fingers! I guess Google Image has indexed the images from this post.
posted by on 2/16/2004 12:28:21 AM [+] - Comment
Ordered Chaos Revisited
After spending an hour zooming ("The 'Invisible' videos zoom in on matter and show you what is actually there, although invisible to the naked eye.") I knew what had to be done. I spent the last two days learning a new programming language called Processing. It's like Flash for programmers, (a simplified java syntax with a powerful graphics API.) During this time I wrote a small Mandelbrot exploration program.
The following applets require that your brower supports java.
Click to view Mandelbrot exploration applet. (Source code available.)
Click anywhere on the fractal plane to double the magnification. Zoom out by holding down any key and clicking the fractal. (The view centres on the clicked position for both in/out zooms.) 15 zooms are possible before floating point rounding errors erode the image. (Is that 65536X magnification?) The maximum number of Mandelbrot iterations is increased by 15 for each level of zoom, (improving the Mandelbrot resolution).
With the Flash apps from the last post, the pixel resolutions were poor, (4x4 pixel to 10x10 pixel representations for each fractal test point.) The pixel resolution of the processing applets is 1x1. The number of calculations being performed compared to the Flash generators has increased by many fold. To improve the rendering time I coded a recursive rectangle approximation engine.
Click to view Mandelbrot exploration applet in approximation debug mode. (Source code available.)
In debug mode you can see that the applet calculates the image as a gradient of bounded rectangles. I was able to exploit an interesting property of the Mandelbrot set, it is simply connected. This means that if any solid shape can be drawn on the set, where the shade/colour is identical for all the boundary points, this shape can be filled in with said shade/colour. The approximation engine divides the screen into four quadrants, a test is performed to determine if the quadrants can be filled in. Each quadrant that cannot be filled is further divided unto four quadrants of it's own. And the process repeats. (Division stopping only when a quadrant is filled or has reached a size of 2 pixels or less in either width or depth.)
This save us the trouble of calculating the escape velocity for every single pixel.
Related: fractal-like images of plants from the cabbage family.
***
Some Flash and Processing links:
Leviated.net - Flash experiments with source code.
complexification.net - Flash and Processing experiments and sketches. (Source code also present.)
Bit-101 and the amazing Bit-101 forums.
***
Will you accept this coffin - A look at the realities of reality show dating.
mundane photos
Awe-inspriring structures in plants.
Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science free online.
What else was Lost In Translation.
Your daily funk and hip-hop fix at WeFunk.
The Mushroom house is now officially grown. The interior design is based on the anatomy of a tree. Wow, it's for sale. (via lorbus)
posted by on 2/12/2004 06:14:58 PM [+] - Comment
Ordered Chaos
The above image is a black and white representation of a Mandelbrot set, (the worlds most famous fractal), that I generated using Flash MX 2004. Chances are, you've seen one before. I saw one for the first time in the early 90s and it wasn't until today that I really understood how they were generated. I spent 6 hours today experimenting with this fractal in Flash.
For the lay person:
Imagine the Mandelbrot set as a cage for numbers. Once placed inside the cage, certain numbers can escape very easily, others have to struggle to escape, and some are doomed to remain for eternity. In the above image, these forever 'trapped' numbers are shown in white.
For the geeks:
The Mandelbrot cage wasn't designed for everyday numbers like 16 or 42. No, this cage was designed to trap numbers with imaginary components. The imaginary unit is i, where i is the square root of -1. ( i * i = -1. This is why we call it imaginary, for no real number multiplied by itself can yield a negative result.)
A complex number is one which has both a Real and Imaginary component, a + ib. (Where 'a' is the real component and 'b' is the imaginary component.) Complex numbers are added and multiplied differently than Real Numbers. Let's say I have two complex number, N and G, where N = a + ib and G = c + id:
N + G = (a + c) + i(b + d)
N * G = ac − bd + i (bc + ad)
For more information on complex numbers look here.
Our fractal image is built on a grid of complex numbers where the horizontal x axis represents the Real components and the vertical y axis represents the Imaginary components. The Mandelbrot set lives within the region defined by: -3 < x < 2 and -2 < y 2. (Let's call this the Mandelbrot Plane.)
The mathematical cage is defined as follows:
1 - Let C be a complex number within the Mandelbrot Plane.
2 - Let Z = 0.
3 - Find the next value of Z according to this formula: Znew = Zold * Zold + C
4 - Repeat step 3 until Z falls outside of the Mandelbrot Plane (i.e. the number escaped from our cage)
(If Z is truly trapped in our cage we will be able to repeat step 3 infinitely. Therefore, we can assume that our point C belongs inside of the Mandelbrot Set after a fixed number of iterations has been performed. In my flash experiments below, I used a maximum iteration value of 20.)
***
I wrote a collection of Flash Mandelbrot generators today using Actionscript 2.0. I created the first four demos before I realized that I could halve the processing time by assuming that the fractal was symmetrical. Flash was not designed for this kind of number crunching. (Time to learn processing for Java). Please note that images generated by these Flash applets are highly simplified representations of the Mandelbrot set. This is due to both their scale as well as the maximum iteration value I chose. (For a more detailed view visit the Julia and Mandelbrot Set Explorer.)
Note:If you have a slow computer or if you are fairly impatient you can skip the Flash experiments and download an image of their rendered output.
In these first two examples the 'trapped' Mandelbrot numbers are shown in black. The other numbers are displayed in blue according to how fast they escaped from the cage. (The larger and brighter the pixel, the quicker it was able to escape.)
Sideways Mandelbrot with Pixel Scaling and Shading. (Low Rez) - Pre-rendered image
Sideways Mandelbrot with Pixel Scaling and Shading. (High Rez) - Pre-rendered image
These two examples are identical to the previous two, other than the fact that the pixel scaling is now random. (Pseudo-Random)
Sideways Mandelbrot with Random Pixel Scaling. (Low Rez) - Pre-rendered image
Sideways Mandelbrot with Random Pixel Scaling. (High Rez) - Pre-rendered image
Using white circular pixels. (Scaling and brightness are again determined by escape speed.)
Sideways Mandelbrot with Circular Pixel Scaling. (Low Rez) - Pre-rendered image
Sideways Mandelbrot with Circular Pixel Scaling. (High Rez) - Pre-rendered image
A more 'classical' looking Mandelbrot, where the pixel colour represents the escape speed.
Sideways Mandelbrot with Colour Circular Pixel Scaling. - Pre-rendered image
Click here to see some Mandelbrot images I generated using Flash and Photoshop.
***
In my last post I mentioned the Buddhabrot, a sideways Mandelbrot which resembles an image of the Buddha sitting in meditation. This Buddhabrot is generated using the same mathematical 'trap' I described above. However, "If the [complex number] escapes [from the trap] [...], its path is reiterated, exposing its position onto the image surface with each step. In this fashion, areas of dense particle travel appear bright white." In other words, the Buddhabrot is a visualization of the escape path of all the points which don't belong in a Mandelbrot set. Cool!
posted by on 2/9/2004 11:06:55 PM [+] - Comment
the tyranny of framing our attention
Click on the above thumbnails to view photos.
***
I came across a monkey tail plant while wandering within the woods. Soon after, I was approached by two men with tape recorders strapped to their backs. They wanted the music that was playing in my walkman. I explained my search to them; the quest for contemporary origami. Hopefully the origami zine I picked up in town would provide the necessary clues.
I continued walking. My mind began to drift back to my warm room and the meditative nature of crafts.
Lost in thought, an idea arose: "What if we gave it all away?"
More ideas flooded the pathways: The visual nature of language; Is the Mandelbrot set fractal simply an image of the Buddha sitting in meditation (more buddhabrot); what's on the other side of the...
***
Update:
For Dad: Illuminated Printing.
posted by on 2/5/2004 01:26:26 PM [+] - Comment
Blunt Sharpie Cursive
The word on the street is that I'm engaged. It was romantic and exciting. I think this song says it all:
***
I've long been fascinated by the link between music and mathematics. Chef Quix pointed out a very well written essay on math's relationship to music and life in general.
"Math is about thinking. Math is about problem solving. Math is about working with what you do know to give you a framework and a method of exploring and understanding what you don't know, about seeing relationships and patterns. Mathematics is a mind-set, and an attitude when you face something you do not understand. But there is also a beauty and a wonder about mathematics that only insiders know about. Words like elegant and beautiful are used constantly by mathematicians to describe paths of reasoning and proofs."
It's interesting to note that computer programmers react similarly to the esthetic beauty of well written code. I've read mathematical proofs and chunks of assembly code that honestly share the same emotional impact as expertly crafted poetry. The act of writing code can often lead to a meditative-like state ("the zone"), where the conversion of human ideas into a programming language becomes second nature. I've experienced similar "zones" in the worlds of mathematically problem solving and music composition.
"There are many things in music that are obviously math-related, and many musical notions can be explained in numbers. But it is important to note that numbers are not some way to describe music-- instead think of music as a way to listen to numbers, to bring them into the real world of our senses."
This ties in very well with the book Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse. The central idea of the book is that of a mystical Bead Game. The game, originally developed as a musical improvisation/composition tool, evolves into a universal language of the intellect. I know I mentioned the fascinating logic tools developed by HipBone games in a previous post, but they really deserve your attention. Much like the Bead Game, these games are based on the complex relationships between abstract ideas/concepts.
The Rules:
"Two players play a game by each naming an idea in turn to one of the ten positions on the board. Ideas can be placed in any unoccupied position on the board.
Ideas can take the form of text, sound, or image: a quote, an equation, a musical theme, a video clip, or a photo or graphic are all acceptable. Essentially, a move can be made out of anything in the three worlds... so long as it can be named.
Players score by claiming links between the idea in their own move and the ideas already in play in those positions on the board connected to it by the lines of the board in question. A link can be any form of association - similarity, opposition, cause-and-effect, metaphor. Fanciful links may be made and enjoyed - or hotly contested.
The idea placed in the first move cannot score, since there is no other idea on the board for it to link with. The idea placed in the second move cannot score either, to keep the playing field even. Thus each player gets to make five moves on a ten position board, of which only four are scoring moves."
Several game boards have been designed to foster different styles of play: The waterbird and circuit boards are actually identical in terms of interconnects. The Psyche board is derived from the Pythagorean "tetraktys" diagram and can be used to assist with dream and symbol analysis. The comparisons board is used to compare and contrast two subject areas, or thinkers. The Pentagram and Mercedes boards (topologically identical with different symmetries), can be used in relation with each-other for more involved game-play. (Reminiscent of music transmogrification.)
Digest this sample game and you will see how these boards can be powerful learning/teaching tools.
***
Ping-Pong Ball Avalanche
Consciousness and The Brain - Annotated Bibliography
tinygrow - Grow an addictive virtual garden
Cut and Paste - A History of photomontage
Iconomy goes out in style - "the most linkalicious weblog post ever"
posted by on 2/3/2004 03:36:08 PM [+] - Comment
ARCHIVES...
