The Edge of Chaos

American Progress by John Gast Take note of the bison in the painting above, fleeing from America’s angel of death, a now-fallen angel named Manifest Destiny.Take note of the bison, fleeing alongside horseback-riding natives and dwindling wildlife.Take note of the bison, pressed ever-more westward towards a finite boundary, towards the Pacific Ocean. Now, notice the complete lack of fences. Destiny, in the painting above, carries a reel of telegraph wire, but I can’t help but see it as barbed wire. Sure, this picture was trying to depict civilization as this beautiful, progressive thing,…

The ScienceBlogs party here this past Sunday was a blast. We had about half a dozen people stop by, altogether. We ate and drank, talked science and politics, and did silly things for the camera. On the latter note, I now have about a half hour of footage that we shot at the party that is waiting to be edited. I estimate two minutes of it may actually be usable!* *Note...at future parties, don’t put the helium-filled balloons next to the martinis. The combination is apparently too tempting. So, I’ll have more party news later this weekend, when I’ll have time to sit down and look at that. In…

The following fractal is a tribute to our new overlords, Dendroctonus ponderosae. Lindenmayer Trees and Fractal Brownian Motion I wrote about the role of pine beetles in Colorado’s future last week. The conclusion of that piece: a slight rise in temperatures means a strong advantage for pine beetles, which will be able to decimate Colorado’s vast lodgepole pine forests, thus increasing fire danger and erosion, not to mention damaging our tourism. Well, our annual aerial survey of the forests was completed recently, and the news isn’t good: The growth of the beetle epidemic affecting…

Something about climate change makes people want to argue. Take Greenland, for instance. A few weeks ago, I posted a photo essay about the recent acceleration of melting in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Not only is the entry is still getting comments, but it also spurred a discussion on a political message forum that went on for six pages. Watching all these opinions fly, there were a number of times that I wanted to dive in and start defending science... but I’m a hermit, and it is more fun to lurk and watch. Besides, every point that I wanted to bring up can be found in a paper I’ve been waiting…

If we look at the natural world around us, fractals abound. Sometimes, not. This is the greatest puzzle to me... not that fractals appear in nature, but the fact that not everything is a fractal. Working on this week’s layered set (which took a while, mostly due to unrelated circumstances) I found myself questioning that inconsistency. As I try to imitate some iterative, aperiodic pattern with my computer, I often find myself layering one fractal on top of another, to match the foreground and background (i.e., tree and sky, or clouds and land.) Sometimes, I’ll use more than a couple. This…

Many science bloggers are dedicating this week to a week of pure science, in which they are posting a single non-controversial science piece each day. Since I barely manage to get out a quality post every other day, and also since I'm writing a paper on a controversial subject (global warming), I had to decline my invitation to join. However, I admire their effort, and so I'll try to at least be a bit more serious this week. In other words, I'll share some old papers with actual citations in them, rather than just muttering about chaos and posting pretty pictures. I've chosen a few which…

Many 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…

As 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…

My apologies for getting the fractal out a day late, and for keeping it simple. Just as soon as I started to get caught up with things, I caught a nasty little cold. So, here are the basics-I'll get back to more detailed posts as soon as my head clears. Thanks for your patience! For this fractal, I chose to forego the typical Mandelbrot or Julia sets, and stick with a pure fractal coloring algorithm. I use "fractal Brownian motion" to color the fractals rather often, as the stochastic patterns lend themselves well to fuzzy patterns in nature, from fog and clouds to ripples in the Great Sand…

Why can't we picture a fifth dimension? One, two, and three seem so easy to grasp. We can even see how one leads to the next: a line, composed of points, is a component of a shape on a plane, which in turn is a component of a spatial object. Consider that object with an additional aspect, enduring through time, and you can almost envision a fourth--a curving sense of endurance, relative to our space. So, why not imagine another dimension, not just curved, but twisted or spun, which consists of the aspects of time, present, future and past, relating to one another? Ok... don't picture it too…

It's a dimension of chaos! Shall we battle, or ride the waves? They say it's a catchy phrase, but I know what they're thinking. They hear words like, "dimension", "chaos", or "battle", and think laser guns and villains with curling mustaches and deep, evil laughs. They hear "ride the waves" and think of blond-haired muscular heroes being cooed at by girls in polka-dot bikinis. They smile, and thus cheered, move on with their lives. Maybe that's what they think. If so, I'm inclined to let them be. Others, who understand why I obsess over fractals and philosophical notions of existence and…

Why does chaos always strike in threes? I've spent the past three days* dealing with what I can only describe as personal chaos. Of course, I don't mean it in the classic sense; I haven't been floating in a void of disarray. (It just feels like it sometimes.) Rather, I refer to the variables in life... those which we knew were possible, but seem unbelievable when they occur. I'm still seeking order (riding the waves, with a touch of battle, here and there) so it will be a few days before I have time to write. In the meantime, I'd like to share a few bits from my old site--about chaos, of…