Stirring the Life-Roads With Hand and Foot

The Mandelbrot Set

I've been playing around in math-land. This is the product, at the moment.

http://cs.oberlin.edu/~dadamson/Mandelvox/

The UI is incomplete, the alternate renderings are probably bothersomely slow on slightly older machines (my earlier attempt loaded a fixed-resolution pre-rendering, without the joy of delving - a future version may allow swapping between the two), but I've found this method of exploring the fractal to be endlessly fascinating - to see the process, the path of a point on its way out (or not) of the space.

Use the keyboard and mouse. Play.

Download and install the JSyn plugin to hear the music of the spheres upon the complex plane.

(edit: the applet works now)

Posted by: anhaga at November 19, 2006 20:27 | link | comments (1)
aiki, electricity

Finnish Woe is Beautiful

Posted by: anhaga at November 19, 2006 19:45 | link | comments
poetry, film, vikings, aiki

Cakespace and Bees

This evening's successful cookie/pumpkin-bread hybridization provides further support for the connectedness of the Delicious Set in cake-space.

For detail's sake, I baked an acorn-squash-sized pumpkin-like squash for dinner tonight, and ate half of it. I decided to do something intersting with the second half, and Google took me to the Pumpkin Nook.  I followed the aforelinked recipe, using slightly more butter and sugar, my fortuitously measured one cup of squash mash somewhat less than strained (but I suspect that cooked pumpkins are more liquidy beasts than this squash was).

The result was three dozen large and moist cookies that have a texture like pumpkin bread and which taste of late autumn - a distinct and Delicous midpoint to two previously known points of Deliciousness.

To visit other points on the segment between them (or between any other two Delicious recipes), to make more cookielike or more pumpkinbreadlike variations that are none the less Delicious, shall be left as an exercise to the reader.

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In other news, our school's homecoming dance and game have come to pass. I exercised the unenviable role of anti-grind-dancing enforcer, which students met with an acceptable degree of submission to authority (ugh) - at least until I was out of sight again. I'm amazed that cultural taboos ever overcame teenager's sex drive enough to repress public humping, given these kids' appetite for such.

There's another much more positive school dance phenomenon, that of young men demonstrating flashy (break-?)dance moves in the center of a circle of other young men, taking competitive turns and generally acting a fool, with no sign of posturing for the relatively few female observers. I did, in fact, bust several moves in this context.

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In brew news, here's a more edgy take on the Bride of the Bee image, the coloration of which happened by accident before it was determined to be a good thing:



The variations in Yellow between monitor settings is alarmingly high - the intent was not a muddy goldenrod, as it appears on the evermore limping downstairs Coyote, but the straight happy-face yellow (just shy of Sprint's marketing hue) that one sees on Odin's Cinema Display.

In any case, this inverted arrangement has a much more Evil Mad Science (with X-Rays!) feel, and less of a medieval herbalist's text. I'm not sure which one will better suit the brew, because that brew is still at least a week away, and I don't yet have a name (or a spice-set) anyway. Brainstorms or votes (on both fronts) remain welcome - the honey is a local apiary's "Mountain Wildberry," with a strong and slightly fruity taste.

The name game has so far produced the following:
Bee Seasoning
The Bride of the Bee
On the Evitability of Death and Taxa
Better Bee

<no text at all, just the image>

Combine Harvest
Splice of Life
Solar Storage Cell
End to End Solution

Meady-Ochre


Keep it up!

Posted by: anhaga at November 11, 2006 21:48 | link | comments
food, pictures, friends, school, vikings, electricity, fermentation

Your Ad Here

Future mead label needs a name.

Go.

Posted by: anhaga at November 08, 2006 23:15 | link | comments (1)
poetry, food, pictures, vikings, fermentation

I'll Be Bach.

You can be Mozart.

Saturday saw me pop my head into the Peabody Conservatory for two hours of Bach organ music, on a whim. It felt very much like an evening at Oberlin, only Oberlin has a better (bigger) organ venue, and the walk from home was shorter. The peaconnies and the whitehairs didn't give me a second look, I fit into the crowd. Somebody even asked me for directions.

The Bach was good Bach, but the poor organist was definitely wearing down - 10 two-hour concerts over 5 days, 3 each on Saturday and Sunday -- the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian. Despite his weariness, he played beautifully, playful beauty.

I also saw a play, and went to a fantastic farmer's market (in Baltimore Below - a bustling warren of dairymen and vegetable sellers, of trinket hawkers and sandwich makers, hidden in the city's elbow, beneath the highway on-ramp, where few would otherwise go. I wish I had discovered it 73 Sundays earlier). I ordered new mead-honey (a gallon of "wild mountain berry" -- the label concept is already blooming), and bought a great many items of local produce. And magnificent cheese.

I shared the first big bottle of Patent #990 with my housemates over dinner, a spontaneous simul-meal, which hasn't happened for all three of us at once ever before, I think. They liked it, I liked it, and I determined by loose heuristic that #990 is 4/3 as alcoholic as a typical red wine - maybe 13 to 15 percent, by volume. It's sweet, light, and flavorful without smacking you over the head with orange and ginger. I suspect Thunder! (bottling-time two weeks hence, earliest drinking-time two more) will not be so gentle.

I hesitate to ship my mead (I distrust package carriers with fragile things), but I also want to give you (yes, you!) my mead. So come to Baltimore, or I shall have to trust the postman.

Posted by: anhaga at November 05, 2006 19:43 | link | comments
food, friends, vikings