Friday, September 29, 2006

I was very interested to look at how a website evolved over time. I chose boingboing.net as I had noticed it grow and thouhgt it would be interesting to see it evolve. Here's the result, using some excellent tools that are available over the web.

I also consider it a form of computer art, it really shows the evolution of the web.

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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Here is a more complicated web graph
I noticed that lorenzodom does a lot of great tagging and documenting of his photos. It leads to more complexity and a more interesting photo collection
This is a snapshot of lorenzodom flickr all tags page
www.flickr.com/photos/lorenzodom/alltags/

He has several thousand tags amongst his 16982 photos as of 22 August 2006

For a comparison of complexity, see a graph of my alltags page (~ 1/4 to 1/5 as complex)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brewbooks/222876313/in/set-72157594248410291/



see www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/


Try a search for the tag websitesasgraphs to see some other very interesting patterns

I learned about this from r.rosenberger websitesasgraphs
www.flickr.com/photos/rrosie/sets/72157594152137978/



What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

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2006 Quotations

"The only death you die is the death you die every day by not living."
quoted by Ted Perkins, attributed to explorer Norman Vaughn, in Seattle Times 5 Nov 2006

Ars Sine Scientia Nihil art without science is nothing

If we don't build it; we'll never need it.
(William Muholland, quoted by K. Hays August)

Don't drive 20 nails at a time, just one. (25 July)

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Notes from The H. Paul Rockwood Memorial Lecture: A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram UC San Diego April 30, 2003




Intro by Terrence Sejnowski
Director Institute for Neural Computation

Wolfram Science Website


Cellular automata 1981

Rule 30

Rule 110

"Its sort of interesting to think about how we interact with the ultimate limits of technology. I don't have any doubt that there will be a time, potentially quite soon when it will be possible to capture all the important features of human thinking in pieces of sold-state electronics and no doubt things will get more and more efficent until everything is on an atomic scalle so that our processes of human thinking are just implemented by individual electrons whizzing around in lumps of something."

Computational equivalence


"... if everything was computationally reducible, then nothing could be acheived by history."

worked every day and every night for 10 years while CEO of Wolfram Research

NKS represents a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

Took 20 years to think about... so read it carefully. Read the notes.
Used Mathematica as notation.

Look at NKSX - NKS Explorer.

Summary of NKS
1. New areas of basic science.
2. Whole bunches of applications.
3. Conceptual directions.

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Monday, September 11, 2006

First Scanning tunneling microscope
IBM Research Zurich 1981
(Explanation from Deutsches Museum with wiki hyperlinks added by me)

Top view

Side View

The scanning tunneling microscope has given rise to new possibilities of investigating surfaces on the scale of individual atoms. Rather than "seeing" the atoms, the instrument "feels" them by scanning the surface line by line with a very sharp tip at a constant distance of a few atomic diameters. This distance is minimized in a feedback loop by the tunneling current tip and sample when a voltage is applied. The current is extremely dependent on the distance between tip and sample - the smaller the distance, the larger the current. Reducing the distance by only one-tenth of a nanometer (a millonth of a millimeter) increase the current tenfold. A tripod of piezoelectric rods allows very precise movement of the microscope tip in all directions. By applyingand removing a voltage, these elements expand and shrink, between 0.1 and 10 picometers (a billionth of a millimeter) per millivolt.

The STM measurement results constitute a field of scanned lines from which a three-dimensional image of the surface can be obtained in millionfold magnification e.g. by computer image processing.

Since the breakthrough of the first STM in 1981, numerous further developments and variations quickly led to a wealth of new knowledge in quite diverse research areas. The STM principle is generally considered a key in nanotechnology owing to its capability to image surfaces and investigate their properties on the nanometer scale.
and ultimately, even to change structures atom by atom. The first significant step in the latter direction was the controlled deposition of individual atoms in 1990.

The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope brough Gerd Binnig , a German, and Heinrich Rohrer Rohrer, a Swiss, both from IBM Zurich Reasearch Laboratory, the physics Nobel prize in 1986.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

See also:
http://www.deutsches-museum-bonn.de/ausstellungen/meisterwerke/2_5raster/raster_e.html

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