A Wolfram Mathematica notebook inspired by this wikipedia article.
(sadly, can’t embed it properly, so a screenshot will have to do)
On “butterfly” curves
Category: Making
Plotting diamonds
More Wolfram Mathematica fun, when my daughter wanted to make a “diamond shape” in “hot pink”.
Here’s the “source of truth”:
And here’s the rendering in Mathematica:
Geometrick T-shirts
I had a T-shirt with a certain pattern that was fading out. I didn’t know at the time that this had a name, and later learned it was a geometrical pattern that had certain interesting connections. I won’t link to that here, but you can find it by searching for “Metatron’s cube” online.
Re-creating this geometrical pattern became a fun exercise within Wolfram Mathematica (which is such a useful and under-rated tool, btw, I can’t recommend it enough for anyone with the slightest interest in doodling, tinkering, learning, simulating …).
Nothing fancy, just a bunch of circles, points, lines, triangles. Good old-fashioned geometry.
I was able to experiment with a few different designs until I settled on one I liked. Mathematica allowed me to export what I had as a regular PNG file.
I still had to do some post-processing — to be honest, I’m sure there are tools within Mathematica for this, but I just used a photo-editing tool on my laptop to remove all the black and make the background transparent.
I had to pick a website to use for this, since there are so many options today. I went with something that I knew from many years ago, Zazzle, though again, I’m sure there’s something better right now.
Here is the finished product: https://www.zazzle.com/metatron_t_shirt-235618796112684422
Here’s an example of rendering it within Wolfram Mathematica:
Polar Primes
This “five minutes of Wolfram Language” exercise can be surprisingly therapeutic 🙂
I had come across something interesting today:
However, I then wanted to try it out on my own.
These days, the commonly available frameworks/libraries make it too hard to just up-and-sketch-something.
… which is where WolframLanguage comes in.
I was able to make a simple notebook for this in five minutes:
https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/agam.brahmawolfram/Published/Polar%20Primes.nb
… and have the satisfaction of seeing that yes, it is indeed true.
Seeing things on your own, making things on your own, is a really nice feeling.
Wolfram Language “dashboards”
Playing around with Mathematica for a few minutes.
Or rather, using it to play around.
I’m trying to figure out the “least B.S.” portions of “web3/defi/whatever”. So far, a limited goal is to follow along a couple of “stable, publicly used and usable” blockchains, and I picked Tezos and Cardano for this.
I built some probing views for each, as cloud notebooks:
Very elementary stuff, but it took a few minutes, and really shows how Wolfram (Mathematica) is a really great “computational explorer” right now.
P.S. eyeballing the two, at a very subjective, no-flame-war, just-this-instance level, Tezos seems to be stably handling about 2x transaction throughput compared to Cardano.
A first NFT
I took one of Tara’s drawings from last year and placed it on OpenSea.
Mostly just to see what the experience is like.
So here it is, “A princess, her castle, and an apple tree“.
For more details, these are “the chains it shows up on”.
On metric time
About a decade ago, I thought briefly, about how the day would feel, if we had some sort of metric units instead of hours & minutes, then forgot about it.
About six years ago, I had an Android phone, and wondered what it would take, to make an app for this. At the time, I looked into OpenGL support, and had some basic screen working, but the state of app development seemed like really grungy to me, and I forgot about it again.
About a year ago, I had an iPhone, and wondered what it would take to make an app for this. I had still never made a mobile app, but SwiftUI had recently been released, and … the state of app development seemed way less grungy, and SwiftUI did live up (mostly) to its promise of being a (mostly) declarative framework … so I made a prototype (using centi-days and milli-centi-days), and then forgot about it again.
Last month, I finally pushed it “over the line”. I had to fill out some forms, make some placeholder icons, and come up with a name.
I’ve always thought of the metric system being based on “tens”, and “ten” feels very “human”, so I called it HumanTime. (I don’t have the necessary free time these days, but it would be good to eventually round this off with a Watch app too).
Anyway, there’s no moral to this story, other than “I built a (small) thing” , “it’s good to make things“, and “I wish I’d done this earlier”.
If you want to take a look, it’s on the App Store: here.
#making
#apps
Puzzles
I started on the first one when I had to stay at home for a few months when I broke my leg, and when that was done, I felt … “hey, I should do this again!”
Then I got another one but I realized I didn’t really have enough free time, which led me to carve out thirty minutes once every two weeks,to spend on this.
Also this second time, I decide to take frequent snapshots of what I was doing, and … I have this amateurish video I made on my phone:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ixv33eb6lna45fd/second%20puzzle.mov
(it’s just a Dropbox link; presumably there’s a smarter way to go about these things).
When I was done with the second one I looked back and found I had roughly done two of these in two years, at a very slow and steady pace … this should be turned into an “annual event” of sorts.
So, I have a third puzzle I’ve started on now (and incidentally, discovered that Ravensburger has quite the collection too; the first two were from Eurographics), which means I should be writing about it about this time next year 🤞.
Zazzle
I can’t believe I never discovered this before. I am never going to pay for quirky T-shirts or coffee mugs again, I’m just going to make my own!
Zazzle.com allows you to upload an image and slap it on to pretty much anything. I made a black T-shirt for myself a few days ago; it arrived today and fitted me well, (now just have to see how it performs after a round of laundry …).
For future reference, this is where I’m going to be adding stuff I make: https://www.zazzle.com/abacusnoirform
Abacus Noir 