Invitations and the occasional fractal

These days are taken up with invitation madness. We are making our own, and the final fiddle-faddling with them has commenced. We hope to get them out by the weekend.

Recently, I have taken to reading a bit before sleeping. This has led to some late nights as I get caught up in a book. Right now, I am reading Lucifer's Hammer which I never read before. It is a good story with many characters whose paths are beginning to cross. Unlike the linked review, I like the book. The review complains about a slow beginning, but I thought it more like a European paced movie--enjoy the ride as it slowly builds.

I also cranked out another fractal amidst all of my curriculum development and wedding planning. It reminds me of tide pools.

Flying, Flowering, Fitness

My dear and loyal readers, my absence has been due to flying. Well, not entirely. I was not separated from the digital domain, but I was on vacation and decided not to write. We had about a week in Philly, and I am back now.

I have been marveling as spring progresses and the flowers burst forth. It always hits me anew, and I like that I never get tired of seeing life exploding out of tree branches and popping up from the ground. A faint sheen of green heralds this exuberance, and then the birds, the blue sky, and the flowers have a fiesta.

I am taking an exercise class through the Cambridge Adult Ed. program. It is fun, and it involves lots of stepping around in patterns with which I am unfamiliar. I seem to be getting the hang of it, but I still look like a fool compared to the rest of the class who have been doing these types of movements for a lot longer. Interestingly, I am the only male in the class. This seems to be a theme in my life with my classes at BMC and my career as an elementary school teacher. Good thing I got a couple good male friends out there to balance things out!

On my way back home from exercise, I used my new camera to get more familiar with it and to take picts of some of these beautiful blooms. I have a long way to go to get to the point where I know this camera as I did my last one. I did find in the dusk light conditions that I had to use the flash a lot more than I wanted to. Ah well, the learning curve commences.

The Eggs Hatched!

Here is what you get when the eggs hatch. A clutch of fire salamanders.

Clutch of Fire Salamander Eggs

This is what I imagine a clutch of fire salamander eggs might look like. The two in the middle might be ready to hatch!

Magnetic Fields

Yesterday, my students learned about magnetic fields by sprinkling iron filings on a sheet of paper under which they had placed a magnet. I still find this phenomenon fascinating and almost magical. Perhaps the preparation for this lesson led me in the direction I took on my newest fractal. It makes me think of two stars with their magnetic fields revealed.

Long Term Benefits?

What are the long term benefits of hacking? If we were all playing a game, and one of us decided that it would be fun to steal the ball and run like an idiot around the field with it (with or without clothes), that would make the game a lot less fun for the rest of us. After a while, running around the field like and idiot loses its appeal, and then the individual is confronted by a ruined game and pissed off people.

Similarly, I could go to the library, rip out page seven of every book I can, stuff the pages in my backpack, and run home chortling at the mischief I have wrought. Again, this would affect a lot of people in a negative way, I would have the temporary satisfaction of having a bunch of page sevens, but in the long run, I would not really get much out of it. In fact, if I needed a resource later on, it might be missing page seven, and I am sure I would not keep all of those around.

I only see hacking as a glorified I-can-piss-further-than-you kind of action. Bragging rights for how many people's work one can screw up.

One of my current, favorite sites appears to have been hacked. Woot is fun to check out for the wacky deals on items, the silly write ups, and the crazy competitions. I get great entertainment value from this site. This morning, the "I want one" button on the main page was chasing my cursor around, and I kept getting "server is too busy" pages. My guess-a hacker is sitting somewhere with his version of a bunch of page sevens and laughing like a possessed gibbon. It could also be Woot! just having some April Fool's day fun.

On another note, I just received my new camera, a Canon Powershot S80. I look forward to using it to take photos similar to the one on my Cafepress store. I will take it out with me today and see what I can capture. I already saw some forsythia blooming that I would like to image.

Movie

I find that I am not much for verbiage right now. I am going to exercise class tonight.

Inspired by Tim, I have been making low res(to speed up the rendering), wide-angle fractals. Just ideas in color or black and white. Here is an old black and white movie of snowfall.

Tired Eye

After wedding planning, curriculum design, crazy school days, and now taxes, my eyes are tired!

Woot Competition

I have recently been pulled into the time-limited, oddly-creative world of Woot competitions. Each week there is a challenge to create an image around a theme involving one of their daily products. This one revolved around the use of a paper shredder as a main character in an action film. While I don't have anywhere near the chop skills of many of the contest entrants, I do enjoy playing with the ideas. Perhaps I'll win a flying monkey. Here are my two entries for this contest. I even had someone reference one of my entries which is as much as I could hope for.

Hello Sunshine

Spring is here, the sun has returned, soon warmth will follow. This image reminds me of the surface of the sun.

Impermanence

It is funny how things are absolute and then without looking become fluid. A while back, there was a fractal that would not render regardless of the many things I tried. I did all the highly technical things like restarting the program and computer, and then devolved into the less technical including sticking out my tongue, cursing, and singing silly songs about obstinate fractals. Nothing seemed to work. Out of sheer perverseness I tried again last night. Low and behold, it rendered. Here is the recalcitrant dancing light.

What's in a Group?

In searching for the name for this new fractal, I looked up collective nouns to find what a group of butterflies is called. My instinct was swarm, but that did not sound poetic or reflective of this image. Instead, flight of butterflies sounds much better. Other choices include rabble, roost and flutter. We humans take on collectives of other animals when congregating. A posse is a group of turkeys which accurately describes many groups of people who self describe as a posse. This was a particularly obnoxious group of guys in my highschool who had rather inflated egos. I thought I had escaped them by going to college far away, but one member also went to the same college a year before I did. When I arrived, there was the same arrogant group of guys claiming to be the "posse." I only just found out that they were turkeys.

What other collective nouns describe groups of humans? Do we need new ones to accurately describe our collective actions when in a group? Cattle, kangaroos, and emu gather in a mob; elk, weasels, bison, buffalo, dogs, and turkeys (they keep coming up) are also known in groups as gangs. Shouldn't our gangs really be prides, ambushes, aeries, or batteries? I just get this picture of wanna-be toughs with their in-fashion falling-down pants strutting around like turkeys.

Here is my flight of butterflies. They are fluttering through sunbeams and something that looks like webs in the background, but I did not see this as sinister. Just a more gentle and beautiful image than I normally go for.

Five or Two

This recent fractal reminds me of a sand dollar. I remember reading something about a significant correlation between starfish (another animal with fivefold [pentalateral?] symmetry) and human DNA. There are many weird articles on the Internet relating to this. What if we evolved with five or ten eyes, arms, legs, etc? Would our problems be seen as a balance between five possibilities instead of right/wrong or good/bad? Would our lack of bilateral symmetry (yes Sand Dollars do have bilateral symmetry) change the idea that there are two sides to every problem? This is interestingly similar to the design of Magic the Gathering card game with its five colors.

Oh, I'll take number 4490

I just made the number up after laughing myself silly.

Order your own...

Here is my latest, a sea monster plowing through the currents of an ancient ocean:

A Week of Fish and Fish

This week seemed to pass by so quickly and yet take forever. In school, my students probably remember this week as the week that the placid algae eater (see picture of a the pleco's cousin at right) attacked and killed one of its new tank-mates. This was during a read-aloud that was promptly cut short for the nature show. I am not sure that tank is moving with the rest of my classroom materials to the new building next year. I never kept fish as a child, and while I enjoy a nice fishtank in someone else's house or business, I do not like the maintenance and upkeep they require.

And now to fish today. It is a rainy day in Philly, and we are going to the food tasting for the wedding meal. There will be several fish courses as well as some chicken. I imagine I will be stuffed after that. Along the way there is another photographer. Much to be done this weekend, and I still have not even touched my grading.

Why do people misuse apostrophes so regularly? Isn't it another keystroke to put one it? I find they are added incorrectly more often than left out, and this happens most often with plural's. (See that sneaky example of what I am talking about, hmm?)

Woot! There it is

My first post to Woot was in their just finished challenge to create the worst movie of a TV show that has not been made yet. Scroll down this linked page for my Arsenio Hall entry.

My school is having a fundraising auction, so I contributed some items from my store and will donate all proceeds from April 8-23 as well. Here is the business card I created for the event.

Welcome Speedsnail!

Here is Speedsnail. Is it a fractal constellation racing in a blaze of greens, yellows, and oranges across the mathematical firmament? I have taken details from its heart and from its orbits in the upper left corner. Click on them to really see the detail.

Mystery Solved?

The sleuth has a report. I tried to eliminate a recent anti-virus software upgrade as the culprit by disabling it while rendering my Dancing Light fractal, but to no avail. I then rendered another fractal over a 12 hour period, and this on was fine. My conclusion is that the file has a problem somewhere. I may try to recreate it with another equation and the same coloring algorithms to see if that is the problem. I really do like the look of the fractal, but who knows what it would look like when rendered. There are always neat surprises to find.This fractal, called Wind, was just an attempt to see if I could still render more complex fractals. Not much in the way of transparencies, masks, etc. However, I am always interested in the closeups from various sections of my fractals such as this one from Wind.In my store, I used closeups on quite a few items including many Coral Fractal items. These two postcards show a detail on the left and the entire image on the right. Both are interesting in their own right.

The Choices

So, I have done a little e-research (ie, looking through several websites). Here are my final selections:

No Sweat- dedicated to no sweatshop labor, not organic-$18.50

Janice's- Organic cotton sweatpants-$44.95

Kasper Organics- French Terry organic pants-$26.95

Justice Clothing-another no sweatshop but not organic clothing source-$21.50

I eliminated the $50-$60 range of sweatpants from the organic crowd. I am pretty torn between organic on one side and union made on the other. I think I will go with the French Terry.

(edited) OOOOPS. Then I tried to order. Out of stock was the issue for two choices, so I went with Justice Clothing. This process took far too long.(end of edit)

That fractal rendered into nothingness again. I have saved it as another file and am trying to re-render it, but I do not have great hope. It is too bad as the image looks pretty neat. Ah, well.

Ghost Appears, Dancing Light AWOL

Here is a closeup of the ghost fractal. I like this even better than the original. My dancing light fractal is still AWOL, so I am redering it for the fourth time. Like they always say, "Fourth time's a charm." You can see why I called this one Ghost.Today was pretty productive. Did some grading, then went on one of those never-ending and always-increasing errand runs. It started with a wonderful massage. Then off to Target for a new pair of sweats and a floor lamp so I can read at night in bed. Neither were to be found, and I hopped over to another mega-store, Home Depot, for the lamp. They had it. The sweats, however, made me think as I am trying to change my buying habits to support more local and fair wage goods. I think I will go online and find an organic, fair wage pair for some ridiculous price compared to the 5 bucks that the non-existent Target ones were supposed to be. I'll bite the bullet and hope that most of that cash is actually going to the producers and manufacturers. Any suggestions?