odd number

I’m watching the first of the “Beauty of Maps” series, the one on the Mappa Mundi. It shows the map as being a complex meeting of religious text and an expression of understanding of the world. The richness of this function is in stark contrast to our strict measurement and coercing of the world into the precise coordinate spaces of a web page. The authors could stick all sorts of junk everywhere. Or to quote, “visual encyclopedias of a complex world”.

So two things have been rattling around in my head recently:

- it would be interesting to take the distorted historical understanding of the world and somehow transpose this into a proper GIS. So you are in the middle, with a vague understanding of unknown blobs at the edge. The map would use rubber-sheet topology to somehow match your knowledge and ignorance. Unexplored areas are just fuzzy bits at the edge. Why should you have your map cluttered up with lots of areas you don’t care about, and will never visit? Places you visit could be cheerfully illustrated in 3d. Scary places you don’t visit would once again be full of sea monsters. This could be applied to actual historical maps – how would our current geographical information look when transposed into these distorted coordinate systems?

- the last post (recently visited constructions) was a plaintive attempt to illustrate something: a building, although defining a place, is actually composed of many different places. So St Non’s Chapel literally contains within its walls parts of other places, other buildings which would have been scattered around the area over more than a thousand years. I have no idea how that information can be sourced and compiled in a useful way. Or how that would then be expressed and communicated in a meaningful way. But the geographical area would be fairly small – the stones wouldn’t have moved very far. Unlike the stones of Stonehenge, some of which came from the Preseli Mountains in Wales. That would be another map again…

Cerreg Cennen, near Llandeilo, is a castle that was pulled apart by 500 men so it couldn’t be used as a base for robbers. It is built on a limestone crag, immediately above a deep natural cave.

Carreg Cennen

The Chapel of St Non, on the cliffs immediately south of St David’s, was built in 1934. It contains in its walls the last remnants of some of the many religious buildings that were scattered there from the 6th century until the Reformation, and the dissolution of the monasteries. Large circular stone piscines feature heavily. These were used to prevent the wine of the Eucharist – believed to be the blood of Jesus – from disappearing into the soil. There’s a project here, to depict the various starting points of the wall’s ingredients. Services are no longer held there, as rain is driven through the 2 foot thick walls within half an hour.

Nearby is St Non’s original ruined chapel, which in turn is supposedly built on the site of her house where she gave birth to St David:

The pain of birth was said to have been so intense that Non’s fingers left marks as she grasped a rock and, as David was born, a bolt of lightning is said to have split the rock in two. It is also believed that the two split pieces of rock were the foundation stones for St. David’s Cathedral and St Non’s Chapel. (Wikipedia)

St Non's Chapel

The chapel is surrounded by standing stones.

St David’s itself was repeatedly attacked and pulled apart by Viking raiders: “A visitor in the 11th century found only an abandoned site with St David’s shrine lost amongst the undergrowth.” (www.stdavidscathedral.org.uk)

I was digging around on the Wayback Machine today, and stumbled across a lost piece of code from December 2004. It’s a Strange Attractor Generator, from the pages of Clifford Pickover’s book Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty (p 165).

As the equation wanders through its orbit, each pixel hit is darkened by a shade. This reveals the features in a way that would have been hidden by a simple drawing of the graph. The only addition I made (beyond introducing the code to Processing) was to enact this process over time, which makes for a lovely sense of a landscape etching its way into existence.

Click on the applet area to generate new, very different orbits. Pickover describes this well:

A “strange attractor” has an irregular unpredictable behaviour. Its behaviour can still be graphed, but the graph is much more complicated. With “tame” attractors, initially adjacent points stay together as they approach the attractor. With strange attractors, initially adjacent points eventually follow widely divergent trajectories. Like leaves in a turbulent stream, it is impossible to predict where the leaves will end up given their initial positions.”

The Wayback Machine is great for HTML docs, but many Java applets and Flash movies have disappeared, vanishing in the uniquely permanent way electronic media can. Processing, however, encourages the source code to be made available and distributed in the act of publishing. This meant the code could be copied and pasted, and run as if it were new.

Queues are comprised of customers joining, waiting and then being served. There are two random processes here: arrivals, and serving time, which in this case are both Poisson processes. There can be one or more servers. A handy notation for this is: M/M/n, where the first M describes customer arrival, the second M server processing time, and the n the number of servers.

In this applet, there are 150 queues, each one M/M/5, with a customer arrival rate of 20 per second, and a server rate of 3 per second.

As each customer gets served, their dot turns red, and all the customers shuffle up one. When serving is finished, the dot disappears. As the server has become free, the next customer is served.

This first attempt demonstrates the variation that can occur. Currently, the queues move to the right if serving outpaces arrival. The next step is to have them wait at a particular point, and then moving off when a server is free, with those behind moving up to fill the space.

More queue models to follow, though not sure what their arrival rate will be…

You have a set of friends, colleagues and vague acquaintances you’ve accumulated over the years, and expressed as a graph of connections in various applications such as Facebook, Myspace, blog networks, twitter, flickr etc. You’ve spent years constructing a trail of digital detritus.

Mnemosynr lets you press a button, wipe your list of friends away, clears your office party pictures, deletes your thoughtful snaps of rolling hills from flickr, empties your blog of all those valuable observations.

Then it takes the mass of Facebook accounts, arbitrary images, occasional mutterings from twitter, and randomly chooses elements to recreate the whole construction.

You now have new friends, with a history of conversations, events attended, and a whole new list of old schoolfriends to ignore. Internet caches are rewritten, search engines reindex, reputations are recalculated. You have been digitally reconstructed.

As memories have long ago been discarded, to be replaced with paginated histories, the transition is painless.

I’ve had the builders in, and redesigned this blog. The main aim has been to make a bit more room. The default WordPress theme, despite cosmetic adjustments, is a little mean and narrow – while the wide themes all have strange quirks in their efforts to look slick.

Blueprint made it easy to bash a gridded layout together, leaving me to spend time on the details. I borrowed Mark Boulton’s new fondness for Georgia, as the Helvetica/Verdana combination is a little austere for my ramblings. It’s strange how tastes change – a few years ago, I’d have thought serif fonts were caused by a missing stylesheet. Now I feel it makes things look nice and textbook-like.

The little robot is back, waving about at the top right. I made him years ago, and he’s done a solid job in a time when digital presence is scattered round multiple sites. He suffers from my occasional attacks of minimalism, but doesn’t do any harm. Not yet anyway. Let me know if he attacks.