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Origin of Mathematics in Aesthetics

From Richard Hamming's essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics:

Geometry seems to have arisen from the problems of decorating the human body for various purposes, such as religious rites, social affairs, and attracting the opposite sex, as well as from the problems of decorating the surfaces of walls, pots, utensils and clothing. This also implies the fourth aspect I mentioned, aesthetic taste, and this is one of the deep foundations of mathematics. Most textbooks repeat the Greeks and say that geometry arose from the needs of the Egyptians to survey the land after each flooding by the Nile River, but I attribute much more to aesthetics than do most historians of mathematics and correspondingly less to immediately utility.

He is also paraphrased:

There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.

From my friend Nix.

Tripnotica

This Friday in NYC: HifiDreams on the main stage at Tripnotica, at Rebel 251 West 30th Street. Electronic, Downtempo and Trip-hop Live music starts at 11pm. Art show by Art for Progress.

Interviewed on Tubular TV

Hank Grebe interviewed me for his vlog Tubular TV, also available directly on Blip TV where it showed up on the front page as a "hot episode". I also put a straight-up sheep sample on blip. Thanks!

addendum: video recording of a "Tech Talk" and discussion at Google.

HiFiDreams in Googleplex Blog Coverage

Valleywag (comment: "one single phrase: wow. They truly are a moving painting and are gorgeous."), Wired Blogs, SmartMobs, Sentient Developments, The Daily Galaxy ("Don't miss Scott Draves compelling Dreams in High Fidelity ... graces the Google lobby next to a replica of SpaceShipOne."), networked_performance, and BoingBoing. thanks for your kind words :)

28th Day at Wonderland

HifiDreams at 28th Day psytrance party at our loft -- Wonderland. 300+ people, all night long -- i had to leave early to catch my 2pm flight to SF, from where I write this. A review posted on isratrance forum said "those freakin' mind bending electric sheep visuals...I caught several poor trancers wide-eyed and paralyzed by looking at it...me being one of them." many thanks for your kind words and a wonderful night.

Fractal Laser Modes

Fractal Laser Modes describes how to generate fractal eigenmodes with lasers. This reminded me of the upcoming tiny laser projector that can fit into a cell phone, PicoP demoed at CES in January.

Pix: Birthday, Danger Party, Villareal Opening

New Sheep Packs for Kickstarting the Client

I'm trying dreamhost for serving sheep, and the first experiment is manual download of sheep packs. Download one or more, unzip, and place the mpg files in your cache directory. By default on Windows that's "c:\windows\system32\electricsheep-cache\mpeg", On Mac OS X it's "~/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep", and on Linux it's "~/.sheep".

Update: bigger and newer megapacks.

Update 2: Sometimes the bandwidth quota is exceeded making the packs unavailable. Fortunately you can bring them back.