PASSING AN ORCHARD BY TRAIN

Grass high under apple trees,

The bark of the trees rough and sexual,

the grass growing heavy and uneven.

We cannot bear disaster, like

the rocks--

swaying nakedly

in open fields.

One slight bruise and we die!

I know no one on this train.

A man comes walking down the aisle.

I want to tell him

that I forgive him

that I forgive him, that I want him

to forgive me.

ROBERT BLY

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We cannot know his legendary head
wide eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

The Beauty In Numbers, 1b: A circle, a spiral, a flower.

A curve that starts from a point and moves farther away as it revolves around the point is called a spiral.



















These happen everywhere in nature.  Spiral curves are seen in the way plants arrange their leaves in circular patterns. It turns out, rather beautifully, that these plant spirals are often formed according to something called the Golden Angle, which in turn, is related to the Golden Ratio, also seen in the Fibonacci series. I won't go into the Golden Ratio here( dude, look it up! ), but the Golden Angle seen below as angle b can be thought of this way: the ratio of the arc of b to a is the same as the ratio of a to the entire circle.

Another way to calculate it: Golden Angle = π(3 − √5) = roughly 2.4 radians = roughly 137.5 degrees.

Now, if we plot 500 points, plugging in the Golden Angle in R, the code would look like this:

# Defining the number of points
points = 500

# Defining the Golden Angle
angle = pi*(3-sqrt(5))

t = (1:points) * angle
x = sin(t)
y = cos(t)
df = data.frame(t, x, y)


resulting in

and if we clean it up and add some color, we get

Cool. I LOVE this!

Today's Breakfast of Champions

Coffee: San Francisco Bay French Roast beans (Costco)

Adulterated with:

1. Kirkland Organic Virgin Coconut Oil
2. Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter (unsalted)
3. Richi Turmeric Ginger Chai

Grub: homemade chocolate chip cookie (thanks Margaret)

For Team Purple

 A friend who had pancreatic cancer (and has since passed away) created a campaign to raise awareness and research funds called Purple Stride. I wasn't able to make the walk so I let her know I was thinking of her ...

The Beauty In Numbers, 1a: Plotting a circle.

Let's use math to draw pictures, shall we? There is a wonderful world out there of representing patterns in nature, especially flowers, in mathematical terms. Ever gazed into a sunflower? I hope so. I'm learning and exploring as I go along here, so I'll start with simple circle plots and move on from there. But where to start?  How about Pythagorus?

Although it is often argued that knowledge of the theorem predates him, the theorem is named after the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BC) as it is he who, by tradition, is credited with its first proof, although no evidence of it exists. There is some evidence that Babylonian mathematicians understood the formula, although little of it indicates an application within a mathematical framework. Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians all discovered the theorem independently and, in some cases, provided proofs for special cases. (Wikipedia)

The Pythagorean theorem is a wondrous thing, having to do with the relationship among the three sides of a right triangle. The theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It can be written as an equation relating the lengths of the sides a, b and c, :

where c represents the length of the hypotenuse and a and b the lengths of the triangle's other two sides.

But how do we turn this into compelling pictures? We can do a lot with this if we use software programs to draw or plot, say, circles. A lot of beautiful geometric patterns come out of circles, including patterns that represent the arrangement of petals and stems in flowers. But how do we get circles out of these triangles? By expressing the Pythagorean theorem in terms of trigonometric functions.

We need to move to trigonometry because we need to move beyond solving triangles. Trigonometry give use a mathematical description of our physical world, of things that rotate or vibrate, such as light, sound, the paths of planets about the sun or satellites about the earth. We have to have angles of any size, and to extend to them the meanings of the trigonometric functions.

The Pythagorean trigonometric identity states that sin²(θ) + cos²(θ) = 1 for any real number θ. Since every (x, y) point should be in the unit circle (a circle with a radius of 1), it follows that x² + y² = 1.

Okay. Now that we've established the background information, we can begin building a series of plots. We start by creating a dataset of two variables, x and y. First, we'll draw 50 points on a circle of radius 1. 

In R, some code for drawing (plotting) 50 points in a circle looks like this:

t = seq(0, 2*pi, length.out=50)
x = sin(t)
y = cos(t)
df = data.frame(t, x, y)

# Make a scatter plot of points in a circle
ggplot(df)

Running this code results in this:

Very basic, yes? But with various enhancements and tweaks to the code, we can begin to get images that look like the geometry seen in flowers.

Thanks to @aschinchon

Hello, you gorgeous algorithm you.

Can there be beauty in math?  I think so. I want to experiment with this idea for awhile. So, here goes a new series: The Beauty In Numbers. I'm going to off on a tangent (!) and study mathematics and art together.

Algorithmic Beauty in Plants

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. (Bertrand Russel)

Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is. (Paul Erdős)

An example of beauty in method Click to learn more.

World as lover, world as self.

"... it's Ok for our hearts to be broken over the world. What else is a heart for? There's a great intelligence there. We've been treating the earth as if it were a supply house and a sewer. We've been grabbing, extracting resources from it for our cars and our hair dryers and our bombs, and we've been pouring the waste into it until it's overflowing, but our earth is not a supply house and a sewer. It is our larger body. We breathe it. We taste it. We are it, and it is time now that we venerate that incredible flowering of life that takes every aspect of our physicality."

Joanna Macy

Guitar fretboard

Must ... not ... let ... this ... go!

I haven't been working on learning the fretboard for months. Probably gone backward as a result. 

Arrrrgh - can't let that happen.

I Feel More And More Every Day,

as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. (John Keats)

I have had the great pleasure of making art as a collaboration with a lovely young woman who lives not far from me. She is an amazing and beautiful person, an aerial silks artist and circus performer, among other things.

Together we have performed locally, she on the silks and me watching her and playing accordion extemporaneously, trying to match her gestures with music.

This makes me so happy. I live for these kind of experiences.

Thank you Chelsea.