chaoticutopia | January 26, 2007Trying to merge a flame fractal with a Julia set and a 3D sphere was almost enough to make my computer have a thermonuclear meltdown.... or at the very least, run out of memory. With a little coaxing, however, I was able to make it work. I'd say the results were pretty hot:
...but not quite as hot as another flaming sphere that we see every day:
Sol (image taken this morning by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory)
This seemed like a good time to make a corona-like fractal. Coronal Mass Ejections have been spurting out the side of our grand star over the last week. (Check out these cool…
chaoticutopia | January 26, 2007This guy is simply amazing. While my fractal art uses a computer to explore the fuzzy boundaries between a 2nd and 3rd dimension, Peter Callesen's art uses nothing more than standard paper--the very same sort you probably have sitting in your printer tray--and a little glue. From these humble beginnings come fantastic landscapes, like this waterfall:
Water Always Finds Its Way by Peter Callesen
A surreal treat is found at the bottom of the picture, where the paper waterfall spills out of its imaginary landscape onto the frame:
Many of Callesen's works disguise hidden treasures like this.…
chaoticutopia | January 23, 2007...let's come up with some advice for the next president.
It seems like everyone is passing the buck on climate change, these days. In his speech, President Bush spoke of future technologies, and called climate change a "serious problem". He isn't going to be in office too much longer, of course, and the next president will be faced with decisions concerning that serious problem. As the Presidential Climate Action Project put it:
Leading scientists estimate that the international community has approximately 10 years to make serious changes in its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if we wish to…
chaoticutopia | January 20, 2007I must apologize for being a bit slow with blogging lately, and now a day late with the Friday Fractal. A series of events and observations left me in an existential mood, pondering the fuzziness of the line between reality and fiction. Since my story on the subject, Illusions in Lavender was published this week, I have to admit, it is just that sort of philosophical pondering that can drive a person to madness. I've gotten used to these moods, however, and the most that suffered was my blogging. This week, however, as I emerged from that feverish hermit state, I caught another sort of fever…
chaoticutopia | January 16, 2007If you are love reading great science blogs, and wish you could read them while you are away from the internet, check this out: The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006:
A collection of 50 selected blog posts showcasing the quality and diversity of writing on science blogs till 2006.
With the help of his readers, fellow ScienceBlogger Bora Zivkovik (better known 'round these parts as Coturnix at a Blog Around the Clock) has scoured the web to find the best science writing in the blogosphere, and compiled it all in one easy-to-read volume. It is now available to purchase…
chaoticutopia | January 13, 2007Everybody else is doing it.... who am I to argue with peer pressure?
Now, you can be cool too, make your own library catalogue card, here.
chaoticutopia | January 12, 2007Many things in nature seem to catch our eye, simply by hovering between a turbulent, chaotic mess, and a vacant, serene sense of order. Art tends to reflect these dichotomies in nature, even when it is fairly abstract in nature. Some say it stems from a fascination from good and evil, or light and dark, or lightness and weight. But I suspect we just enjoy exploring the point in between. This is the draw of fractal art... the edge of the fractal itself, the border between the "inside" and the "outside" of the shape, can be followed endlessly. To our eye, the wonders and variation never seem to…
chaoticutopia | January 10, 2007Here's a collection of odd things I've run across in the last week or so. A fireball from space here, maps of the future there, general chaos everywhere, and someone riding the waves... just go with the flow.
First, last week, the skies over our head were glowing in the darkest hour, just before dawn. A chunk of Russian spacecraft, an SL-4 rocket body plummeted to earth, flaring into a giant fireball before crashing into the middle of Wyoming. Fun stuff. My husband happened to be outside at the time, taking a break from his assembly of the daily news clips. Although our view to the north is…
chaoticutopia | January 9, 2007I spent long enough thinking about my last entry, that I forgot to announce my news. I've been admitted to the University of Colorado at Boulder, in the Environmental Studies program. I still need to make a few contacts to establish a double major, and study philosophy as well. (Perhaps I can eventually focus on the flow of being!) It's a great oppourtunity, and I'm pretty excited. Of course, this means that I'll be spending the next week scrambling to be registered and set up for the start of spring semester which is about a week away. That's chaos for ya... I'll still be riding the waves…
chaoticutopia | January 9, 2007As a writer, I love to use metaphors to explain what I see. Sometimes, it is much easier to describe how something is like another thing than it is to describe the thing itself. The metaphor adds a subjective layer of context to a thing, making the unfamiliar familiar. Language is, in some part, all subjective layers of context: a thing is a thing; we label and describe it for our convenience. We come to agreements about our language, about our use of labels, to the point where a thing and its label are indistinguishable.
The word "water" is indistinguishable from water itself, as it is…
chaoticutopia | January 6, 2007It's hard to believe I've been blogging for a year now. In some ways, I still feel like a newb, struggling to put up my three or so posts a week. Yet, when I look back at all the work I've done in the last year, I'm amazed at all that I did. Choosing the "best of Chaotic Utopia" was no easier than choosing a favorite among my fractals. The subjects and formats I've covered have been incredibly diverse, yet, as I've seen while writing the outline for my latest book, they all seem to be driving at the same idea.
That is, we live in a world rich in complex patterns... where most everything we…
chaoticutopia | January 5, 2007I'd be hard pressed to choose a favorite from all of the fractals I've done as a Friday Feature. I started the feature in April of last year, after playing around with a fractal toy that a friend of mine built. Since then, I've created a piece of nature-inspired fractal art nearly every week. I've pasted them all into one block here, with a few abstract fractals included in the bottom row:
(Descriptions and links can be found beneath the fold)
In the first column, from top to bottom, are 1. Ammonite (which was also 15), 2. Red Spot Jr., 3. Rose, 4. Reflection of the Sun, 5. Grasshopper, 6.…
chaoticutopia | January 2, 2007I'll admit, I've never been a big fan of New Year's resolutions. It isn't that I don't like setting goals... but vowing to make a major lifestyle change with a time limit does seem to be asking for trouble. After all, there will always be a touch of chaos. With that in mind, I actually made a resolution last year, and more astonishingly, kept it. In fact, you're looking at it... this blog.
Chaotic Utopia was around before 2006, but rarely seen. I had a collection of essays, stories, poems, doodles, and ideas that (to me) seemed rather important (though I wasn't completely sure why) stored on…
chaoticutopia | December 29, 2006Even in a snowy winter landscape, I feel as if I'm surrounded by fractals. In order to capture this feeling, I turned to the complex topography of the Mandelbrot set. I added an fBm coloring algorithm, to mimic the soft hues of a winter storm. When the fractal was complete, I decided to superimpose a sketchy map outline for clarity. (The NOAA does it, why can't I?) Here's what I came up with:
...which is rather similar to a recent image from the NOAA:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Image of the Day, showing snow accumulation over the Rockies from this week's…
chaoticutopia | December 23, 2006In order to create a festive holiday fractal, you don't even need a computer. All you need are a few standard Christmas decorations: glass balls and lights. (Actually, you don't even need Christmas lights, any light source will do.) It's quite simple: put the balls in a small pile under the light, pressing up against one another. Voila:
If you manage to get 4 balls together in a tetrahedron (each ball touching every other ball) the fractal image in the middle is called a Wada basin. In this type of fractal, there are three basins of attraction--areas where the patterns tend to converge, but…
chaoticutopia | December 20, 2006What do you do when stuck at home in a blizzard? Why, build a snow fort, of course:
And, inside, to wish you a Merry Winter Solstice, is the king of the fort, Roland:
chaoticutopia | December 20, 2006The mother of all logarithmic spirals is focused right over my head. Check it out:
Basically, moisture is being drawn from the Gulf of Mexico and blown to the northwest. There, it climbs the slopes of the Rockies, where it is colliding with a large mass of cold air from the arctic. For Denver, which has been cool and clear all week, this means one thing... Blizzard:
Current forecasts expect an average of an inch a snow an hour, through tomorrow. The snow is already drifting up to a foot high around our house, and gusts of wind (estimated by the NOAA to be as high as 40 mph) have been…
chaoticutopia | December 19, 2006I get strange searches from google or yahoo all the time, from queries about facial hair to blowing things up. It isn't too unusual for a search engine to come up with sites unrelated to the original query, so I usually give these searches little more than a cursory glance. One search from yahoo last week, however, caught my eye:
disorder to describe ability to find meaning in random information wikipedia
For once, I thought, "kid, you've come to the right place." Not that they stayed... the link (#6 in the search list) led to my story, "Illusions in Lavender", which describes the world as…
chaoticutopia | December 17, 2006Finally! Well, sort of... my caricature, along with all the other ScienceBloggers, appears in the middle of the next issue of Seed Magazine, and also here. You'll find me lurking off to the sides, looking sort of evil. ;-)
chaoticutopia | December 17, 2006I'm a bit late on the Friday Fractal this week, mostly because I've been busy with my son's 6th birthday party. Since Roland adores these fractals almost as much as I do, I told him he could make this week's fractal. (That's another reason we're late... he has school on Fridays, and had the party yesterday.) He understands the basic premise behind a fractal--a pattern repeats, but with differences--enough to occasionally point them out to me in nature and art. When he sits down in front of the computer, however, he just wants to pick wild colors and weird shapes. I can't say as I blame him--…