Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

I just found this amazing video of Tatiana Mollman and Jordan Frisbee performing West Coast Swing at MADJam 2006. Simply fabulous.

(And sigh, I think I’ve a bit of a crush on Tatiana Mollman after watching about fifty of her videos online….)

I’ve been working on some fun CA stuff in Processing, and here’s something that’s the product of a bored plane ride.

It’s based off of this Cellular Automata demo by Mike Davis.  I basically added a randomness function (butterflyEffect()) that adds additional chaos; however the numbers have been adjusted to optimize for stability, however depending upon the randomness function, that may or may not happen.

Interestingly enough, this seems to create pockets of clusters, which are quite stable — however, increasing the numbers beyond the optimal ratio seems to either create too many particles or too little.

So, here’s the CA3 demo with my butterfly effect functions added. And yes, I decided to let the project have the default name as a tribute to randomness. =)

I’m a big fan of Processing, the “visual” programming language created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

Today, I stumbled upon something truly fascinating — a JavaScript port of Processing by John Resig. Using the Canvas element, he’s created something shows just what JavaScript programming is capable of.

And of course, he has a collection of some very interesting demos and some of the more classic ones.

Nepal abolishes monarchy and gives in to Maoists and Communists, and one wonders how long it would be before China decides that Nepal is part of its sovereign territory.

And yet another nation falls silently to democracy, where the needs of the mediocre many override the few. While I do not care much for monarchy as an institution, it is a sad day indeed to see nation states fall prey.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Scrabble Cuff links.

(Why, yes, I love cuff links)

I wonder who will win in the standoff between ugly dolls.

Personally, I vote for both to be gone to raise the intelligence of the next generation by a few points. Bring on the Legos instead!

National Geographic recently had this fantastic picture of Chile’s Chaitén volcano’s erruption. Fascinating.

The other day, I was debating the “question of god” (eh) and listening to an anti-evolution rhetoric. Of course, as it often happens, the person brought up the classic strawman on evolution and watches.

For those unfamiliar with the strawman, here is how it goes — if you took an existing watch and smashed it to pieces, can the parts come together and tell time? Of course, the people posing this question never really provide an answer, and instead assume that they have stumped you.

Well, as it turns out, the answer is yes, the parts can indeed come together to form clocks given a few preconditions. For instance, providing a natural affinity between components and having the ability to tell time as a criteria for natural selection will result in functional, efficient clocks over time. Through evolution, no less.

And for those who are interested, the author has also made available the source code for the watchmaker program for those that are interested. Fascinating stuff.