Ecce Sigum

  • Accidental Popularity

    Looking at my site statistics this morning I saw that over the weekend es.o got over a hundred hits. Egads! thought I, The cellular automata experiments must have caught the eye of the Right People. I have become Known! Stephen Wolfram himself might have stopped by while I was at the bar!

    But on closer inspection all of the hits, or almost all of them, were referred here by a surfboard design website. Well, sez I in a desperate grab at fading hope, Maybe the members of the Fields Medal Review Panel surf in their spare time.

    I suspect someone grabbed one of my javascript files, specifically the one which opens pop-up windows, and plugged it in over there. Plugged it in and neglected to get rid of the absolute URL reference in the code.

    No, (he says on looking at the referrer logs and cross-referencing the error files). Someone found my site when searching for “surfboard design”, and maybe linked to something which caused everyone following that link to go to my discussion board. I don’t have a discussion board. Nor do I have a surf board.

    Which leaves me right back here where I started: begging for attention.

  • What Is It With the Ants?

    I got the idea for the Langton’s Ants experiment from Kevin Lindsey’s experiment . The code is my own, but the results were carefully double-checked against the original.

    The “ant” follows four rules:

    The ant toggles the color of its current square
    The ant advances in the direction it is facing
    If the new square is off, then the ant turns to the right by 90 degrees
    If the new square is on, then the ant turns to the left by 90 degrees

    Possible future riffs on this idea include multiple ants, multiple colors, and a hex/octal grid.

  • Back to School

    Play .

    Hypothesis: Stability in a bounded environment requires a repeating pattern.

    Watch .

  • A Brief Respite

    candle

  • More of the Same, Yet Different

    Still another variation as I climb toward Cellular Apotheosis. This one elegantly captures the elusive beauty of the poetically named “Rule 149”. It shouldn’t beat up any computers too badly, but it will run faster on more powerful machines. Obviously.

  • Har

    Broog, Alien Film Critic is very funny. Read him when you are not gazing in awe at the River Project .

  • More CA

    Scott played around with my code, then I played around with his code, and this is what we did . It should be much easier on the processor than was yesterday’s experiment. Just sit back, grab a beer, and enjoy.

  • C A

    I had a productive evening yesterday playing around with Cellular Automata, in response to Stephen Wolfram’s magnum opus A New Kind of Science . I put together a CA generator which calculates 90 generations of a 60-cell grid. That’s 5400 cells. So when you click this here link , wait for a few seconds (around four on my monster PC) for the thing to finish crunching. It shouldn’t crush your computer, although I have not looked at it on a Macintosh. The blank right half of the file is where the (self explanatory) controls will go in the next iteration of the thing. It still has a few bugs which won’t be obvious unless you know what the thing is doing.

    I will post the code when I am happy with it.

    This evening I got all set up to start playing in Java. I will maybe have a more powerful version of the CA demo up in a couple of months.

  • Starting the Year Off Right

    To usher in the new year in the appropriate way I have picked up two new books: Flash Math Creativity and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain . This year I expect es.o will have more visuals than it did in 2002.

    On to other news.

    Apparently there is (was?) a movement (the “Two Towers Protest”) to have The Two Towers renamed to “show increased sensitivity toward the destruction of the World Trade Center”. The organizers have even gone so far as to call the un-altered title of the movie “hate speech”. Hate speech. Peter Jackson, et.al, kept the original title of the book for the movie, and it is being called “hate speech”.

    This is what I have to say about that:

    1. Dear Two Towers Protest: Fuck you.

    2. The Two Towers is a movie, and the World Trade Center was a tragic event. Never the two shall meet.

    3. If “the people” can’t make a distinction between a fantasy movie and a terrorist attack, then “the people” deserve the angst, anger and ulcers which that will cause.

    The Two Towers Protest is as much a capitalization on the 9/11 events as is the Bush Administration’s arbitrary naming of an “axis of evil”, and as are the kiosks at the outskirts of Ground Zero selling bags of dust and rubble from the buildings.

    Come to think of it, the name of this moronic movement is hate speech, too. The “Two Towers Protest” shows insensitivity toward the terrible events of September 11, 2001. What applies to one must apply to all. They must REALLY hate America. The ghost of Joseph McCarthy is buggering the ghost of Thomas Jefferson in glee.

    And I don’t even want to get into how, with their flawed logic, they are actually encouraging people to forget what happened last September.

  • Huh?

    Raining and 45 degrees here in sunny cheerful warm Grand Rapids. The taking stock of the past year has been done, and my major accomplishment occurred this past night at midnight, when I filled the last page of a journal in which I have been writing since mid-August 2000.

    Raining hard now. The skylight sounds like a popcorn popper.

    The journal is 380 pages of 8 x 11 paper. I write small. But I also send my creative energies into this vampire computer machine. I spend a lot of time here. Too much. Let’s just go ahead and call me obsessive. 380 pages in 850 days. My new journal is about 150 pages, unlined, designed and built by the extraordinary Tracy, who gets nowhere near the credit she deserves for her art. Why unlined? I have never learned to draw, and now is as good a time as any to begin.

    Not raining so hard now. The skylight sounds like a skillet full of bacon.