geezerfud ([info]geezerfud) wrote,
@ 2007-01-24 21:06:00
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Current mood:geeky

Damn Color Thieves
I think Michael Barnsley ("Let's play the chaos game!") is hallucinating, and boy am I glad!

Without actually doing anything but notice that there is essentially nothing but theorems, proofs, and exercises between the graphics, it is obvious that this perseverator upon gratuitous self-similarity has stumbled across something great (I would have told you this 10 years ago too, but since then I hadn't really seen anything from him, but the new stuff is great!). I still don't see how to apply it to cell biology or the standard model of physics, or the holographic brain (which I still maintain is a bullshit idea), though in fact it subsumes L-systems (can you say "massively subsumes?"), but even more emphatically than I would have said 10 years ago: "there's something to this."

Oh. You'll probably be wanting a link. Check it out here, then if you want to, buy it here.


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Insane
[info]mubay.vox.com
2007-01-25 06:46 am UTC (link)
I looked over the recent Barnsley work at the Powell's technical annex recently, and it looked to be the same meaningless collection of failed applications of the collage theorem as the previous work.

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Re: Insane
[info]geezerfud
2007-01-25 12:10 pm UTC (link)
Hey, Flanagan, I hadn't realized that more than a couple of folks actually noticed that I occasionally left word-scat here.

Technically, there would have to be applications, for any of them to fail. Maybe this is why Barnsley's high-tailed it to Australia, to escape the geeks at Georgia Tech. Plus, it's too bad his book's website sucks. Still, the notion of iterated function systems, considered as enormously ramified feedback systems, appears as if it should resonate with quantum mechanics and systems biology very strongly. The biggest problem with Barnsely's approach (hey, maybe the new book changes this) may be that the transforms themselves aren't subject to feedback.

For some reason, I posted that blurb before I got to the point where I was going to say "He's no Stephen Wolfram, but..." or some such, and now I don't want to edit it. Then I could have perseverated about how "important" SWANKOS is.

I generally go by the motto, "If it looks cool, then somebody's onto something"

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Re: Insane
[info]mubay.vox.com
2007-01-26 02:20 pm UTC (link)
Yes, I'm a subscriber all right. I subscribe to Nick Szabo's blog too.

A corollary to your motto might be "If it looks cool, then somebody's on something."

There's no question in my mind that IFS are a mighty powerful abstraction. But bringing them to bear on any problem more than trippy art.... not so much.

I was struck by an illustration in the book of a picture of a person standing in front of a truck, mapped onto a fractal leaf, compared with a picture of a person standing in front of a truck mapped onto a slightly different fractal leaf. The next page was filled with such things, and none of the text could enlighten me about the import of these comparisons. So I shook my head and put the book back on the shelf.

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