Sunday, September 7, 2008
Fractal Triumph
I'm done, for the moment, being apoplectic over politics. I find myself becoming so vitriolic that I've declared a forty-eight hour moratorium on checking the news. I'm sure that when that's done, there'll be just as much stupidity there as there was today and the day before.
Sigh.
Usually when I get all worked up about the news I can distract myself with food blogs, but when I tried that today I found myself getting annoyed with people who seemed to be fiddling around while Rome burns down around them. They're out there, those people, writing about the quest for the perfect slice of pizza, or querying the food boards for recipes that use chorizo. They're pondering the question: Mayo or Miracle Whip? They're gaga over photos of pork chops. (Those are actually examples from a few of the blogs I read--excuse me, tried to read.) And I found that I just couldn't jump in and pretend that it even matters in the least, for example, who is going to win Top Chef or whose cupcake is the best. I just couldn't do it.
Instead, I went and found some fractals.
The show we went to the other day is a local specialty, called Fractal Friday.
(In case you don't know what a fractal is, here's one definition: "A curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole." I guess the way I understand fractals is by thinking about them as the graph of a fractal equation that produces a pattern. Manipulating the variables and the equation itself leads to some very interesting patterns. That's a very, very basic explanation. The less basic explanation takes into account that fractals are useful for modeling natural structures like snowflakes, ferns, coastlines, evolutionary trees, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation.)
So, yeah, that's what we went to see when we went to Fractal Friday, graphed mathematical equations.
Sounds boring, huh?
But it's not.
Anyway, so the guy who makes the fractals and the guy who writes the music are brothers, Johnathan and Daniel Wolfe. Here is an example of their work. (It seems pretty low key, but you kinda have to imagine this projected above you onto a planetarium screen.)
You can see, at the beginning, the mathematical equation that is graphed to produce the image on the screen. Computers are used to make the graphs, but I think there is a lot of aesthetic judgment required to, for example, decide what colors to use and which portion of the graph to zoom in on.
Isn't it beautiful?
Sigh.
Usually when I get all worked up about the news I can distract myself with food blogs, but when I tried that today I found myself getting annoyed with people who seemed to be fiddling around while Rome burns down around them. They're out there, those people, writing about the quest for the perfect slice of pizza, or querying the food boards for recipes that use chorizo. They're pondering the question: Mayo or Miracle Whip? They're gaga over photos of pork chops. (Those are actually examples from a few of the blogs I read--excuse me, tried to read.) And I found that I just couldn't jump in and pretend that it even matters in the least, for example, who is going to win Top Chef or whose cupcake is the best. I just couldn't do it.
Instead, I went and found some fractals.
The show we went to the other day is a local specialty, called Fractal Friday.
(In case you don't know what a fractal is, here's one definition: "A curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole." I guess the way I understand fractals is by thinking about them as the graph of a fractal equation that produces a pattern. Manipulating the variables and the equation itself leads to some very interesting patterns. That's a very, very basic explanation. The less basic explanation takes into account that fractals are useful for modeling natural structures like snowflakes, ferns, coastlines, evolutionary trees, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation.)
So, yeah, that's what we went to see when we went to Fractal Friday, graphed mathematical equations.
Sounds boring, huh?
But it's not.
Anyway, so the guy who makes the fractals and the guy who writes the music are brothers, Johnathan and Daniel Wolfe. Here is an example of their work. (It seems pretty low key, but you kinda have to imagine this projected above you onto a planetarium screen.)
You can see, at the beginning, the mathematical equation that is graphed to produce the image on the screen. Computers are used to make the graphs, but I think there is a lot of aesthetic judgment required to, for example, decide what colors to use and which portion of the graph to zoom in on.
Isn't it beautiful?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment