This is my first update since I’ve been screwing around with updating the template. I’ve moved off of 2010 to 2011, and dropped that to go the base genesis framework. I like the default font a lot, but still don’t like the default urls that wordpress generates, so I think I’m going to end up at a customized version of the roots framework. Enough blogtalk. I’ve been playing around with mapping out different grids using differential equations. This was supposed to be concentric circles.
Archives for June 2012
A minor update – circles
I’ve changed the algorithm up a little bit using circles instead of lines. Â I like the additional focus point it adds to the composition.
Related Images:
Canvas Line Based Image Renderer
This is the second in a series of canvas rendering demos that I’m putting together. The first  was from yesterday’s post using random colored circles.  This one was inspired by an image I came across on pinterest.
Most images look pretty horrible with this approach, but objects that have relatively plain textures and strongly delineated boundaries both end up looking pretty good.
Like yesterdays demo, you need to have an image on your system to upload to see anything.
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HTML5 Canvas Image Effects
It helps when you actually upload the page for your demos. Â One of the down sides of scheduling posts before finishing them is that you might publish prematurely.
This is the first page I put together to play around with the combining the canvas and file upload controls. Â The page works by loading up the image and generating random circles using the center point of the circle to sample the color. Â Playing with the alpha level of the circle led to some interesting effects, but I didn’t prefer one setting over any of the others, so I set it to vary with time.
I’m trying to get it to preload an image from the site, but the canvas security and random errors I’m getting are making it not worth the effort. Â Long story short, you have to have an image to upload for this page to work, so when you navigate to it, click the button and upload an image.
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Making sense of space-time
Adding Minkowski options in my Voronoi page made me realize that I really wasn’t sure how to interpret the results, and that I’d always been puzzled thinking about the zero distance between points of the light cone means.
Reading: Where Is Now? The Paradox Of the Present made a few things snap into place for me. We are small slow moving creatures and the natural speed of space-time is way too fast for us to grasp. It’s only when we look at things that are far, far away like the night sky that we have to come to grips with being denizens of a Minkowski space.
I’ve often thought that one of the biggest hurdles with trying to understand relativity is that most introductions tackle multiple mathematical abstractions all at the same time. Space-time is a complicated concept that is still useful in non-relativistic mechanics. Thinking about points in time is a skill which takes time to learn. Thinking about 4 dimensional and higher spaces is another skill that can be tackled on it’s own. There are many useful and interesting abstract non-Euclidean geometries that don’t require quite the same leap of understanding as relativity.