“H.P. Lovecraft were really underrated in terms of the sixties bands from the West Coast.” — Psychic Hi-Fi: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Favourite Albums, The Quietus, 23i2014.
Previously pre-posted:
• He Say, He Sigh, He Sow #23 — an earlier engagement by Genesis P. Orridge in terms of issues around “in terms of” (dot dot dot)
• Ex-term-in-ate!
A white-eye bird, Zosterops sp., on a blooming cherry, Guiyang, China (viâ The In-terms-inator)
Like plants, fractals grow from seeds. But plants start with a small seed that gets bigger. Fractals start with a big seed that gets smaller. For example, perhaps the most famous fractal of all is the Koch snowflake. The seed of the Koch snowflake is step #2 here:
Stages of the Koch snowflake (from Fractals and the coast of Great Britain)
To create the Koch snowflake, you replace each straight line in the initial triangle with the seed:
Creating the Koch snowflake (from Wikipedia)
Animated Koch snowflake (from Wikipedia)
Now here’s another seed for another fractal:
Fractal stage #1
The seed is like a capital “I”, consisting of a line of length l sitting between two lines of length l/2 at right angles. The rule this time is: Replace the center of the longer line and the two shorter lines with ½-sized versions of the seed:
Fractal stage #2
Try and guess what the final fractal looks like when this rule is applied again and again:
Fractal stage #3
Fractal stage #4
Fractal stage #5
Fractal stage #6
Fractal stage #7
Fractal stage #8
Fractal stage #9
Fractal stage #10
I call this fractal the hourglass. And there are a lot of ways to create it. Here’s an animated version of the way shown in this post:
Hourglass fractal (animated)
In “Hour Power” I looked at my favorite fractal, the hourglass fractal:
The hourglass fractal
I showed three ways to create the fractal. Next, in “Hour Re-Powered”, I showed a fourth way. Now here’s a fifth (previously shown in “Tri Again”).
This is a rep-4 isosceles right triangle:
Rep-4 isosceles right triangle
If you divide and discard one of the four sub-triangles, then adjust one of the three remaining sub-triangles, then keep on dividing-and-discarding (and adjusting), you can create a certain fractal — the hourglass fractal:
Triangle to hourglass #1
Triangle to hourglass #2
Triangle to hourglass #3
Triangle to hourglass #4
Triangle to hourglass #5
Triangle to hourglass #6
Triangle to hourglass #7
Triangle to hourglass #8
Triangle to hourglass #9
Triangle to hourglass #10
Triangle to hourglass (anim) (open in new tab to see full-sized version)
And here is a zoomed version:
Triangle to hourglass (large)
Triangle to hourglass (large) (anim)
Morrissey’s stag night, like sim. Descriptive of a public house peopled entirely by broken men of indeterminate age staring silently at their half-empty pint glasses. […]
mortal adj. Refreshed (qv) within an inch of one’s life.
mortal combat n. Fighting between intoxicated fellows. Or occasionally, in the case of certain self-sufficient Harold Ramps (qv), between a single intoxicated fellow. — from Roger’s Profanisaurus: Das Krapital, The Revolutionary Dictionary of Bad Language (Viz 2010)
Pre-previously on Overlord in terms of the Über-Feral, I looked at my favorite member of the fractal community, the Hourglass Fractal:
The hourglass fractal
A real hourglass for comparison
As I described how I discovered the hourglass fractal indirectly and by accident, then showed how to create it directly, using two isosceles triangles set apex-to-apex in the form of an hourglass:
Triangles to hourglass #1
Triangles to hourglass #2
Triangles to hourglass #3
Triangles to hourglass #4
Triangles to hourglass #5
Triangles to hourglass #6
Triangles to hourglass #10
Triangles to hourglass #11
Triangles to hourglass #12
Triangles to hourglass (animated)
Now, here’s an even simpler way to create the hourglass fractal, starting with a single vertical line:
Line to hourglass #1
Line to hourglass #2
Line to hourglass #3
Line to hourglass #4
Line to hourglass #5
Line to hourglass #6
Line to hourglass #7
Line to hourglass #8
Line to hourglass #9
Line to hourglass #10
Line to hourglass #11
Line to hourglass (animated)
Green Pitcherplant, Sarracenia oreophila (Kearney) Wherry (1933)
I thought I knew how depraved and despicable core serial-slayer Ted Bundy was when I began The Only Living Witness (1983) for the first time earlier this month.
I was wrong.
Keyly, corely wrong.
As I discovered when I reached this putrefactively performative passage:
I wanted to know how Lynda Healy had been taken from her bedroom. “I guess you would have had to dress her?” I ventured.
Ted ignored my use of “you”.
“In that kind of situation,” he replied mechanically, “a person who was alert enough to be able to dress would not be afraid in terms of struggling or crying out. So it would be unlikely that any attempt was made to clothe the girl.” — from chapter 5 of The Only Living Witness, Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (revised edition 1989)
It’s always possible to go lower and get worse, it seems. Bundy trained as a lawyer. That’s bad. Bundy used “in terms of”. That’s worse. (dot dot dot)
Ted should of course have said: “afraid to struggle…” or “afraid about struggling…”
Elsewhere other-engageable:
• Ex-term-in-ate!
• All Posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”
• Don’t Do Dot… (also interrogates issues around “core” and “spike”)…
• Heresy, Homotextuality, Hive-Mind…
Currently listening…
• Loxomoxol, Basilisc d’Or (2001)
• HēDoNē, See The Grace Above (2004)
• Episodic Static, Ridmik (1979)
• T-Nor-F, Ipacuma (2013)
• Qvo Y Rugr, By the Rivers of Bangor (2017)
• Tumultus, Cat’s Breath (2001)
• Veulgozir, Dwelling Beneath (1998)
• Dan Hadden, Total (Live in Yeovil) (2006)
• Los Ombres del Voske, TuMiNos (2017)
• VampiriOc, PlanetOc (1983)
• Xriqsar, S343813 (2018)
• AzogFoe, Ghosts of the Hemisphere (2011)
• Los Magnicidios, Líquido (1997)
• Undulatio, Viva Papua (2006)
• Ifikh, Askal Ni Luwo (1975)
• Esteban Sureño, Guijarral (1995)
• W. van Wassenaer, Concerti Armonici (2004)
• Tom Vigattsef, Urneolus (2013)
Previously pre-posted:
Toxic Turntable #1 • #2 • #3 • #4 • #5 • #6 • #7 • #8 • #9 • #10 • #11 • #12 • #13 • #14 • #15 • #16 • #17 •
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.” — John von Neumann
This quote is popular on web pages about von Neumann, and about computing and mathematics generally. It is apparently not from a published work of von Neumann’s, but Franz L. Alt recalls it as a remark made from the podium by von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947. The exchange at that meeting is described at the end of Alt’s brief article “Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945–1947”, Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694. Alt recalls that von Neumann “mentioned the ‘new programming method’ for ENIAC and explained that its seemingly small vocabulary was in fact ample: that future computers, then in the design stage, would get along on a dozen instruction types, and this was known to be adequate for expressing all of mathematics…. Von Neumann went on to say that one need not be surprised at this small number, since about 1,000 words were known to be adequate for most situations of real life, and mathematics was only a small part of life, and a very simple part at that. This caused some hilarity in the audience, which provoked von Neumann to say: ‘If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.’ ”
