Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Flicker is Addictive

Interesting photo of a fractal irrigation ditch from Afghanistan: here.
There's the usual dirt ditches, as idyllically seen here... if you look closely they follow a nice fractal pattern. Makes sense, so often in nature resource distribution goes fractal.
More sets that are right up my ally:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/sets/72157603524192835/

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Linear Telephone

It's interesting that these functions not only become more noisy but more linear.

Here each row is a chain of people passing along a function relating X to Y. Each person first guesses and is corrected on 50 (X,Y) cases, then just guesses on 100 more cases. The final guesses of the last person become data for the next person. The final relations are all basically lines, 7/8 with a positive slope, 1/8 with a negative slope.
-Overcoming Bias

I'm a strict Westerner myself... but this reminds me of a talk by Alan Watts:


Saturday, April 4, 2009

Hofstadter's butterfly


In GEB he writes:
Gplot: a recursive graph showing energy bands for electrons in an idealized crystal in a magnetic field. α, representing magnetic field strength, runs vertically from 0 to 1. Energy runs horizontally. The horizontal line segments are bands of allowed electron energies.
From Wiki:
The Hofstadter butterfly was the first fractal structure ever discovered in physics. In particular, Gplot (as Hofstadter called it) was described as "self-similar" in his 1976 article in Physical Review before Benoit Mandelbrot's word "fractal" was known.
Hofstadter is, of course, officially awesome.