Emergent Creativity

It’s Alive!

mobiusdynamo — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 02:33:49 +0000

Here is a delightful video of robot that is able to balance an inverted pendulum. It’s worth nothing that the technology to center a ball on a flat surface demanded the full resources of computing power in the mid-nineties.

Wild.

Peafowl

mobiusdynamo — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:10:29 +0000

Just a quick post to share with you some beautiful images of peacocks in their fully glory. Be sure to sort through the many pages of the galleries to get the full effect.

Schizophrenic Kitten

mobiusdynamo — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:53:58 +0000

Louis Wain was a 19th-century painter whose whimsical drawings of cats were often featured in popular publications of the day. Much like ‘dogs playing poker’, Wain’s works imagined cats anthropomorphized in everyday situations. Largely uninspired work. He is of interest to us, dear reader, because he suffered from late-onset schizophrenia, and this neurological cataclysm was reflected, with eerie prescience, in his work. In time his drawings of cats became more and more abstract, exhibiting colors and patterns totally absent in his prior designs.

It’s fascinating to reflect on the fact that the structure of the mind, one of the most complex constructs known to science, so often results in a persistent stasis we know as consciousness and yet is so susceptible to nearly immeasurable, ineffable change.

Butterfly Utopia

mobiusdynamo — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:31:28 +0000

Butterfly Utopia is a custom-order supplier of acrylic-mounted butterflies. I’ve collected butterflies for a little over a year now, and these are undoubtedly the most beautiful specimens I’ve ever encountered. There are dozens of strange and beautiful single butterflies, but the really stunning displays contain butterflies by the hundreds.

They’re Everywhere!!

mobiusdynamo — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:08:48 +0000

Now, I may be late to the party on this one, but holy jesus … what a terrifying concept. Apparently the spiders have been organizing under our very noses, constructing giant communal webs. Mosquitoes are the only victims for the time being, but what next? When they came for the mosquitoes, I said nothing. Then, when they came for the house pets, I said nothing. When the giant carnivorous spiders came for me, there was no one left to speak up.

On a serious tip, one can only imagine what kind of territorial disputes go on in an ecosystem such as this. It seems that an alliance of this nature must be an uneasy one, with traditionally solitary creatures competing often for the same food resources. I wonder what kind of critical threshold occurred to allow this to happen. Was it a density issue? Is it simply that there’s far too much food to go around and so competitive pressures are essentially nonexistent? And, most importantly, will there be runs on Raid? I’d be curious to learn more.

More Organic Strangeness

mobiusdynamo — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 04:14:01 +0000

This set of images is definitely worth a look, and features some of the strangest animals in the world, including several I have never before seen or even possible conceived of.

Beatbox Extravaganza

mobiusdynamo — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 02:03:08 +0000

A tribute to those wacky breakmasters..

First, a relatively formal introduction to the sport. Check out the singing / boxing around4:30.

But there are plenty of interesting variations to enjoy. First, some dangerous fun in the kitchen …

Then, a harmonica …

& why not a Flute?

Incredible Fractal Zoom

mobiusdynamo — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:03:40 +0000

Enjoy this lovely nearly two-minute zoom into a Mandelbrot fractal. It’s perplexing and a bit humbling to think that there is an infinite level of detail at any position within this structure. It’s worth noting that, within the domain of chaos theory, all strange attractors are fractal in nature. Fascinatingly enough, a dripping faucet and an arrhythmic heart share the same strange attractor, and papers have been authored exploring the relationship between the two, and how we can apply knowledge of the drip system to improve treatment for cardiac patients.

The following entry is also interesting in the way it illustrates that even within seemingly homogeneous regions of a fractal there are infinitely-intricate patterns.

SwimBots!

mobiusdynamo — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 13:51:17 +0000

I’d like to share with you a clever little evolutionary application called SwimBots. SwimBots are colorful creatures that float around in your own virtual petri dish, looking for food, mates, and … well, mostly just food and mates. However, the dynamics governing locomotion and reproduction are interesting and extensible. The software is Windows-only unfortunately.

Tiny Little Dots

mobiusdynamo — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 04:19:51 +0000

So I’ve been tasked in one of my courses with an ethnographic exercise. I am to “use a tool to record what you see, observe a place and then write a one page description of it.” In that vein, I’ve decided that I’m going to observe the human swarm from way upon high. I’ll station a video camera on top of the student union, about 8 stories up. I’ll record the human swarm for 15 minutes, observing the baseline activity levels. I’m certain interesting dynamics will emerge, and look forward to observing that film. Then, I’ll place a large pile of clean, unopened candy on the ground .. you know, M&M’s, snickers, etc. I’m curious to see how people respond. I’ll collect that pile, and then place 120 condoms in a pile in the same place. It will be interesting to observe which pile interests the crowd more. After collecting that pile, I plan to place another pile of both candy and condoms in the same place … I have no idea what’s going to happen here.

I’m totally open to suggestions for other phenomena to observe … I’d like to avoid using actors as much as possible, but if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

Funky Duck

mobiusdynamo — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:30:14 +0000

Apologies for the late dearth of posts .. the beginning of the school year has kept me quite busy. Ironically, it is the school year, by and large, that is the reason I started this site, and I look forward to sharing many of the exciting things I encounter in the course of my studies into Informatics.

One such peculiarity is Vaucanson’s Mechanical Duck, a strange automaton constructed using mechanisms similar to those employed by watchmakers. This complicated, deterministic little creation was, at the time, considered to be a stunning manifestation of artificial life, a field I hope detail thoroughly during the coming months.

Fusion Realized

mobiusdynamo — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 04:36:52 +0000

Ned Kahn creates beautiful installations that fuse, quite elegantly, the disciplines of art and science. From displays involving fire and light to installations featuring wind and water. He uses patterns in nature to create art that is provocative and fundamentally beautiful. I found this link by way of NPR’s fantastic archive of stories on “Where Science Meets Art“.

More From the Fluidic Muscle Front

mobiusdynamo — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:51:32 +0000

Yesterday I posted about an incredible new technology that uses fluid-filled chambers to simulate the complex musculature of a human arm. Today, we find that that same technology (from the same company, Festo) is being applied to racing simulations.

Fluid-Controlled Robotic Muscles

mobiusdynamo — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 03:01:55 +0000

Amazing technology from Festo.

Now We Must Burrow Through

mobiusdynamo — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:18:24 +0000

Those rascally scientists have found a giant hole smack dab in our very own Universe. The hole, which is devoid of even dark matter, spans over a billion light-years across, baffling scientists. The reason this is so perplexing is due to the well-supported notion that the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous. Essentially, we have observed that the Universe is made up of pretty much the same stuff regardless of where you look in the sky. Given this, finding a region of pure space this large is really quite a puzzler. With that in mind, I present to you, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. This little gem represents a slice of the sky about the tenth of the size of the moon as viewed from earth.