Author: admin

This week’s widget is, as suggested in an earlier post, a result of exploring the attic. Years ago I posted a simple program that uses an iterative loop to create a huge number of lovely looking patterns.

Unfortunately that code was written in Java, so it no longer runs on the Web. So this evening I reimplemented it in Javascript. It lives again!

As you move your mouse around, vast numbers of patterns are displayed. Some mouse positions produce beautifully symmetric results, others just result in a mess.

The core code is two lines that look something like the following, which get repeated 8000 times to make the point (x,y) trace out a pattern. The loop starts with x=y=t=0, and (X,Y) is your cursor position:

t += ( pow(x*x*Y, X) + pow(y*y/Y, Y) ) / 200;
lineTo(x += cos(t), y += sin(t));

I love the emergent nature of it all — how a multitude of patterns can arise from something so simple.

You can try it out here.

Today is the 200th anniversary of the announcement in 1822 by Charles Babbage to the Royal Society of his Difference Engine, the great great great grandparent of our modern computers.

Basically Babbage was the OG of computing, and now look where we are. Can’t wait to see what this will all lead to by June 14, 2222!

There is a radical asymmetry between the ability to recognize good art and the ability to create it. Everybody knows when they have heard a great song, seen a wonderful movie, or watched a play that has moved them.

But they usually can’t tell you just what it was about the song, the movie or the play that made it so good. They know the difference between something good and something bad, but they don’t know what has caused that difference. For example, the typical person knows when a movie has been beautifully shot and edited, but if you were to hand them a camera, they wouldn’t know how to set up a sequence of shots.

For some reason this bothers me. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.

Why are funny things funny? In fact, why did humans evolve humor?

Specifically, what is the evolutionary advantage of having a sense of humor? Was there some point in prehistory when tribal survival benefited from being able to have a good belly laugh?

I am imagining two tribes of protohumans at war with each other. One tribe comes at the other with sticks and rocks and a readiness to draw blood.

The members of the other tribe suddenly realize the absurdity of the situation and begin to laugh. The aggressor tribe slinks away in shame and disgrace.

And so the good guys survived to live another day. Humor is funny that way.

The only thing absolutely necessary for theater is an audience.

Let’s think about this a little more deeply, by considering two complementary examples.

Here’s the first example: If you have people up on stage acting, and there is nobody in the audience, that’s not theater.

Here is the second example: If you have an empty stage, and an audience is sitting there experiencing it, that’s essentially a variation on John Cage’s 4’33”. Unlike the first example, it is arguably theater, albeit very avant garde theater.

For many years (roughly from 1996 to mid-2013) I wrote lots and lots of programs in Java. Pretty much all of it was in the form of Java applets that ran on the Web, including my own handy-dandy interactive 3D modeler and renderer.

Then in 2013, Java applets stopped being a viable way of communicating with the public, since they didn’t fit with the agenda of Oracle, which had acquired Java from Sun Microsystems. So I pivoted that summer and started implementing everything in Javascript and WebGL.

Now that I am doing “Widget Wednesdays”, I find myself combing the attic, as it were, for some of my old Java programs. There are lots of things I implemented many years ago which I had forgotten all about.

Of course I’m going to need to reimplement them, but that’s ok. Every time you reimplement something, you learn something new. I’m looking forward to having fun with it.

Sometimes we only really remember one song in a musical. Of course there are exceptions. The Sound of Music, for example, is just filled with one memorable song after another.

But in many cases, one song stands out so thoroughly that it essentially becomes identified with the musical itself. It’s the show stopping number the audience waits for each night.

In such cases, when we see a poster for the musical, that song can start to play in our head. Some examples that come to mind:

Man of La Mancha	The Impossible Dream
Stop the World I Want to Get Off	What Kind of Fool am I
The Music Man	Seventy Six Trombones
Singin’ in the Rain	Singin’ in the Rain
The Wizard of Oz	Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Wicked	Defying Gravity
A Little Night Music	Send In The Clowns
Evita	Don’t Cry For Me Argentina
Cats	Memory
The Fantasticks	Try To Remember
Hello Dolly	Hello Dolly

You can probably think of other examples.

Today I decided to make a fractal tree, just for fun. It’s a remarkably simple program. Turns out you can get a lot out of mileage from using recursion in your graphics programming.

I wanted something that would change shape in response to mouse movement, but would still remain tree-like, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

You can play with it here.

Suppose you had instant access to your entire life stream — all of the conversations that you’ve ever had. You would only need to think back on a particular day and time, and everything you said or saw or heard in that moment would be right there for you to revisit and study at will.

Would this ability improve your quality of life? Or would you end up regretting having such a power?

Now suppose everybody had that same power. Would society be pretty much the same as it is now, or would it be radically different?

There is a trend in Hollywood to use digital make-up to dramatically reduce the apparent age of actors. Most recently, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent put Nick Cage on the screen with a simulacrum of his much younger self.

The technology is still not 100% mature, and the virtual Nick Cage looked slightly uncanny. So have other virtual younger representations, such as Carrie Fisher in Rogue One and DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci in The Irishman.

In the case of the Nick Cage film I think the uncanniness sort of worked, because the younger version of Cage was supposed to be an unreal fantasy figure. That covers a lot of sins.

There will come a time, as technology advances, when de-aging digital make-up will not only look perfectly real, but will become easy to do and inexpensive. When that happens, older actors will likely routinely take on much younger roles. This will simply become accepted as a normal part of the filmmaking process.

But the frontier after that, one which is far more difficult, is to use digital make-up to allow one actor to create a perfect impression of a different actor. This will also allow living actors to take on roles made iconic by actors already deceased.

I suspect that whenever that technology reaches maturity, it will involve not just CGI but also Machine Learning to model the dynamic facial musculature of the original actor. Fortunately those algorithms will have lots of good labeled data to work from, thanks to old movies.