This one really really looks random, but it’s as well defined as any of the other more geometric images I’ve posted. Fractals don’t follow the same rules that we are used to. That’s what makes them interesting subjects. My latest burst of posting has died down as I’ve gotten busy and probably will be for a while with the holidays and things picking up at work.
My First canvas experiment
Bouncing Circle Grid
Supercharged performance
I was going back through some of my old posts and making sure the javascript still works, and I loaded up the three.js particle system test code I put up a while back. Instead of being broken, it was even faster in chrome than when i wrote it. I was surprised at how much of a difference the boost in performance made.
Grids of circles
All things must pass
This article reminded me of one of the strange features of the standard wave equation from basic physics. The wave equation describes an infinitely long vibrating string. Like point masses from Newtonian physics each bit of string has a position and velocity. If you know the position and velocity of the entire string at one moment of time, you can predict the position and momentum of any bit of string at any time in the past or present. It seems natural to think in those terms because we predict the motion of things around us all the time.

The reason this works is that the wave equation lets us solve for the time evolution of the system based on the current state. For the case of a string, the time and position variables are symmetric, and knowing the position and velocity of the string at one point for all time is just as good as knowing about all space at one time. Philosophically this is a nice feature. It means that nothing in this world can escape you, all you have to do is sit in one place and everything either has passed you by or will pass you by, nothing can avoid you forever.
In higher dimensions things are similar, but just a little different. For a 3 dimensional space time (2 spacial dimensions and 1 time) knowing the position and velocity for all space at an instant of time is what you need to make predictions. Instead of sitting in 1 place and being able to keep track of everything, you need to monitor a single line that divides the world in half. Knowing everything that crosses that line for all time lets you know everything in that space. In our 3 dimensional spacial world, you have to monitor an entire infinite plane.
That works because signals on this string travel in one direction with one speed, they never turn around or stop. That is completely unlike particle dynamics where things move independently. This would be just an interesting feature of these wave equations, but basic quantum mechanics is a wave theory, and the same rules apply.
Circled out
Circular Cellular Automata
These are the same cellular automata I’ve been working with. This time I’ve just mapped them into a circular grid, which seemed to make sense as I’m using circular boundary conditions.
Infinite Flow
Bouncing circles
More of the stereographic circle series. In this one, the circles are defined by iterating over a circle in 3 dimensional space. That circle is bouncing up and down in the vertical direction.
The changing shape and disappearance come from the circle leaving the interior of the sphere and returning bit by bit.



































