Here’s a tutorial on a really neat and powerful math art technique that I first came across years ago in the book, Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty by Clifford Pickover. It’s described in Chapter 14, entitled Dynamical Systems. More recently I’ve seen it described as “Popcorn”. I’m not sure where that name came from, but there’s a good chance it originated with Paul Bourke, who used the term back in 1991 in this article.
The technique is based on some very simple formulas – just using a couple of trig functions (sine and tangent in this example) to transform an x, y point repeatedly. But it creates some amazingly intricate, complex and beautiful images. It’s also open to a nearly infinite amount of hacking by changing the few constants used or swapping out which trig functions you use or how you compose them.
Almost exactly two years ago I bought my last phone, a Pixel 3XL. The phone I had before that was a Samsung Galaxy S8. It was two years old and was in good condition, but I didn’t like it that much. All the extra Samsung garbage was not to my taste. I like stock Android or as close as I can get.
After two full years, I was totally happy with the Pixel. I had no plans on upgrading or changing until I had to. And then… I had to. The first sign was the the volume buttons weren’t working. I have one of those rubber bumper cases. When I took it off, the volume worked fine. But not with the case on. The case seemed fine, and then I took a closer look at the phone beside the volume keys.
If you’ve been following along #awegif2021 on twitter, you’ve seem me post a few animated gifs that look like the image above (days 1-6 specifically). These are known as Chladni figures, named after Ernst Chladni. He described the formulas that create the patterns that result when you use soundwaves to activate sand or powder on a flat surface. You can find a ton of videos on Youtube that feature real world examples of this. But it’s also fun to do in code.
One of the things that’s plagued me since I’ve been doing creative coding is managing the code I use to create images and animations (or whatever else). Of course, standard source control management comes into it in a big way. I’ve been using git for ages. I remember having arguments with coworkers who refused to see how git was better than SVN (at least they had moved off of CVS). So yeah, you put your code in a repo and you check in your changes, etc.
Back in the day, I was a big fan of Google Reader. There were lots of blogs and feeds I followed and Google Reader kind of set the standard of what an RSS reader was supposed to work, and what it was supposed to look like
I’m one of those people who will never fully trust Google again – but only because they shut down Reader.
For the month of August 2021, I’m going to try to post an original animated gif on twitter every day of the month. I’ll be tagging them #awegif2021. I invite anyone to join along.
I’ve done this twice before. And the cool thing is that all the entries are easily searchable in twitter.
This is just a post about some changes I made to my personal computers. Probably not interesting for most people, but I like to document this stuff so I can go back and say, “when did I switch to ____? And how did that go?” And who knows? A few people might find it vaguely interesting after all.
Back to Mac.
I’m not switching back to Mac by any means, but I did buy a new Mac for personal use.
Over the last week, I’ve made several deep dives into the subject of noise – Perlin noise, Simplex noise Curl noise, 2d and 3d noise. Worth reading through them in order, if you’re interested in this stuff.
In yesterday’s post, I ran across this statement about Simplex noise:
noise generated for different dimensions are visually distinct (e.g. 2D noise has a different look than 2D slices of 3D noise, and it looks increasingly worse for higher dimensions).
During my deep dive into Perlin and Curl noise, I kept bumping into the subject of Simplex noise. I figured it was worth going down that rabbit hole for a day or so. Here’s what I’ve found.
