G'day! Dan Wills 'ere! I'm a full-time Houdini VFX Pipeline TD and Teacher (at RSP). I contribute a bit to a software called 'Ready', that enables explorations into 'reaction-diffusion'-type (ie field-based) simulations. Separately to work I've explored 2d fractals quite a lot, and dabbled with fractals and RD and other stuff in GLSL shaders (in an on-phone shader app) more recently.
I'm on YouTube as 'danwills' and there's the ol' UltraIterator blog below, and a flickr, which is probably the best view for my fractal images at present.
http://www.ultraiterator.blogspot.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/57934548@N02/albums
I'm always keen to chat about anything! I would love to turn some of these things into apps or cool games or shaders, so many possibilities! Send me an email:
I agree with your sentiment but myself I'm not convinced that either politics or corruption are actually (in reality) one-dimensional as you're suggesting, despite fairly widely reported trends towards world-wide political polarisation, and various different groups/parties/companies trying to appear as if they don't harbour corruption in a black-and-white way (how ridiculous!?) these things affect all systems to varying (nonzero) degrees.
I think there are actually still plenty of other dimensions/axes/structures one can think and argue/discuss about even if not many people (or politicians) actually do!
Authoritarianism surely sucks on so many levels though, I will echo that for sure!
I am partial to this speed-is-life sentiment, and it made me think of this beautiful and wonderfully poignant demoscene production by Farbrausch and Haujobb: "Time Index". It is made in the memory of a friend of theirs that died.
The softsynth soundtrack includes lyrics and one of them is "we slow down" which I always interpreted as a kind of demoscener's lament since making things go fast is sorta the whole point!
I am not arguing for either side of the fastness debate, while I certainly adore fast computers I don't like the mental image of our computers all blazing away doing stuff mainly humans care about, while the the world 'outside' is steadily getting hotter and more polluted.
I think there's utility in structures/patterns that can self-heal when damaged, but my imagination initially goes to usage in games and unusual UI.
I've played with reaction-diffusion quite a bit, which is an adjacent idea, and there can be some fun in trying to delete all the solitons - which can be an interesting challenge when they behave like like rapidly-replicating gliders!: https://www.mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/F180/F180-k530.html.
My kids enjoyed that as a semi-game like challenge in an RD I made in Android app 'Shader-Editor' on phone, and I reckon something similar but using Neural-CA could be really fun!
Particularly if animated/dynamic (moving) patterns could be developed - like 'The Powder Toy' (et al) but less discrete and more continuous - and far less aliasing!
How about a Terraria-like crafting game, crossed with Powder Toy and using NeuralCA, Reaction-Diffusion and other continuous automata like fluid Sims too! Sounds like it could be fun!?
Wow this is too much fun for simple sum-of-cosines but I shouldn't be surprised (have played with FFT a bit, and I know of Reimann Zeta Function.. sines are amazing!)
I doubled the angle so that it doesn't drift to the side any more.. and put it back to 7-symmetry, but left it with the coloring I added (now adjustable via consts):
If you squint with it on fullscreen on that last one there's a wonderful mixture of things feeling like they are rotating vs flowing inward-and-outward from 'centers' (like it's ambiguous whether it's curl or divergence somehow for my eyes/brain at least!).
Hooray for sines and cosines and shaders and thanks for motivating me to play!
Thanks! Perfect match as far as I can see, nice one! How did you learn/know how to do this?
The code was really interesting to read and tinker with! I made a version where the symmetry (7 originally) can be other numbers, and that was fascinating to see!
Only partway through the article but it was a small shock when the word 'rodent' turned up unexpectedly:
"...later, if the rodent reenters that place, the cell will fire"
Totally fair and normal of course I just had been imagining human or generic neurons/dendrites up to that point. The test species wasn't mentioned earlier as far as I can see!
Spot on! So much silly engineering would be needed to make this even slightly make sense for normal Linux 'users' and even then, if you can be root then there is no limit!? root can do anything as any user, right? And it's definitely expected that the system admin (ie yourself for your own computer!) can become root!!
I'm glad I'm on a source distribution (Gentoo, even though it does require patience) so I could in-theory edit/patch out the nasty bits before they even become binaries if anything like this ever does go ahead! (Seems unlikely to really work for Linux users anyway really though, for many of the reasons you suggested!)
Ah wow that is awesome, thankyou for clarifying that! Today I learned there's another native fruit with a similar name, but you're right it's a totally different species! Good to know!
I wondered, since quandong sounds like an Aboriginal word, whether it might be similar to what happened with the word 'sapote' in South American fruits. I have heard that it means 'soft fruit' and hardly any of them are even related species!: White Sapote (ice-cream fruit, it's amazing, related to citrus) Black Sapote: might not quite live up to the name chocolate-pudding-fruit, but a perfectly ripe one is still delightful imo, related to persimmon) I haven't tried Mamey Sapote yet or any others.. something to look forward to! :)
I'm envious of that volcanic soil! Quite clay-y in the Adelaide Hills.. I have had a white Sapote in the ground for years and it's still less than 1m tall :/ don't know if it will ever fruit.. should care for the soil better I'm guessing, that might get it going :)
Wow! I have not heard about that! A 40m tal! Quandong!? Crikey! Tallest I've seen is about 10m. I guess they usually don't get that big in SA.
Must have been ideal conditions for it in your case and maybe it happened to be a particularly vigorous/fast-growing variant!? I have heard that it can be hard to get the seeds to germinate (sounds like it was working without troubles on your property!) I'd actually be kinda happy if it took over most of the grass at my place though I reckon! :)
I agree eucalypts are unusual, I also find them beautiful, especially ones with smooth light bark like Ghost Gum and Citriodora, which has light pinky-orange bark! Such a presence!). I've never seen a Rainbow Gum but would love to one day!
I live in South Australia and I was surprised to hear about all Eucalypts having 'leaf dimorphism' (that is what I searched for, then learned that it's usually known as 'heteroblasty') I have of course seen it many times in-the-wild, but it is not universal to all Eucalypts.
Banksia, Grevillea and Hakea are also very beautiful Australian native trees/shrubs imo, but they are a different group: Proteaceae. And there's a fascinating fruiting small tree called 'Quandong' that's in the Sandalwood family (still seems bit related to eucalypts or maybe Wattle (Acacia) when looking at it in real life though).
On many Linux desktop environments it is the default - or can be configured: To hold the Windows Key ('meta') and left-mouse-drag a window around from _anywhere inside the window_! No need to get the mouse into the 'title bar'!
Additionally, meta+middle-mouse-drag allows one to resize a window from anywhere in the whole window!! (it chooses the closest corner when the drag starts) and this, being able to resize a window without needing to put the mouse in a usually-very-thin window border, is extremely liberating in my opinion! To the point where I really miss it on sub-windows where the app is handling resizing/etc itself!
There's a Windows app I used to use that supports the same kind of thing for Windows (different key I think), no idea if there's one for Mac I'm afraid - or whether it can be configured to work that way, but there probably is one so it would be worth investigating if this sounds useful to you I'd say!
When there's physical access to the device it's nearly impossible to make any system unhackable I think, at least with current tech. In this case it's a deliberately injected (twice!) hardware fault, and requires intervention at the hardware-level to reproduce the privilege escalation.
Yeah Apple does have "secure enclave" on some devices, and maybe in many cases it would wipe itself before you got in, but maybe that just means a more careful-hand is needed? (Again, physical access and extreme care/caution when debugging/investigating the chip should work eventually I think!) - I am not a hardware hacker, just have read about it quite a bit!
Having played a bit with Discrete FFT (with FFTW on 2D images in a Shake plugin we made at work ages ago) makes the DCT coefficients make so much more sense! I really wonder whether the frequency-decomposition could happen at multiple scale levels though? Sounds slightly like wavelets and maybe that's how jpeg2000 works?.. Yeah I looked it up, uses DWT so it kinda sounds like it! Shame it hasn't taken off so far!? Or maybe there's an even better way?
I just put on a Venetian Snares album (Rossz Csillag Alatt Született) and thought I'd come back here to say the same as you have!
I'd also add: It's like Aaron's whole career is slightly resting atop Amen Break, at least as far back as (first I heard and still my favorite) The Chocolate Wheelchair Album! Amazing detailed work with Amen and similar samples that's for sure!
This worked in Opera on my (Android) phone, but on both Firefox and Chrome on Linux it seemed to not animate the rotation, and the rotation slider didn't seem to do anything either, so it was not showing off the real beauty of the MRS Fractal. I still think it's awesome but I wanted to check it out on a bigger screen and haven't been able to yet.
Very cool! Reminds me a bit of some formulas that are available in UltraFractal (and Visions of Chaos by the looks) called 'ducky' or 'ducks' fractals, here's a blogpost about them from Softology:
I really like how Ducks fractals produce detail across the whole image (a pet favourite feature in fractal renderings), but I find that Ducks huge abundance of symmetries made them a bit less natural feeling, and have less variety than say, the cloudy 'inside' of a Nova-family fractal when relaxation is turned up.
Thanks heaps! I very much love the 'old-school' jungle/uk-hardcore sound and didn't know about these more recent Suburban Base releases, and your other reccs were also great too! Amen break went soooo far!
My particular favourite is in demoscene tracker music where Amen also went all over the place (and sampling more generally too!)
I'm not sure if the below is actual Amen-break (need to ask BrothomStates probably!) but it's certainly in the spirit of it and this is definitely near or at the top of my favourite demos ever, I just find it so damned cool! "The Day the Earth was Born" by TPOLM:
I'm on YouTube as 'danwills' and there's the ol' UltraIterator blog below, and a flickr, which is probably the best view for my fractal images at present.
http://www.ultraiterator.blogspot.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/57934548@N02/albums
I'm always keen to chat about anything! I would love to turn some of these things into apps or cool games or shaders, so many possibilities! Send me an email:
[email protected]