Just My Imagination

In progress: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I believe in coincidence but am grateful for serendipity. I ran into this in the visual literacy (why??) collection while shelving at the library and fell in love at first page. The thesis, tantalizingly alluded to in the introduction: that consciousness is the product of "strange loops" that create self-awareness in a way that is analogous (here's the cool part) to the images of M.C. Escher. Aha. That's why it was in vis lit. And I think I've just detected a theme in my interests. Visual understanding?
Speaking of which, this is fantastic: Visual Complexity

This:

Date
6/09/2006
PHP code generates OSC messages for Max via Drupal using Javascript and Ajax in HTML. Shit.

...was the last draft I had saved before I got, well, distracted and forgot about all this. I have since decided I rather dislike web programming. Oh well. On to other things, I suppose.

In any case, hello. Here I go again?

Projects currently in progress:
Make a drupal website for my dad's colleague. Figure out how to get an acidfree gallery working with lightbox, get jstools working (on the expandable menus in particular, because waiting for the page to refresh is damn irritating). Figure out multilingual support, for that and the la Mouff' site.
Read how-to make modules, read through one and understand it thoroughly. Then, work on flexinode and make it work with sliders (save slider location by converting to numbers and saving as hidden text). Get the sliders (2-D also) working with OSC via drupal (how the hell am I going to do this??)
Download Java OSC library and figure out how OSC works.
Make flexinode patches.
...*sigh* I think I need a cup of tea.

...from my dad's bookshelf today, and read about a page of the first chapter. The book was called A Basis for Theoretical Computer Science (will cite properly in a bit) and the chapter was about set theory. The first example showed how to do a division and remainder problem. I got it in about a minute by looking at the flowchart-if the divisor is greater than the number, output 0 as the quotient and the number as the remainder, if not, add one to the variable with the value 0 and subtract the divisor from the number, then test again. Yes, that would draw a collective "duh" from the computer scientists of the world. But here's why it was awesome.
I'm about 11 and we're in a hotel room. My mother is talking to a friend of hers and I'm half-listening. At one point, her friend comments that the problem with the way basic math is taught in schools is that they teach multiplication as repeated addition, but not division as repeated subtraction. I don't understand this at all, but store it somewhere as an "unanswered question biding its time."
I'm about 14 and my C++ teacher shows us the code for division (/) and modulo (%). It vaguely bothers me that I can't get any more basic than that.
So in the space of about 30 seconds of looking at a bunch of boxes with arrows, all those unanswered questions just CLICK! and I put the book back, smiling.
That's why I love this stuff.

...and last unoriginal title, hopefully.
My personal journal has happily progressed to the point where it seems to be past the years of teenage angst and is ready to start becoming a productive narrative about the pursuit of fun and interesting things and finding a niche in the world. And it's going online!
It's going to take me a little while to get to the point where I want to link people to it, of course. I had an epiphany today though-the vague impressions and half-thoughts in my head, while they give me an impression of inexpressible complexity and depth, mean nothing whatsoever until crystallized and concrete and SAID. Imperfect as this world is, and as little time as we all have to live in it, the things we actually do and experience are all we are going to get. So this is me beginning to be. Wish me luck.