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Mandelbrot set: cellular automatons & fractal islands
Mandelbrot set: fractal math. After spending some time in space, we wanted to come back down to Earth. Continuing on our previous photos, should we talk about Conquistador economics or the invention of writing and 3,000 year-old Chinese sunspot observations? First let’s talk about von Neumann machines and cellular automatons. This is the famous Mandelbrot set, an image generated from pure mathematics. There are an infinite number of beautiful images inside the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set isn’t normally constructed as a cellular automaton (although it certainly can be as cellular automatons are Turing-complete for the computer scientists out there.) However, many other famous fractals are easily expressed as cellular automatons. The two fields are closely related, as many fractals (including Mandelbrot) are related to bifurcation problems on recursive functions (famously related to automaton simulations). We’ll just note for now that Cellular Automatons are another name for von Neumann machines, which you may remember from Arthur C.… Read the restVR Data Preservation: Is this dutch masterpiece painting really a 400-year old photograph made by a human?
Coming back to our earlier posts on data modeling of the impacts of investment in world literacy (represented by another 400-year-old dutch masterpiece painting of a schoolhouse) and 3D-digital big data preservation of the Buddha destroyed by the Taliban (also related to literacy as we’ll discuss in the future), we wanted to circle back around and discuss just the data and Virtual Reality aspects of these dutch masterpieces themselves. Texas inventor Tim Jenison noticed that the Dutch master artist Vermeer had perfectly captured the pattern of light dappling in the background, although this cannot be seen by an unaided human eye. (Although you can see the light is dappled, your brain still reinterprets most of the shading as a flat surface with a single color, preventing you from seeing the subtle variations of grading. To get exact shades as perfect as in the painting, Jenison feels an optical device must have been used the obscures most of the image, so that each the shade in each ‘pixel’ can be matched exactly by the painter.… Read the restType 3 civilization (Hoag object ring galaxy photo)
Continuing our earlier Carl Sagan civilization post, today’s photo is Hoag’s object, a non-typical ring galaxy. A type III civilization would, be definition, be able to harness the entire energy of a reference galaxy. We left off earlier on the important wrinkle that Sagan added to the Kardashev scale on civilization advancement (and, by extension, the Leslie White scale on historical civilizations). Both of these scales focus on technology (with Kardashev focused on technology to harness energy), but Sagan also added information processing (data science!) to the scale. He defined a scale from A-Z to represent the amount of information available to a civilization, each letter representing a 10-fold increase, with A representing 10^6 and Z representing access to 10^31 bits of information. Sagan believed no civilization could yet have achieved a Z status, as not enough time had passed in the history of the universe to allow this much exchange of information.… Read the restDigital data preservation: big data foils Taliban?
Digital data preservation: The photo pictures the larger Buddha of Bamiyan as it was (1968) and as it is today (2008 photo) after it was destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban, supposedly on the orders of Bin Laden himself (according to one documentary). Built 1,500 years ago in the 6th century AD, the Buddhas were a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the larger statue was 53m tall (174 feet), the largest #statue in the world. But thanks to big data (well, small data in 1968) it turns out the larger Buddha cannot be destroyed, for it has been digitally preserved forever. Long before the Taliban came to power, high-resolution photographs were taken from multiple camera positions. Half a century ago, way back in 1968, scientists already used the technique of photogrammetry to reconstruct a 3D contour plot by analyzing the data from the multiple photographs. With the computers of that day, a 3D model accurate to within 20 centimeters preserved the giant Buddha.… Read the restRecent Comments
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