Friday, January 15, 2010

Worrying Jedi Tendencies



The ground is broken here, twisted by cold and salt and all the general chaos that is concealed by snow. The sky looks like any grey midwinter day but still a lot of ground around us is white, almost pristine white, untouched saved for the occasional rabbit track or a flurry of mess and blood and feathers where some raptor has brought its dinner down to earth. It seems the snow will never go whatever happens to the temperature. Maybe it has been compressed into neutron star densities and will still be around at the heat-death of the universe.

And smoothly moving on, there was another cracker of a scientific programme on BBC4 last night - a doc called The Secret Life Of Chaos presented by Jim Al-Khalili who has a TV presence up there with Bronowski and Burke. I was expecting nothing new but a revelation came immediately with the discussion of the work of Alan Turing on Morphogenesis and pattern forming which started the understanding of how a single gamete can divide and split into a complex organism and which was also the first spark of chaos theory. It was mentioned that it is impossible to know how much was lost to science because of Turing's death but from this it is clear that our understanding of both the universe and computers has been limited to some degree as a result. How telling that the final to-camera piece of the programme mentioned that any event - from the most disastrous to the most beneficial - is possible and that the only thing for definite is that it will be exciting.

I am currently enjoying Dawkins's latest book though it seems slightly like a pulled punch at the moment. This maybe (and he has alluded to this in the book itself) his way of preparing the reader for the big stuff coming later. Obviously I am converted already though I gather I am still within the target audience.

The confluence of chaos and evolution is sparking ideas for programs in my head though at the moment I'm thinking of merging the Mandelbrot drawing program with the Gamelan Simulator. The Gamelan Simulator is currently picking up ambient background from the microphone via Direct X in order to provide the random numbers for the music which means that the output varies in melody and intensity with the level of noise going in. I now want to take the numbers from the Mandelbrot formula and use those to provide the input. I've said it before but having the ability to program music is the pinnacle of what I've wanted to do with sound since I first poked wires into the tape-in port of my Oric 1. Happy days.

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