Check out the huge heap of awesome that is the mandlebulb or 3d mandlebrot set. Read the whole story over here at this very strange skytopia project page. It seems to have been the brainchild and 20 year quest of Rudy Rucker, which he writes about over on his blog, and also over here at fractal forums, where “the elite meet to geek”. There is some math in both places for people who are interested in how this thing was derived.
The quick summary is that this is a mandlebrot set in intersection with both the xy plane and the xz plane. The math had been around for 20 years but generating fuzzy results which seem to have sharpened up when they changed the exponent from 2 to higher orders. 8 seems to have generated the most impressive results.
Just playing around a bit with some basic branching in processing.
Click on the thing to make new branches. Clicking towards the top of the screen makes for straighter branches, towards the bottom for curvy ones. Clicking towards the left makes skinny branches, right makes fat ones.
Just take a look at these amazing photos that came back from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has been orbiting and photographing mars since 2006 at resolutions of an inch a pixel.
ice erosion, south pole of mars
They look so organic to me, so suspiciously similar to the living processes that are at play all around us here on the earth. It really makes me think about what we mean by the word “organic”. Websters says “of or relating to living organisms”, yet few would argue that these pictures are indications of life on mars.
They sure look like the result of living processes to me though. They look so much like living things do: composed of cells, shifting through time, gradually settling, and then decaying away. We are all familiar with these kinds of facts as they are the fundamental facts of the earth. These photos show that they are quite clearly fundamental processes of Mars as well.
I would argue that they are processes of living systems, period. The surprising conclusion being that the wind, the sea and the stones around us are every bit as alive as we are, and possessed of the same patterns that animate our progress and interactions.
How far a leap is it to assume that there is some source at the heart of the universe somewhere in some abstract center that animates it all, pulsing out some string of ons and offs that ultimately becomes everything around us. Like some huge resonating field that snaps otherwise lifeless dust into animated patterns by way of invisible but ever-present energy.
You be the judge:
impact crater, mars
decaying leaf, earth
thermal expansion, mars
plant leaf cells, earth
dust devil trails, mars
tree branch shadows, earth
You really should click the link and check them in their high res glory over there at the Boston Globe article.
Some new processing work. click the mouse to change the colors and start new shoots growing. This has a really cool texture if you render it at the high resolution. Here is the source code if anyone is interested.
Here are a few screen grabs from versions that looked cool along the way:
Just discovered this incredible java-based open source flash-like product called processing. Very simple to work with and excellent if you are trying to make art-like output for printing. Lets you render at very large scale and output to very large images.
Its been interesting to read reactions around the blogosphere on facebook’s announcement of their adding usernames and the inevitable land grab that will begin tomorrow night when the system goes live.
Anil Dash has a comic take on things. His timeline of events stemming from the facbook identity launch ends in OCtober of 2010 when AOL decides to add a usernames project to their AIM and Bebo 18-month roadmap.
My take is a little different:
It’s about getting you PUBLIC:
My personal take after having spent the last year working on a communications product is that the username announcement is really less about owning your identity and much more about finding a way to get your facebook status updates public in order to compete with twitter.
Twitter is public by default and that is what makes it such a powerful system. There are no barriers to information moving from one user to another. If anyone in the system has anything important to say (like for example if you happened to see a terrorist in a hotel in mumbai, then that information spreads throughout the system in no time.
That is what makes twitter such a powerful system for transmitting news and information and it’s what has set off so much discussion about the real-time web.
The problem for facebook at the moment is that a very strong expectation has been set that information posted there is only available to your friends, and not to anyone in the public. Facebook first added public posts back in March, and then opened them up for celebs and public profiles last month. By most accounts the response was muted at best and posting frequency has declines in places where posts are public. This must be scary for facebook.
By making a big announcement about a new public facing feature and forcing user’s attention over to what their public facing page should be is a great way of shifting expectations slightly towards accepting a public stream of information from you coming out of facebook.
I would bet that within a few weeks of the push, you will be able to publish status items to your public page and within a month or two updates will be public by default.
As I am spending more time inside of twitter it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the “retweet” (RT) is by far the most powerful gesture in the twitter universe. So powerful that I think it’s likely to replace newspapers.
It is the simple pointing of your finger towards an idea and saying that is interesting. Any one or two people pointing to an idea means nothing, but if there are ideas that are powerful enough to get hundreds or thousands of people pointing at them, then they must be interesting.
I think that twitter is now processing information much like a giant brain, with each person acting as a single neuron. If you follow that metaphor, then re-tweeting is the equivalent of a neuron firing.
This is essentially the original crowdsourcing insight behind so many companies, most notably digg. In the twitter universe its much more pure. It can be done from anywhere anytime. Ideas themselves are often very easy to put into 140 characters or less, and if they take somewhat more than 140 characters, it’s easy to reduce them into something that is just a few characters long and then include a link back to the longer bit. But even the links can be nearly 140 characters, which is why we need URL shortening services so that the URLS themselves take up as little room in the message as possible. That is why we now have a variety of newly URL shortening services fighting to the the URL shortening service of choice for the twitter world. tinyUrl and Bit.Ly and is.gd might have a very interesting role to play in the twitter ecosystem.
And if you look at the streams of popular URLs that are being shared on twitter at the moment, you will see that they do indeed feel a little bit like a people magazine cover. One with a decidedly geeky twist, but still…
There are two from the onion (each shared more than 2,000 times in the last hour, and then some geeky news stories including one about twitter itself. (If you find this interesting, you can get a list of these stories sent your mobile device as they happen. How? By following BitLyNow on twitter of course).
There are even services now organizing the popularly shared URLS by category and updating them every 5 minutes. Have a look over here at Tweetmeme for example which is doing a very nice job in that department.
Perhaps the most interesting thing though is that often you don’t even need a link to convey a big idea. In fact, that top URL being shared this hour (3026 re-tweets according to BitLy). Shows a list of the ten most extraordinary tweets that by themselves contained important information. Examples include news of water on mars, the recent crash of Continental airlines 737 in devner, the breaking news of the earthquake in china, and the mumbai terrorist attacks. The list goes on. In these cases, you have both the speed of entry and the power of the re-tweet to focus in on the important content.
So to rephrase all that, twitter (or some other system that contains streams of short updates) will completely replace breaking news coverage because it is both faster to get word of new events, and more transparent in the way it amplifies important messages. It will also partially replace the more thoughtful editorial journalism by sussing out the best content from millions of writers through simple re-tweeting and the wisdom of crowds and then presenting it in real-time steams. Crazy, right?
The data is now starting to trickle in. Here, is a recent Neilson study, for example, that shows that email is starting to slip behind social networks in terms of “active reach”. Here’s the key exhibit:
I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. The sad fact of the matter is that the companies that lead the market in consumer email (Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google in that order) simply can not evolve their products in the ways that the need to evolve in order to address the needs of today’s users.
It would be too upsetting to the existing users to have the products change as drastically as they need to if they want to remain relevant in this new world. The new Yahoo Mail Beta and the Gmail labs efforts are marginal adjustments that amount to little more than window dressing on an experience that is still 40 years old at it’s core.
Given the recent twirtermania sweeping the nation, I couldn’t help but take A close at the transmission mechanisms built into facebook, MySpace, twitter and some other new communications systems. The whole process has been very interesting and it has really illustrated to me just how big and profound twitter is as a system for collecting, processing and transmitting information.
One thing that has really stuck with me is the follower/following model that twitter users to distribute information. I’m struck by how similar that mechanism is to a neuron, and because anyone can follow anyone else the entire twitterverse is in the process of wiring itself up like a big brain.
With Neurons, you have incoming signals travel in through the dendrites. In twitter, this corresponds to incoming messages coming in from the people you are following. In the brain, if enough of the incoming neurons “fire”, then the receiving neuron will also fire, transmitting a pulse down to the neurons to which it is connected to. In twitter, this essentially means that if enough of the people that you are following are tweeting about an idea, then eventually you will start tweeting about it to and the people who follow you will catch word of it and they too may pass it on.
This is how information moves through a brain. It’s also how information moves through twitter. It’s why information on the Mumbai terrorist attacks spread around the world in just a few minutes after people started twittering about them. In fact the “RT” convention for retweeting is precisely this sort of derivative firing.
Just to keep the metaphor going, I think its interesting that some of the most influential twitterers are acting like a sort of sensory organ, constantly scanning the horizon and tweeting away all of the new things they see. Their followers sort the wheat from the chaffe. Its not unlike the eyes simply passing along the fact that something looking like a bus is moving quickly towards you. It’s up to the cerebral cortex to do something about it.
I think Tim o’Reilly (with 100k followers) and Dave Morin (with 150k) are great examples of this. I wonder if the optic nerve has more neural connections than other parts of the brain? Anyone?
We are about to start building some software over here, so it was great timing when a friend recently forwarded me this great post about consumer oriented software development. Its a very thoughtful and thorough post. If you don’t have the time to read it all (it’s so long that it actually has a bibliography!), here is the snippet that I found most valuable:
The top 4 success factors in new product development
A unique, superior and differentiated product with good value-for-money for the customer.
A strong market orientation – voice of the customer is built in
Sharp, early, fact-based product definition before product development begins
Solid up-front homework – doing front end activities like market analysis well
I couldn’t agree more. Enthusiasm and passion are never missing from startups. What is often missing though is the voice of the customer. We are going to be sure that’s not the case here.
