(Previously: 2014, 2011, 2010; also, less closely related, 2015)
I tried to smoothen a stroke by shifting each dot toward the Euler spiral (aka clothoid, aka Cornu spiral) determined by its four nearest neighbors. That didn’t work so well: small wiggles were removed, but big ones were magnified.
Continue reading
Mom mentioned a friend who once had two dogs, and when one died both she and the surviving dog took it hard; so now she keeps three dogs of staggered ages.
My cats are brothers, now six years old. I have long had in mind that in 2021 I’ll look to add one about 5yo – rather than get a kitten now, because older animals are harder to place.
But today at the shelter I saw many kittens whose data sheet said “would prefer to go home with a sibling,” and thought of saying, “Next time a batch of kittens is down to an odd one, call me and I’ll take it, if it’s not solid black (like Rocky and Bramble).” A sad proviso, but one must be practical.
In The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, there are two yes-men: Tony, who likes to say “Great!”, and David, who likes to say “Super!”.
If I were writing it, their distinctive tics would instead be “in terms of ——” and “from a —— standpoint”. (They can share “on a —— basis”.)
Sometimes I search my blog for this picture and scratch my head in puzzlement that it’s not here, before remembering that I posted it on Google Plus back when I used that.
So here it is. Stephen Guerin (the shaven one) displays his canvas print of one of my designs.
The colors came out better than I hoped, in stark contrast to a couple of mugs with related designs that I got from the same shop.
In 2007 I thought of a pretty way to paint a square so that all pixels are different, but similar colors are clustered. For each pixel, set x,y to its coordinates; if their sum is odd, set the low bit of one of the color channels to 1. Replace x,y with (-x+y)>>1, (-x-y)>>1; this has the effect of rotating the grid by 3/8 turn and shrinking it by a factor of √2, so that the former even points, which formed a larger oblique grid, now fall on the original grid, and the odd points have their new half-coordinates truncated away. Repeat until a bit has been assigned to each bit of the three color channels.
(More concisely: considering the pixel’s coordinates as a complex number, express it as a bit string in base (-1+i).)
Colors that match in their higher bits form twindragon fractals, thus:
In 2012, I thought: what if the rotation alternates clockwise and counterclockwise?
A bit on the boring side.
But in 2017, I thought: what about less trivial sequences? Continue reading
In the last couple of years I’ve looked at thousands of webcomics. Sometimes I wish I’d kept a list of those whose first page is captioned “It begins” or “So it begins” or “And so it begins.”
Fireflies in Borneo have a wonderfully simple and distributed way of synchronizing their blinks.
If I had the skill I’d make a screensaver of it. A couple of ways to play with the concept:
I wouldn’t expect all bugs to have exactly the same period, but how much variation is tolerable? What if there are two populations, indistinguishable except that their periods differ by an irrational factor?
What if each bug has a different hue, and responds only to others that are near on the color wheel (perhaps only in one direction)? Might a stable cycle result, rather than synchrony of all?