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.

I think the images speak for themselves.

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.

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

 

<br /> No Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition v 1.4.1 support for APPLET!!<br />

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:

Here’s a digital take on the 8th painting in the ox herding series.

<br /> No Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition v 1.4.1 support for APPLET!!<br />

It looks different every time. Here are some random renderings that I liked:

Here is more of a spherical version:

And here is a hi-res image over here, and a little cut-out to give you a sense for the texture:

Chris Messina thinks its all about facebook trying to own your digital identity, and he has an interesting post along those lines over on his blog.

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.

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…

At the moment, the top five is as follows:

1. http://bit.ly/uVKNA (3,026) 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
2. http://bit.ly/QfMeA (2,134) First 100 Days | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
3. http://bit.ly/5hnAd (2,761) Homeless To Phase Out Dimes By 2011 | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
4. http://bit.ly/7pNe (2,083) Church puts Passion of Christ on Twitter — newsday.com
5. http://bit.ly/HFJyd (1,904) The New Bebo: 50 Percent Growth in One Month

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?

And of course this now goes without saying, but…


if you found this interesting, please share (or re-tweet) it!

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.

As I’ve said before, the future of email is way better email.

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?

In his wild-man style, he covers everything from open payment systems to friend lists and by the end of the article seems to have transformed decade old eMail systems into brand new billion dollar business franchises that will dominate eCommerce and displace the social networks.

So he can be dramatic. So what.

The main point he is making at the bottom of it all is that the social information implicit in email is being badly under leveraged. He gets into a little more detail on it over here.

There are a few interesting ideas in there, and I think that for many people email is a good source of social information. His vision is that email patterns will be analyzed and used to come up with a list of contacts who should become the short list for new social sharing.

PROBLEM: when i’m on a website or social network or social app, it wants me to help refer other people / help with some lame-o viral marketing scheme. however, i’m only gonna do that for a select few who really share my context / insanity, not everyone in my network (unless my name is Robert Scoble).

what I DO NOT WANT:

• select from a god-awful list of 100 faces in your pop-up face listbox
• upload my entire address book of 2000+ contacts for you to spam the world
• wait for your data-loading / selection function to crash horribly, after taking forever to load

what I DO WANT:

• popup the MOST RELEVANT 5-10 peeps who meet certain key criteria
• use an intelligent combination of shared interests & messaging frequency to figure out who these “TOP” friends are (for the given context)

let me select 1-3 of them to invite & checkout an awesome [video game | baby stroller | new book | really good pr0n] i just found

Sounds cool. I think the problem with the thinking is that people communicate for vastly different reasons and the algos needed to guess at which contacts might be relevant for which purpose are way-hard to write. We tried to use prior behavior to guess at what products might be relevant for users at Shopping.com. If our experiences with behavioral relevance at shopping.com are any indication, the best friend-guessing in the world will only get you 80% of the way there. Thats not good enough to automate the job, and it’s not like its the most painful thing in the world to check off a few boxes each time you want to do some medium-scale sharing.

Although nice to have, I doubt if they will be worth in revenue terms the investment they would take to write well…