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Not for the faint of art. |
Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() PROMPT January 25th Write about something antique or inherited that you own. Who owned it before you? Where did it come from? What’s its story? ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Unfortunately, I have quite a few inherited items - unfortunately, that is, because my parents have died. I've talked about some of them in here before, I know, but I can't really remember most of them. I do remember writing about the barometer. But I can't recall if I've discussed my dad's sextant ![]() These days, of course, sailors have other means of navigation, mostly GPS. I have a vague idea of how that works, having used it myself and looked into the (very interesting) technology behind it. What's most interesting about GPS is that if you don't take general relativity into account, it loses precision remarkably quickly. It absolutely relies on science that people in the 19th century couldn't even have imagined, let alone understood. Well, to be fair, if you took the time to explain it to many of them, they'd get it; we haven't gotten any smarter; we've just increased our understanding and changed our technologies. Still, for the greater part of the 20th century, they understood the principles, but it wasn't until around the turn of the 21st century that GPS became widely available. So as far as I know, a sextant is something that's only about 20 years behind the times. I could be wrong about this. Martini, remember? And so I can't be arsed to look anything up. Just don't take anything I say here as the absolute truth. In vino veritas, but in gin, whatever. So a sextant is largely obsolete. I like to think that serious sailors keep one around for emergencies, but from what I understand, it's not very useful without two other items: a chronometer and an ephemerides. And in any case, I'm not a sailor like my dad was, so I don't have any actual use for it. A chronometer is mostly just a fancy word for clock. When mechanical clocks were invented, they relied on a pendulum, a thing that provided a predictable periodic "tick." These were completely useless at sea, what with all the waves and shit. So the big problem in intercontinental navigation was to invent a chronometer that relied on something other than gravity -- but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. But first, I'll tell you what an ephemerides is. It's a table of where a certain heavenly body is expected to be at a certain time. These calculations are fairly complicated, but at the same time straightforward. You could have one for the sun, the moon, Jupiter, or any of the other planets or stars. Now, backing up. Navigation requires at least four pieces of data. 1. Latitude. 2. Longitude. 3. Heading. 4. Speed. There are probably others, but... gin. Oh yeah. 5. A freakin' map. Latitude, at night at sea in the northern hemisphere, is dead easy: 1. Find Polaris, the North Star. 2. Determine the angle between Polaris and the horizon. 3. That angle is your latitude. (Step 2 requires an instrument such as the sextant.) Finding longitude, on the other hand, is complicated as fuck. You have to know the time, and you have to know the expected location, in the sky, of some star or planet or some such. Knowing the time is where the chronometer comes in; knowing the expected location of a certain point of light is the job of the ephemerides. Heading and speed are largely irrelevant to this description, so I'm going to drink more gin and ignore them for now. There. So. You know your latitude because it's night and you've shot Polaris with the sextant. And now you know the longitude, because you know what time it is (or, rather, what time it is back in London or whereverthehell) and you have star charts so that you can tell the difference between where, say, Sirius would appear in the sky from London and where Sirius looks like to you on the heaving deck of a ship. The reason you know these things is because you have the sextant to determine the angle between the star (or whatever) and the horizon. There's also a way to "shoot the sun;" that is, figure this shit out in the daytime. This is above my pay grade, even if I weren't three sheets to the wind right now (that's also a nautical phrase, by the way, in case it wasn't completely obvious). People talk about a "moral compass," what they use to determine their direction in life. A compass is another important tool in navigation (see: "heading"), but it's not the only important tool. I keep the sextant around for two reasons: because it's a constant reminder of what my father lived for a good part of his life (not most; he was a sailor for about 1/4 of his 90 years), and also because it's a reminder that you always need to know your location. Metaphorically speaking. I told you the other day that I've been going through all the episodes of Star Trek. Picard kept a sextant in his Ready Room -- and given the utter uselessness of a sextant in interstellar space, I like to think it was for the same reason I keep one: that you should always know where you are. And where you're going. |
Honestly? At the moment, none. I go through cycles: reading - video games - shows/movies. At the moment I'm in a shows/movies phase, determined to (re)watch every episode of every Star Trek. Including the movies. Yes, including those movies. There are a couple of books on my Kindle I'll get to when I get to them, but right now I'd have to look to remind myself what they are. Nothing spectacular, just what would be called pulp novels if they were actually printed rather than e-books. Sometimes they're surprisingly good. Other times, not so much, but as a writer I learn from negative examples as well as positive ones. When I'm in a reading phase, sometimes it'll be a run of fiction and sometimes nonfiction. For fiction, it's usually SF and/or fantasy. For nonfiction, it's usually some sort of science or mathematics. The one constant is I keep up, at least a little bit, with certain topics on the internet. That's reflected in here when there's not a blog challenge going on. Very likely, that will happen again after this month's challenge is over -- unless I get squirreled by something else. This long doing prompts, my current list of articles could keep me busy for quite some time. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() PROMPT January 17th What do you do to escape or distract yourself from negative thoughts and emotions? How do you take your mind off something you don’t want to think about? ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Come on, now, I think everyone already knows my answer to this one. But really, I have all kinds of avoidance behaviors, not just drinking myself blind. Usually if I immerse myself in a game (one that's a bit of a challenge, not, like, solitaire or whatever), it gets my mind to think about other stuff. Just going off to do something else sometimes breaks the circle of thought. Thing is, I know that if something in my mind is nagging at me, I should confront it rather than avoid it. I just don't wanna. The best strategy, for me, one that is less directly self-confrontational but probably healthier than all of the above, is to start freewriting. Pretty soon my mind wanders and hey, maybe I even get a story out of the deal. I haven't done that for a while, though -- so avoidance it is! ![]() ![]() ![]() Mini-Contest Results! Yeah, I didn't actually expect a lot of responses; it was a tough one. Sumojo ![]() I had been asked to be a bridesmaid for the fourth time in my life. The bride was my cousin and I was sure I was asked just to make up an even number. We had never really liked each other, even as children but I agreed to participate once again. But what I really didn’t want was yet another horrendous bridesmaid’s dress which I’d never be able to wear again even if I altered it. The colours are always atrocious. Lilac or puce. I’m sure that brides select dresses for their bridesmaids to reflect on themselves. To show how beautiful they are and what plain friends she has. I was bemoaning this fact to my mother, saying what terrible taste my cousin had and I wondered what her wedding gown would look like. “She’ll look like a meringue, I’ll bet.” I saw my mother’s face go pale and I turned to see my cousin standing right behind me. Whoops! And I just gotta say, that's a trope that when I see it in a movie or TV show, it never gets old: Character A is talking shit about Character B in front of people, and you see the people suddenly look uncomfortable and their gaze shifts, and Character A finishes with, "...and she's right behind me, isn't she?" Way more embarrassing in person, I suspect. But hey, have a Merit Badge to take the edge off the shame, Sumojo. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() PROMPT January 14th If you could have an all-expenses paid trip to see any famous sight-seeing destination (monument, building, national park, etc), where would you choose to go? ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Valles Marineris ![]() Cheating? Maybe. I'd argue it's a sight-seeing destination because a lot of people want to see that sight. But hey, if you're going to pay my expenses to go to Mars and back, I'd be happy to be the one standing on the rim. If we're going to be boring and limit the destinations to Earth, there are a lot of places I still haven't seen. Hell, I've been close to the Grand Canyon many times but never actually seen it. Some say it's overrated. Well, compared to the Valles Marineris, it probably is. There isn't a single tourist destination on the planet that someone, somewhere, hasn't claimed to be "overrated." "Mount Everest? No thanks, too crowded." "Yeah, no, the Taj Mahal is a filthy place that's falling apart." "The Eiffel Tower? Tourist crap." (Yes, that's a pun because the French word for 'tower' is 'tour.') The places where I most want to go are less grand, anyway, and probably less singular: a brewery tour of Belgium, or a houseboat cruise down the Danube, or maybe a Vouvray expedition to the Loire valley. But if we have to limit it to "famous" destinations on (yawn) Earth, I'd probably do what I usually do in such situations: make a list of places I haven't been (technically, I've been to the Eiffel Tower, though it was around the time Nixon resigned), and then pick one at random. Because ultimately, I want to see everything, but I know I'll never be able to. So random it is. |
I... don't really do nostalgia. Not on a regular basis, anyway, and not tied to songs. Which is not to say that I don't sometimes miss some aspects of the past; it's just that I use music differently, I suppose. Sure, there are songs from my younger days that can trigger memories, both pleasant and not so pleasant. But I also enjoy some newer music, and some older music that I somehow missed along the way. Music, to me, is music: I don't care much about what "decade" it was made in (except insofar as my mental metadata about a song usually includes what year it was released), and while songs have a genre, that's often secondary to me. As long as it's a good song -- subjectively and/or objectively -- I generally want to hear it again. In other words, unlike I suspect most people, I'm not trapped in any one period of popular music, or any one type. I've been known to create mix tapes, back when mix tapes were a thing, with folk songs back to back with heavy metal. Or punk followed by glam rock. From vastly different time periods. For example. Now, obviously, I'm often drawn to familiar music like just about anyone, but, again, that's not usually because of any associations it has, but because I simply consider it quality music. I hope I'm never one of those "all music these days sucks" types. Sure, there's a lot of music out there that is utter crap, but I distinctly recall that this has always been the case. It's just that no one ever plays the crap music from when I was a kid anymore... because it's crap. They still play the new music that's crap because it's new, so I understand why people might draw that conclusion. (It's the same way with books.) Admittedly, I haven't really been keeping up with new music, lately, but every once in a while I'll hear one at the taphouse or something and, curious, I use the handy "Hey Google, what song is playing?" feature on my phone, and often, it'll be something from the last decade... or maybe from the sixties. And can I just say, that shit is sorcery -- the music recognition search thing. It picks up like three measures of the music and comes back with song, artist, album, year, label, producer, lyrics, and pretty much anything else I'd want to know. Perhaps that's why I don't often wax nostalgic: apart from certain political and epidemiological problems going on in the US right now, I feel like I'm living in "the good old days." Like I said, yeah, there are things from the past that I miss: my parents, old friends, cats, being able to travel, that sort of thing. But damn if technology isn't pretty fucking awesome right now. Like, if I want to hear a song? Comes right up on my phone and I Bluetooth it to a high-quality speaker. Sorcery. |
Oooh, good question. Haven't really thought about it. For me, fiction is fun but I don't imagine myself living there. So let's think about some of the more popular cinematic universes. Some of these might not meet the strict definition. I don't care. I figure if there's more than one movie (and/or TV show) that have continuity with each other, they count. Marvel. This is the obvious choice, really, but it has major downsides, including the ever-present threat of godlike beings messing around with Earth. One could argue that this is what the heroes are for, but on the other hand, I'd hate to be between, say, Hulk and whatever Hulk wants to smash. So... pass. Star Wars. Upside: Space travel, cool outfits. Downside: Ewoks, Sith, Space Fascists, and whateverthefuck JarJar was. Pass. James Bond. Fun if you're an elegant, martini-swilling spy with cool gadgets. Not so much fun if said spy ever fails and some villain takes over the world. So, nope. Harry Potter. You know, if you think about it, this might be the most ill-conceived universe after Twilight (which is itself a hard pass). So much of the "wizards are operating in secret" thing doesn't make logical sense unless you figure they're Jedi-mind-tricking everyone on a regular basis, and I don't want my mind messed with like that. DC Extended Universe. Same problem as their traditional rival, Marvel, see above, with the added downside of really spotty writing. No. The Matrix. Hell no. We have enough problems in our own world with people thinking we're living in a simulation. John Wick. No. Hey, don't get me wrong; I love those movies but I wouldn't want to live in one. Doctor Who. Only if I get to be a companion. All of time and space. Star Trek. This one may be a bit of a cheat, since it's meant to be not an alternate universe but a future-us. And it started out as TV only, but more than enough movies have been made for it to count as a cinematic universe. And the upsides are plentiful: a post-scarcity society with warp drive, transporters, advanced medical science, and a unified humanity. So this is a real contender, for me. On the downside, though, you also have powerful aliens deciding to mess up Earth's day on a regular basis, just like in the MCU. I wouldn't mind living in the Trek universe. Preferably the original timeline, not the Kelvin one. Also, coincidentally, on my current run-through of all the Star Trek episodes / films in chronological order of release, I'm approaching the end of Season 5 of TNG. One of the greatest Trek episodes -- hell, one of the greatest TV episodes -- of all time, in my opinion at least, was The Inner Light. In it, Picard, because of some alien technology, appears to experience the rest of his life on a different world (while he's passed out on the Bridge -- it makes sense in the context of the episode). I just had to mention this here because I was watching it when this prompt came up, and Picard actually got to do what we're talking about, albeit not of his own volition. But I think the winner, for me, is the cinematic universe created by Kevin Smith: The View Askewniverse. It's a lot like our own universe, but with a lot more comedy and nerdy reference jokes. Nootch. |