I'm walking on eggshells [wooah, it don't feel good]

SWMNBN is going nuts.¹

15 minutes from home...

She asked motherdearest to put down her window. It wasn't down far enough so she communicated this to us with pepperings of "f*cking hell", "you are all f*ckers", and kicking her inactive window switch. From here, She smoothly segued into how she hates us all, especially me.

7 minutes from home...

She began talking about how her and I can have the house to ourselves, sit on the couch, cuddle and watch a scary movie ["but only a ittle bit scary"], while Deirdre collects her sowing kit.

3 minutes from home...

She is asleep.


Mythbusters had a look at Chinese Water Torture and the found that it was not the dripping water in-and-of-itself, but the regularity of the dripping  that made the experience torture.² It reminds me of and is possibly related to this interesting little ditty from Cornell U. The idea being we look for patterns to make things simpler for ourselves, so we reduce the amount of information we have to handle. Generally speaking it has made us pretty awesome, but accidentally or intentionally complicated/irregular/non-sensical information makes us its bitch.³

****

¹Well, she is growing more apparently nuts...


²I know I paint her in a pretty bad light at times, but she is hilarious, shockingly adroit, and generally
very niceⁱ. I don't think we much cared for each other at the beginning of my time in the country, but we've gradually won each other over, like some kind of mutual Stockholm Syndrome.



³In Neal Stephenson's book Anathem, the punishment within the Maths was to copy from and memorize "the Book." It is rife with errors, which grow more insidious chapter-by-chapter, the feared result being a corruption of the mind.

++++

ⁱI'm hardly going to relate the dull bits; it's kind of like war- lots of waiting around interspersed with moments of terror.

Chirp chirp

It has been a while since I put up something.⁰

I suspect that the elephant in the drawing room is that I finished my thesis two months back;¹ the idea of typing anything more than chats/emails has had that giving it the eeeeeevil eye. Although it is possibly compounded by being generally house bound in the middle of no where with a pack of kids; and really one post on them is the same as another.

So, I'm going to use someone else's words as a jumping point.

Preamble: myself and Kevin were chatting about Twitter today...

Kevin: Twitter seems to be actually a very difficult concept to grasp

I don't understand how

but (and this is an eerily familiar statement) it's almost too simple for people to understand easily

me: I use it to say or pass on something i think remarkable

Kevin: you can use it for whatever the hell you like!

me: lol

yeah

Kevin: so when people ask me (and they have) - "what is it for"?

and I say "anything"

they don't understand

It's like Seinfeld

"It's a show about Nothing"

older generations didn't get it

younger generations made it the most successful sitcom of its day

me: ah

the twitterati

Kevin: but trawling hashtags appears to be the main use of it.

I'll get back to the chat in a moment, but now for something completely different obliquely relevant...

I learned an interesting thing in linear algebra back in the day: for an n-dimensional space, any set of n vectors can be the basis (i.e. the axes/frame of reference) for that space as long as they are linearly independent of each other. (The change of basis theorem, at least I think that is what my lecturer called it.)

An example (repeating what they say in the link, but we all have our vanities):

In three dimensional vector space of real numbers one basis would be:

[1 0 0], [0 1 0], [0 0 1]

Where the three vectors arbitrarily represent "x", "y" & "z" axis. Multiplying, or dividing and adding these vectors together you can define every point in space. However, it is also possible to express it in terms of:

[1 2 3], [3 1 2], [1,000 0 11]

Now, Don't Panic the two sets of vectors are equivalent, in a Machiavellian way... take the coordinate [1 1 1]; both basis can be multiplied and added together to get it:

[1 0 0] + [0 1 0] + [0 0 1] = [1 1 1]

1/315x(326x[1 2 3] - 337x[3 1 2] + [1,000 0 11]) = [1 1 1]

And it is the case for any three vectors as long as they aren't a straight up multiple of each other (i.e. [1 1 1] ≡ [2 2 2])

Clearly, there are convenient and inconvenient ways to get things done... Now, the reason I put it forward is because we could think of ideas as objects in an abstract-space,² and the basis is a perception or way to describe the abstractions; then there is a best way to pass an idea to someone else. I saw an article, a summary, of a paper on education at my favourite website, physorg.com, a couple of weeks back.³ Basically it showed that teaching/practicing mathematics abstractly leads to better understanding of the core principles than if the students dealt with "real world" problems that only illustrate the principles.

Aaaaand back to the chat.

It is unlikely that this was the first conversation about Twitter that went this way. But I think Kevin's analogy (he loves analogies) and his turn of phrase is nice and simple. It was like looking at Twitter through new eyes after I finished reading it.⁴

For those that prefer antic-based tales of high-adventure from Máirtín, I'm moving to Belgium to start working as a crack research engineer so emigration will be a healthy source of blog-worthy stuff (it better be!).

**********

^{0I've given up on the MacNamyver finalé, or whatever it was... Long story short, the draw strings for a velux in a high-ceilinged room got stuck and they couldn't be reached, even with crutches stuck together. I nipped down to Tesco, bought duct tape and 50 wooden bbq skewers (suspicious buy/boy). I used two brushes and a mop with their ends pulled off, which left me with hollow tubes. I slotted the skewers into the ends of the brush handles to join them together and then wrapped some torn phone book pages around the joint and taped it together. With my ad hoc thing-longer, the handy plastic hook that is at the top of the last brush disentangled the draw strings from the velux and I could once more open and close the window with impunity [Mwa ha ha ha ha ha].}

¹So much writing... [rocks back and forth, rubbing upper arms]

²In Pratchett's Guards! Guards!, he has this description of where dragons went:

[...] And although the space they occupy isn't like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but it is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the top of a tail, the the effect is like one of those trick drawings and your eyeballs eventually realize that the space between each dragon is, in fact, another dragon.

I think ideas are like that; a Venn diagram by Salvador Dali.

³Here's the site, and DOI:10.1126/science.1154659, and the journal link

⁴Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd

Not a boy, not yet a man

Yet another interlude before the last of the McNamyver posts.

It's Diorraing's first day of secondary school tomorrow.

Deirdre insisted on making a cake for him; she asked him what kind of cake he wanted; he said that he did not want one; she kept at him; insisting.

Eventually he told her to guess. She went with a sponge cake with orange icing- he hated it. She was annoyed.

Based on this mother–son dynamic: he is officially a teenager!

[There would have been party poppers and balloons, but he grunted about us not knowing him.]

A scatological rambling and a scatological dosing

[Editors note: An interlude before the conclusion of the much anticipated McNamyver Trilogy]

Two amusing and telling Facebook exchanges in the last 24 hours:

First was from Eimhin, being his usual uncouth and irreverent self.¹

I think his crowning moment in the exchange was:

"I'm no dissonant churnings of voices, I am phalanx of united manchoir"

It is up there with his fem-eimhin 1, 2, 3 line, in my opinion. It is note worthy that he uses the plural of churning. It is hard to tell if it is a joke within a joke or a mistake. I'll wager he'll claim it a joke regardless.

As to the intimations that herself is like Lois from Malcolm in the Middle. Not 12 hours after that thread wound down, she wrote two damning comments on my wall:

I think we can all agree that this is exactly the kind of stuff that Lois pulled... If Malcolm in the Middle was after watershed.

Exactly.

Also, I checked out the cake and biscuits and there was no evidence of tampering, so I ate them.²

Bluff. Called.

***

¹Word of the day toilet paper for the win!

²It was just sitting there in front of me! If I didn't eat it, I would have become everything I hate.

McNamyver: Chemical Burn Notice

My name is Máirtín McNamara. I used to be an undergraduate until...

"We've got a graduation for you. Your postgraded."

When you are postgraded, you've got nothing. No cash, no credit and no job history.¹ You're stuck in whatever lab they decide to dump you in.

You do what ever work comes your way...

"Someone needs your help, Máirtín."

Bottom line: Until you figure out your thesis, you're not going anywhere.

[Cue "glamorous" montage of rain covered UCD: People waiting for buses, campus security chasing skateboarders, nerds highfiving beside a chalkboard, people in lab coats and goggles slowly jumping away from an explosion or some genetic experiment gone wrong², guys with popped collars mispronouncing words with orange-skinned girls]

I was chilling in my lab doing scientificy stuff. My cell rings.

It's an ol' buddy of mine from back in my undergrad' days. He's in a bind. He locked his keys in his car.

My partner-in-problem-solving [and pale Bruce Campbell stand-in], and I coolly walked out to the parking lot, to assess the situation.

If you are going to break into a friend's car, it is important that you don't do any damage. A lot of people are inclined to go for a fast break and grab, but that is going to sour a friendship real fast.

Most cars have a design flaw that can be exploited; this late model blahblah happened to have a slightly flexible door frame. A mistake a lot of people make at this point is trying to get the door open; just because it is how you usually get in to a car doesn't mean that it is the only way to get into one. In many cases the trunk will do just as well...

I strode back inside to get some things. I strode out with a heavy-duty screwdriver, section of 1/6" steel pipe and a spool of electrical wiring.

It's important when you are doing something suspicious, which could draw the attention of security personnel, that you act like you are meant to be there.³ More operations fail because of someone's nerves than effective countermeasures.

I threaded some of the wire, a loop tied in the end, through the steel pipe. I casually used the screwdriver^3.5 to lever a gap between the car and the door frame. All I needed was space to stick the wire-in-pipe. With the pipe wedged in the door frame, the wire was free to move up, down and swing side-to-side.

My eye fixed on the target. Sweat beading on my brow, I smoothly handled the wire-in-pipe to catch the lever. We held back on the celebrations. Now the hard part began.

With infinite care, I pulled back on the wire until...

My ol' buddy dove through the open trunk and grabbed the keys just in time.⁴

_________________________

Stay tuned for the final installment of McNamyver: The Living Skylights.

***

¹Well, not much anyway.

²"Glow in the dark mucus!"

³I'm not saying we were cool as cucumbers, but in the car park, in broad daylight we were standing around and ultimately breaking into a car and campus security didn't come our way at all.

^3.5Ostensibly it was a screwdriver, but that foot-long lump of steel would only fit screws that grew up beside a nuclear power plant in the 1950s.

⁴The narrative laws governing Heists require certain phrases to be included. Continuity be damned.

***

Afterword: For those that aren't fans of Burn Notice, I hope there was still some amusement and basking-in-my-uncanny-skills-of-improvisation to be had. The incident did happen and the only liberties I took in its description were how coolly we went to the "parking lot," how much striding I did and I didn't break a sweat during the incident; that was purely for dramatic effect.

For anyone that is interested, I got the Eye on Springfield clip here and the "click" sound effect here. Of course Blogger does not host audio, so I had to sign-up for a place that did. I went here.

I cut out the Kent Brockman intro to EoS and put that up. And then the wav for "click" format was not playing, and I converted it to mp3. I could almost write a whole entry about the charade; well, I could, if there was any more to it.

McNamyver part 1

[Blogger's note: I had intended to write this series up before I left Dublin, but I forgot about it until I was taking pictures off of my phone.]

Every now and again I get a chance to shine.

Sometimes if a friend of mine (sometimes even a compadre) has a problem, if no one else can help and if they can find them me, maybe you he/she can hire me.^0,1

It all began waaaaay back in autumn 2003....

It was the first day of term, and fresh out of the day's last lecture I get a call from Ro-Ro. Due to circumstance more amusing not to mention, he locked himself out of the apartment with the oven on.² He had just moved in with his girlfriend and it was essentially his first day in the little flat on unsupervised. Even though herself had a key and was only a 10 minute walk away, Ro-Ro felt it best not to involve her.

The apartment is in the basement of a converted Georgian house, and there are two access points: the door and a narrow, narrow window overlooking by the backyard.^2.1 The keys were in a backpack on the bed at the opposite side of the flat (2.5 m from the window).^2.5 Being the strapping examples of human form that we were, neither him nor I could fit through the window.

On my way to his rescue, some friendly carpenters renovating a pub, gave me a discarded switch of timber, which Ro-Ro used as a fing-longer to turn off the oven. His most pressing concern solved, we stood in the garden for a while thinking on how to get to the keys. Eventually, Ro-Ro mentioned there was a roll of stiff tubing under the stairs; I felt that this should have been mentioned earlier.³

It being a dingy garden on the Northside, there was plenty of junk lying around: 5L paint drums, rusty nails, bricks, rusted wheelless bikes, etc. I hammered some nails into one end of the tubing to make a rudimentary hooking device and we fed it through the window.⁴ But it didn't pan out because the bag was too heavy and kept slipping off its perch.

Struck by inspiration,⁵ I jammed the sturdy steel handle of a foreshadowed paint drum down the end of the tube, holding it in place with those nails that were not good for much else. And thus, with my rudimentary hooking device somewhat less rudimentary, we were able to get the bag and our rightful ingress to the premises.

Stay tuned for the next installment of of McNamyver: Chemical Burn Notice.

***

⁰Will work for food.

¹"Talk about poor production values, he references one 80s classic with his title and another in the introductory section; hack."

²If you like, imagine him with a too-small towel clasped around his waist, shampoo still in his hair and a back-scrubber in his free hand.

^2.1It makes sense if you tried looking out the window.

^2.5It does smack of an online game such as this, but that is how it happened to be.

³"Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."

⁴More accurately: bricked. And on a related note: Real Men Don't Need Swiss Army Knives.

⁵Recently such moments of inspiration have been shown to be detectable by monitoring brain activity. Again, I am reminded how young neuro-psyhcology is in the grand schemes of things. By which I mean they are largely focussed on things filed away under "That's Obvious;"ⁱ you only have to look in someone's eyes to see that light bulb switch on. Or for that matter, one can feel the change in the mind when the solution to a problem crystallizes.

***

ⁱOf course a number of things are incorrectly filed away under this heading so better off checking things thoroughly. As a whole that blog is worth a read [Thanks to Kevin for sending it on to me], if you can stand being told ad multiplicum how bad we are at thinking and remembering.

False Idols

[Blogger's note, once again this is one that has been gathering dust for a couple of months]

Previously on The Trouble With Máirtín - Motherdearest came to Dublin to bring back the most of the books, suits and bulky items I have gathered in the last 8 years.

As we approached home, I broached the subject of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.^–1 Often has she voiced her love of Eimhin, it being stronger than her feelings for her own father or mother. I asked Deirdre why this was the case. She figured it was because Eimhin brings her toys and gifts when he returns from far away lands. So she suggested that I bring her one of the pair of shoes that were bought for her in Dublin as an offering. I was all for smoothing over the weekend. It didn't seem of consequence at the time, but Diorraing had bought himself two pairs of sunglasses and Cárthach another pair.^–0.5

We arrived in Lisdoon, and I gave Molly her shoes, and she gushed over them and thanked me sweetly. Then she spotted Diorraing's glasses. He told her that he got them in Dublin. Molly said, rather accusingly,"Máirtín got me shoes in Dublin, why didn't he get me sunglasses as well?"⁰

Molly begged Diorraing to wear the sunglasses for a while, so he let her. Since "she got snot on 'em" he refused to give them to her again. Eager/desperate to get into her good graces, I chased Diorraing down and pried the sunglasses from his grasp. He took them off of her, and again I chased him down. This time we took it outside, where there was much wrestling and capering. In all the excitement, Molly forgot whose side she was on and starting kicking me and running away with her other brothers as I lay prone.

Inevitably, Molly broke the glasses by trying to snatch them off of Diorraing and put an end to this episode of our lives. [Fade to black]

[The lead-in: To make room for visiting cousins, I slept in Molly's bed, which goes unused.¹]

As closing credits roll underneath:

The next morning she came in to me. Asked me what I was doing in [Directed by] her room. I told her that she never slept here. She repeated [Written by] herself and added that the bed was too small for me [Key grip], that I was too big and it was perfect for her [Cinematography]. She even went as far as to suggest that I sleep in Eimhin's [Best boy] bed.

–I flashbacked to a morning a year back, where she [Continuity] woke me and disapprovingly asked Deirdre,"Why Máirtín was sleeping [Filmed on location] in Eimhin's room?"–

While she stalked out of her pink, pink room, she made the universal gesture for I-Have-My-Eyes-On-You²; and I pulled the covers up to my nose. [Ballyconnoe Productions, Logo: image of a half bald doll with a dodgy eye holding a mace]

***

^–1SWMNBN to her friendsⁱ

^-–0.5They were of Russian design I think, Chekov or something like that.

⁰My reaction was:"..."ⁱⁱ

¹She sleeps in the master bedroom with her parents. I think it is because she is used to immediate service. Since she drinks copious amounts during the night, when she finds her cup empty, she'll reach over and whack the parent closest declaring:"More!"

²Index and middle finger of the person's hand point at their eyes and then turn and point at you; This really did happen. I found out later that Diorraing had been doing it to her and as a result she picked it up.

***

ⁱThink Lovecraft.

ⁱⁱIt was how I didn't say it that said it all.

The forgotten Mac

A few weeks back, I started moving my stuff out of Dublin. Cárthach and Diorraing came up with Deirdre to get some shopping in in Dundrum before getting me and my things. Shortly after we left the the house, Diorraing started teasing Cárthach. I told him to stop it. He countered that Eimhin and I teased Cillian. I told him that we didn't do that any more. He began the sentence "Is it because he has a job now-"

"- and you don't." finished Cárthach.⁰

I reeled.

He didn't even lift his head from his game. He just rattled the 3 syllables off as he tapped the buttons on his DS. He kept his head down even when Diorraing related the incident with malicious to Deirdre. On reflection, I reckon the little tike was oblivious to Diorraing's jibes, hunched over his Nintendo™ as he was; My interdiction was for naught. Heck, I don't even know if he is aware that he said anything...

Previously, I described Cárthach as a "computer savvy sweetheart." Those of a more immediate acquaintance also know him for his astonishing skill in cards:

• In cribbage,¹ he has beaten all of us far more than he has lost, even when he started playing it and needed help counting his score.
• Once, I played him in poker and he got three kings in his hand twice in a row. I smelled a rat, but Cárthach smiled his dimpled smile, unaware and uncaring of the tall odds he beat.²

He has memorized phone numbers so that he can call Deirdre and Jacko to make demands wherever they are. More recently he was able to recall 6 playing cards in a row after seeing them once; Granted it was only the first 6 out of 15 cards, but it impressed me. [Edit: yesterday he learned between 10 and 15 cards in sequence]

When he was playing a game of 21 on the basketball ring at home, he caught the ball, but was too far away for a good chance of shooting. After a moment's calculation, he chucked the ball farther away, for the next person to get.

I digress.

After he tired of his Nintendo, Cárthach asked if I wanted to play "I Spy" with him. My mother leaned over and cautioned me that what he says "mightn't be spelt correctly, or actually exist."

Cárthach:"I spy with my little eye something beginning with…. 'D'… no. 'D and K'… No.. I spy with my little eye something beginning with 'D' and "C/Kl'."

[This turned out to be Dark Clouds. Since no one guessed correctly, he continued.]

Cárthach:"I spy with my little eye something that begins with 'W'"

"Wall?"

"No"

"Window?"

"No"

"Wheel?"

"No"

It continued like this... we gave up and he told us:

"White, the white on the lines on the road."

How could I explain to a 6 year old that adjectives are not things to be spied up on? Even asking the question, I don't know if I could explain it to a 26 year old.

After this, motherdearest asked Cárthach to give me a go:

Mairtin:"I spy with my little eye something beginning with 'C'"

[A brief silence, no more than 5 seconds]

Cártach:"Crane."

Máirtín:"… yes."

I begged another turn, he let me have it. This time I picked something beginning with 'W.' It was "wire" and he got it in 5 guesses.

Motherdearest got the next go, she picked something beginning with 'S.' Within 10 guesses Cárthach got it. Sunglasses, as in the sunglasses Deirdre was wearing and hence looking through. At this point I was getting freaked out by how good he was at this game. What followed was himself choosing objects or qualities of objects again and again, it all blurs together really. One thing that does stick out is when Diorraing was in the hot seat. Deirdre gave up on it, I gave up on it, so Diorraing told us what it was. Cárthach declared he hadn't given up and repeated the word. It was the first, but not the last time that he pulled that fast one.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, as was most of the weekend thereafter, but Cárthach came out with a stellar put-down for Diorraing:

"Diorraing, you're stupid. You're not smart, Diorraing."

In my youngest brother, there is a triple threat: a disarming cherubic smile, an unorthodox mind, and a Machiavellian streak; I am somewhat reminded of the titular character in I, Claudius.

***

⁰ Technically the sentence is a question; Cárthach's tone implied an emphatic assertion.^i
1This is a card game our grandfather brought back from the Uranium mines of Canada. A two-man game, each is dealt 6 cards. Two of each set are combined to make a third hand that the dealer gets to use after the two primary hands are dealt with. where you win by scoring more points than your opponent based on pairs, three of a kind, 4 of a kind, 3 to 5 card runs, flushes, etc. Apparently it is one of the most popular popular games in the English-speaking world.^ii
2There is a devoted wikipedia page to poker card probabilities. According to it the odds of Cárthach/someone drawing a three of a kind is roughly 0.021. For him to draw a second one it is the 0.021 squared, ~0.0004; choosing the specific cards is slightly lower again. Probability not being my strong suit, I'll leave that for my betters to ponder.

***

ⁱAn interesting aside: Evidence to universality of sentence cadence with respect to question and non-question.
ⁱⁱThe reference is from a text published in 1898... given the lack of Cribbage After Dark, I think it is somewhat dated.

The one in England

Many of my readers have voiced a liking for a character that appears often in my tales of Bog¹: "The Mother." Unusually tech savvy for a mother of 6, often is the time she put me and my siblings in our places on-line; unfortunately, she has to contend with Molly now, who is some kind of cunning pod person in the guise of a sweet little girl.^1.5

Since I am somewhat occupied writing my thesis, I am happy to bang out a work-light piece of fluff to throw to the masses.²

The following takes place between the hours of 8 p.m. and 10 a.m.:

I got the scroll box html code from here, no longer am I at the mercy of blogger not showing things legibly!

*****

¹ I originally come from Bog Road... I never saw issue with it until I went to Irish College at the tender age of 12 and the dang city folk mocked me for it; Also it is an allusion to Tales of Yore.

^1.5Case in point:

²Maybe more accurate to say mass of readers; I think I have just enough for a single pile of people.

Hickey versus the fractals

A friend of mine, who shall remain Hickey, sent a group of us this email:

http://kottke.org/10/02/insanely-deep-fractal-zoom

This is probably one for you, Mairtin, but can anyone explain to me why I'm supposed to be impressed by this. I'm seeing these Mandelbrot set's everywhere on the tinterweb [sic] lately and I don't get it. Why isn't it just an animation that goes on for a long time (in theory can't it go on infinitely)? What exactly is it supposed to convey, mean, represent?

It has been a while since I deigned to put up a blog post and while writing my first [lengthy, oft-times kitsch and pontificating] response to Hickey's challenge, I decided that this fit the bill.

Mairtin McNamara for the defence, your Hickey.

The Mandelbrot set is the flagship for a group of mathematical oddities known as fractals.

Fractals look the same at any scale of magnification.(But, as you said, theoretically.)

This is their key characteristic. Well, that and the fact that they arise from a few simple steps or the solution to a few equations; You get something of potentially infinite vastness, but contiguous enough to shift smoothly from coarse to fine scales, all from a tiny package of information.

Evidence A for the defence:

This is bread and butter in biology. The construction of nerve fibers, the lungs, the folds in the brain, fingerprint patterns, blood vessels, etc. are all examples of the application of fractal behaviour by human genome/body. With a fractal expression it is tantamount to having a button called "create vein system."

It is a few years since I read it, but in Max Gleick's book, Chaos, he as an example of how flexible fractals can be, he writes about a guy who created a set of expressions that yielded the face of a dog, and more easily the leaf of a fern.

Fractal geometries also depict the behaviour of dynamic systems.* I say depict, since it is useless as a predictive tool- as evidenced [I haven't used that as a verb in a while...] by the lack ironclad predictions in the stock market, or the bloody weather.

Simply, it shows you the quality of things, what kind of thing to expect.

Evidence B for the defence:

A weather forecast is the most likely outcome based on numerous simulations performed on current available data. It is an educated guess, not a prophesy [particularly since Met Eireann uses arcane code from the 1960s that is to modern forecasting what an ass-and-cart is to a Ferrari Enzo...]

Fractals come into this because they form in the visualisations/plots of the data- you could probably interpret it as a piece of music, if you were so inclined, but I wouldn't recommend it though.

I digress... the fractals show as almost repeating and never overlapping phase trajectories. In the context of weather the shape of the fractals show in broad-stroke terms how many different types of day could unfold and whether the weather of one of these days is a strange attractor of sorts.

Evidence C for the defence:

Fractals hold an interest in game graphics and special effects, since both want simple little packages that use little energy to provide complex results: clouds of smoke, water splashes, explosions, river deltas, branches of trees, the way wind bends the blades of grass in a lawn, hair on the head of a back-flipping cheerleader, etc. can be represented by some kind of fractal and simulating contextually , or phenomenologically can hugely simplify things, when compared to modelling individual elements in painstaking detail.

Closing statement:

In summary, it is unlikely we could exist today without fractal phenomena, since our bloated DNA would be rife with lethal errors in their convoluted algorithm "how to construct vein system" ["error at vein-889-9-3-1, address not found"]

The defence rests, your Hickey.

I haven't read it in about 6 years, but there is a book called the Collapse of Chaos that does an amazing job of addressing the flaws of the deterministic view of the world adopted by most scientists since year dot, and how it compares with the contextual (i.e. qualitative view) that fractals, Poincaré plots, horseshoe plots, etc. represent. A caution though: it is densely written, I could only go through 10-20 pages at a time before needing a break to think about what they were saying. Max Gleick's book I mentioned earlier is a better one to cut your teeth on, or even to wet your toes with.

You'll notice the sparsity of references in this, it is more a personal essay, than a formal response. Nonetheless, it will be this week's blog post, for no other reason than my canookie uncle demanded one of me..

*Dynamic systems is a catchall phrase: populations and food supplies, the rate change of data failures in a transmission with respect to time, weather- as I note at length-, and almost anything else you can think of. Hell even how a day in your life progresses can be considered as a fractal... if you lived it over and over again like Mr Murray in Groundhog Day and assigned numerical values to the things you did in your day and the outcome thereof... You get the idea.

In writing this little essay on "what the Mandelbrot set means to me" I am reminded of a comment my seconday school English teacher made at the end of one of my essays:

Somewhat overwhelmed by its own verbosity

I imagine that it will be my epithet...¹

Feeling guilty for inundating my friends with a wall of text, left in their inboxes waiting to be sprung on a Sunday morn, I wrote a more brief one:

If that wall of text was too much to consider reading on a Sunday morning:

The set is the iconic representation of infinite recursion, something rich, complex and almost the same arising from a simple set of rules.

Poetically speaking it represents life.

It is seen all over nature- from trees to blood vessels.

By corollary, fractal shapes that we make can follow the spirit of the law of the world around us as opposed to the letter of it.

If I get the chance, I'll comb through the, currently, baseless, but generally reasonable, claims I made above and insert citations. I make no promises though.

*****

¹I could write another post on how much I enjoyed my teacher's sense of humour, but then it wouldn't be very funny, would it?

I am man, hear me whimper

I was at home last week, for Easter. As expected Molly and I exchanged words and significant looks.

She hasn't been going to crèche recently. Every morning, she gives a few coughs for appearances sake and declares she is sick. Once this has been accepted, she retires to her room¹ and watches "TeeeeVTeeees," which is what she calls television.²

I took to asking her when she was going back to crèche. At first she would cough and repeat she was sick; I rebutted with,"Oh... sounds like you need to go to the doctor." She knew she was rumbled so didn't use that line of defence again.

Instead she out-and-out ignored me. Her blanking of me was impressive, she gave absolutely no indication that she even heard me, not a dismissive shake of the head, not a turn of the shoulder; I may as well have been an imaginary friend that she had out-grown. I was so appalled that I took my tale of being-ignored-by-my-3-year-old-sister to Facebook... More the fool was I:

You read it right there, folks; My mother pwned me, pwned me royally. The irony of it all! I discovered just that weekend that my mother had unfriended me on Facebook because of a harmless comment I put on my page.³ Scant days before the above flaming, I had added her again as a friend. Surely it is ironic?

To cap it off, Molly asked her father if he could kill me; She said it so sweetly.

I have noted her cunning in the past, compared to the two youngest brothers even now her guile is otherworldly. Mr Kipling doesn't just make exceedingly good cakes, he makes exceedingly good points too:

...But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male...⁴

When the blanking seemed to have no effect on me, ["never let them see you bleed!"], she took to giving me the coldest, flintiest stare I have seen on any one, including Jon Hamm and Ian McShane! In the event of my [un-]timely demise by her machinations,^4.5 I would that this be my epitaph:

Us men,

We never have a chance.

Here we are;

Harmless dreamers;

Happy to play our games,

While the women,

The women plot and maneuver.

Sure, they call it "playing house";

I don't buy it.

Not for a second.⁵

****

¹It isn't technically her room; It's the sitting room; Supposedly a common area.

²Eimhin and I call Cárthach "DVDs." When he was younger, the thing he rattled off most often was: "We play Playstation, watch deeeevdeeeeeees [the "v" is supposed to be barely perceptible, like a caught breath] on Máirtin's laptop. It be OK" - It should be noted that Cárthach (now 6) is a computer savvy sweetheart, he has the shortcut keys down for opening movies, going to fullscreen on them and he can google online games pertaining to cartoons he likes and gets the trailers for films he wants to see; I played him in a turn based game, while I was at home, and he told me that he had my strategy figured out. Bless.ⁱ

³

I edited the image to protect the identities of those involved.

⁴From Rudyard Kipling's The Female of the Species.

^4.5The inclusion of "un-" will very much decide on who you are talking to... on reflection it probably won't come up.

⁵We'll say this is from my pink period..

***

ⁱHe only thought he did; I just about beat him.

Super Science Slide-Show Special

Some research images, stuff that is so hydrophobic it kicks itself out of solution as quickly as possible. So fast it doesn't have any structure- an amorphous phase. Nothing happens to it, so it builds up, but eventually some of it develops a structure- some crystals- and it breaks up. The whole thing took about 5 minutes to happen.

"Just a little meta-stable amorphous phase, nothing to worry about..."

"Ah! He's brought a friend, or grown..."

"Space..."

"Now that is just psychedelic"

"It's OK, looks like it is breaking up into crystals, fine ordered members of society"

Collected the images with a microscope submerged in a beaker of my¹ solution and I² dumped in some acid to get the thing to come out of solution.

☆ ☆ ☆

¹It is a chemical I used in my PhD research

²By "I," I mean Barbara did the experiments