Creative Cogitation

A friend recently twit­tered me, “Has tech­nol­ogy pro­gressed to the point that I can live out the remain­der of my life with­out face to face con­tact?” I told him he still needed to get his car emis­sions tested in per­son.    But is does raise the ques­tion, are we head­ing for Isaac Asimov’s dystopia, Solaria?

I dunno, but I recently learned a new slang term, e-lationship.  It’s a cyber rela­tion­ship, where friends, lovers and other strangers never meet face-to-face, they just carry on vir­tu­ally, be it via Face­Book, Twit­ter, IM-ing, chat or what have you.  For years peo­ple have known that cyber cutie might be a three-hundred pound guy, an 84-year-old grandma, or a tee­nie bop­per look­ing for a thrill.  But there is the whole other level I had not con­sid­ered and that is peo­ple who really do not want to meet in per­son, but who feel ful­filled with a harem of cyber-mates.  e-lation, it’s a great punny in my opinion.

e-lation by Jake Beck­man. Two cyber-canaries stare dream­ily into each oth­ers eyes.

e-lation was a nat­ural follow-on piece for the social media birds.  I have place two canaries star­ing dream­ily into each oth­ers’ eyes-that alone should give pause for thought-after all you really can’t see the per­son on the other end of the wire.  The back­ground is mot­tled, sug­gest­ing an insub­stan­tial venue.  The birds are perched on a swirly, green, heart-shaped con­tour.  One half of the out­line is over­laid with ASCII binary which reads e-lation.

I had a great deal of fun let­ting the acrylic flow in the back­ground of this paint­ing.  There was quite a bit of splat­ter­ing, drip­ping, flow­ing and all sorts of uncon­trolled activ­ity, which con­trasted strongly with paint­ing binary on the heart out­line (that took me three tries to find a good lay­out).  I hope you like it.

What do you think of the paint­ing, or cyber rela­tion­ships, or …?

Update: Details about e-lation, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

I fin­ished up day 7 of the SmArtist Tele­sum­mit and I can tell you, brain full now.

One thing made emi­nently clear to me as that I have to work on mar­ket­ing myself.  So 2010 because the Year of Mar­ket­ing for me.   I have made it my mis­sion to deal with this deep dark hole in my busi­ness plan.

Its an scary propo­si­tion for an artist.  The accoun­tant in me always has some ready account­ing, tax, busi­ness, human resources fac­toid to whip out an a moments notice, but art is not easy to talk about. It is a visual medium.  So I guess I will be show­ing a lot more art in my blog in com­ing days.  If I can’t talk about it, at least you can look at it.

Then maybe some­thing will occur to me.

On other fronts, I know I need to chose a style of the moment and develop it into a con­sis­tent body of work which makes the schiz­o­phrenic artist in me squirm.  “What do you mean I can’t do a land­scape if  I want to?” Of course I can still do a land­scape if I want, but I will be pro­mot­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent  — prob­a­bly — I haven’t made up my mind which body of work I am going to focus on yet. I am lean­ing toward my rep­re­sen­ta­tional abstracts.  I have heard them described as mys­te­ri­ous. It sounds good anyway.

I also have a lot of work to do on the Social Media front.  Holy cow, I didn’t know there was so much of that out there.  Face­book Fan pages? Who knew?  Tweet­meme? Twol­low? Tweet­deck?  RSS feeds?  It is over­whelm­ing. But at least I know if I work it bit by bit, even­tu­ally a whole will emerge.

Also some­where amidst this men­tal chaos I also have to con­tinue to create.

Who­ever said Art is not a real job?!

Got any­thing to say?  Would love to hear it.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda

Today I have been reminded by some­one very close to me about what he per­ceives to be all my fail­ings to act in the past. I find the entire exer­cise unpro­duc­tive. I am also find­ing it a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence as he goes on and on about it, which has been tak­ing up far too much time in my brain hous­ing group. Of course before he started nat­ter­ing on I didn’t know what today’s blog was going to be about and now I do.

I can learn from the past to be sure, but I refuse to beat myself up about what may have been. The past is gone. Noth­ing I do today will change it.

I can only do what I do today. Sure I can make plans for tomor­row, but action only occurs in the present.

The first day to do any­thing is now. The first day to start that learn­ing a new lan­guage, exer­cise pro­gram, diet, mar­ket­ing plan, cook­ing class, get spend­ing under con­trol, start that paint­ing, take up underwater-basket-weaving, or what­ever evil lit­tle shoulda that is hang­ing out in your brain hous­ing group is today. It is do or not do. TRY is the pre­cur­sor to failure.

If you don’t do, “why not” can be a valid edu­ca­tional analy­sis but it should not stop you from act­ing tomor­row when tomor­row becomes today. “I failed to act yes­ter­day” is not a rea­son to not act today. Nor is there a chas­tise­ment to be applied to the fail­ure to act yes­ter­day; “I failed to act yes­ter­day” does not mean “I am a bad per­son” or “I am a fail­ure”; it sim­ply is, in the past, unchange­able. “I failed to act yes­ter­day because I watched SciFi reruns all day” may be a call to change behav­ior, change pri­or­i­ties or what­ever, but again it implies no value judg­ment in and of itself; it is a call to action.

Beware of the shoul­das that do not prop­erly belong to you. Some peo­ple live vic­ar­i­ously through other peo­ple and will implant shoul­das in the unwary peo­ple they hold influ­ence over. If you are a lit­tle pudgy, but not unhealthy, and some­one is berat­ing you about being fat maybe that is a shoulda you need to ignore. Maybe the proper shoulda on your list today is to tell your nag where to get off, or maybe it is just to ignore them.

I should blog more often (as a mar­ket­ing tool) is one of the shoul­das in my list, also I need to paint more, and I need improve on my mar­ket­ing efforts in gen­eral. These artis­tic goal cen­tric efforts are com­pet­ing with a mil­lion other shoul­das in my life. Pri­or­i­tiz­ing shoul­das requires you to develop a self­ish streak. I am no Objec­tivist, or Exis­ten­tial­ist, but from the cre­ative stand­point Ayn Rand or Søren Kierkegaard did present ideas that may res­onate with you. If your true goal is to be an inde­pen­dent cre­ative per­son, you must under­stand that those around you think you are nuts, wast­ing your time with pie-in-the-sky ideas, and need to find some­thing sen­si­ble to do with your life. They are more than will­ing to load up your plate with well-intended should ofs. I believe that after sat­is­fy­ing your basic needs of food and roof-over-your-head, your next pri­or­ity has to be cre­ative goal-centric, not clean­ing your house, fix­ing the drip in the kitchen faucet, respond­ing to irrel­e­vant email, blog­ging per­haps, deal­ing with con­tin­u­ous demands of sig­nif­i­cant others…

The act of cre­ation is self­ish; it is ful­fill­ing a need in you that oth­ers may not under­stand.  These oth­ers are more than happy to con­vey to you their dis­plea­sure with your cho­sen path over and over again.  They will also remind you over and over again how your effort has failed in the past thus prov­ing their the­sis that you need to be doing some­thing else; they, of course, will also tell you what that some­thing else woulda, coulda, shoulda been.  If you have not done so already it is time to ban­ish these unpro­duc­tive ghosts from your mind.

So hav­ing com­pleted my blog and mar­ket­ing effort for the day, and ban­ished my unpro­duc­tive ghost via this blog, I will move on to other self­ish pur­suits in the now.

I am curi­ous, hav­ing now espoused my phi­los­o­phy regard­ing the cre­ative effort, how do you make time for your art?

Yours in Art,

-Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

PS. I am still look­ing for Spon­sors & Con­tribut­ing Patrons to help me pay the esti­mated $8000 it is going to cost me to attend this event.  Every lit­tle bit helps.

Num­bers, there are many kinds of numbers:

• The Nat­ural Num­bers, 1, 2, 3… are count­ing num­bers that a child can fig­ure out with their fin­gers and toes etc.  Depend­ing on who is doing the def­i­n­i­tions the nat­ural num­bers may or may not include the num­ber 0,. Nat­ural num­bers do NOT include num­bers such as that have dig­its after the dec­i­mal place such as 2.25 , nor do the nat­ural num­bers include neg­a­tive numbers.
• Whole Num­bers are the Nat­ural Num­bers plus Zero plus the Neg­a­tive Coun­ter­parts of the Nat­ural Num­bers,  …-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3…; Whole Num­bers are also called Inte­gers.  Again Integers/Natural Num­bers do NOT include num­bers with dig­its after the dec­i­mal point.
• Ratio­nal Num­bers are num­bers that can be expressed as a ratio of two Inte­gers (except­ing divi­sion by zero), there­fore are num­bers like 1/1, 2/3, –5/8 etc.  Ratio­nal Num­bers can include num­bers whose dec­i­mal equiv­a­lent ter­mi­nates such as –5/8 = –0.625, or num­bers whose dec­i­mal equiv­a­lent does not ter­mi­nate, but repeats instead such as 2/3=.66666…
• Irra­tional Num­bers are num­bers that can­not be expressed as a ratio of two Inte­gers, for exam­ple, the square root of two.  Irra­tional num­bers do not include num­bers involv­ing the Imag­i­nary Unit.
• Com­plex Num­bers are num­bers num­bers involv­ing the square root of neg­a­tive 1, also called the Imag­i­nary Unit, i.  Num­bers that are mul­ti­ples of the imag­i­nary unit are called Imag­i­nary Num­bers.
• Both Ratio­nal and Irra­tional num­bers can be Alge­braic.  An Alge­braic Num­ber is any num­ber that can be found as a root of poly­no­mial equa­tion with Inte­ger coef­fi­cients, such as the square root of 5, which would have the inte­ger coef­fi­cient 2, or neg­a­tive cube root of 10, which would have the inte­ger coef­fi­cient –3.   Num­bers like the square root of 2 are irra­tional num­bers, but they are alge­braic.  If n is the low­est pos­si­ble degree of such a poly­no­mial, the roots are alge­braic of order n. The square root of two is alge­braic in order 2, nev­er­the­less the square root of two is an Irra­tional Num­ber.
• Tran­scen­den­tal Num­bers are NOT Alge­braic.  The most famous tran­scen­den­tal num­bers are Pi, the ratio of a circle’s cir­cum­fer­ence to its diam­e­ter, and Euler’s Num­ber, which is the base of the nat­ural log­a­rithms among other things.
• Just to com­plete the pic­ture, Real Num­bers are num­bers that are NOT Com­plex Num­bers.  They can included Ratio­nal and Irra­tional Num­bers; they may be Alge­braic or Tran­scen­den­tal.  Real Num­bers can­not include num­bers involv­ing the Imag­i­nary Unit, but Com­plex num­bers can have Real Num­bers as com­po­nents.

Although some Tran­scen­den­tal Num­bers, such as Pi and Euler’s Num­ber are cool, they are not mys­ti­cal, nor are they par­tic­u­larly rare; tech­ni­cally almost all Real and Com­plex Num­bers are Tran­scen­den­tal, since the Alge­braic Num­bers are count­able, but the sets of Real and Com­plex Num­bers are uncount­able. All Tran­scen­den­tal Num­bers are Irra­tional, since all Ratio­nal Num­bers are Alge­braic, but NOT all Irra­tional Num­bers are Tran­scen­den­tal as some Irra­tional Num­bers are Alge­braic (such as the square root of 2).

Now that some of lan­guage of num­bers has been defined let’s con­sider the Golden Ratio, Phi. The Golden Ratio can be found in the pro­por­tions of the human body, the pro­por­tions of many other ani­mals, plants, DNA, the solar sys­tem, art and archi­tec­ture, music, pop­u­la­tion growth, the stock mar­ket.  It can derived math­e­mat­i­cally, geo­met­ri­cally, or via the Fibonacci Series.

The Golden Ratio: the ratio of the sum of the quan­ti­ties to the larger one equals the ratio of the larger one to the smaller one. Con­sider the whole length of some­thing, lets call this length, C, where C is com­posed of two smaller unequal sec­tions, A and B, such that C = A + B. Say B is the larger piece and A is the smaller piece. If C/B = B /A then the divi­sion of C into parts A and B is pro­por­tioned to the Golden Ratio.  This dimen­sion­ing con­sid­ered most pleas­ing to the human eye, prob­a­bly because these dimen­sions are found so fre­quently in nature. If (A+B)/B = B /A, then both equal Phi, the Golden Ratio.  Phi is approx­i­mately 1.6180339887498948482045868343…

Since the Golden Ratio, Phi, is the solu­tion to the equa­tion, x² - x-1 =0, which is Alge­braic in order 2, Phi is NOT a Tran­scen­den­tal Num­ber.

The Fibonacci Series is a series of num­bers with a recur­sive rela­tion­ship; it sim­ply expressed as the sum of the pre­ced­ing two num­bers in the series: start­ing at 0 and 1, then the next num­ber is 1=1+0, then num­ber after that is 2=1+1, then 3=2+1, then 5=3+2, then 8=5+3, etc.  The first 20 terms of the Fibonacci Series are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181…

The Fibonacci Series also fre­quently occurs in nature. We have 2 hands, 5 fin­gers, each fin­ger has 2 knuck­les and 3 segments-all Fibonacci num­bers. The num­ber of flat sur­faces on a banana — usu­ally 3 or 5 — again a Fibonacci Num­ber. Flower seed heads often have a cer­tain num­ber of spi­rals to pack seeds in such a man­ner that the seeds have the same amount of space-the num­ber of spi­rals is usu­ally a Fibonacci Num­ber. Plants also fre­quently arrange their leaves accord­ing to the Golden Sec­tion; If the entire cir­cum­fer­ence is pro­por­tional to 1.618 then the angle of rota­tion is usu­ally 0.618, which is the lesser of the sec­tions in the Golden Ratio 1.618 = 1/0.618. When the lesser sec­tion refers to an angle of rota­tion it is called the Golden Angle. The ten­dency of plants to wind them­selves using the Golden Angle and oth­er­wise arrange them­selves with Fibonacci num­bers is called Phyl­lotaxis; an esti­mated 90% of plants exhibit the ten­dency.    But not all plants fol­low phyl­lotaxis, some­times sweet pep­pers have 4 cham­bers instead of 3, some flow­ers have 4 petals, such as a fuch­sia,  or 6 petals, such as a cro­cus. Still it would seem that the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci num­bers must have a connection.

Indeed, the Golden Ratio, Phi, and the Fibonacci Series are inti­mately con­nected.  As the num­bers in the Fibonacci Series increase, the ratio of suc­ces­sive terms tends toward a cer­tain num­ber and that num­ber is the Golden Ratio; in math­e­mat­i­cal terms the limit of the ratio of suc­ces­sive terms in a Fibonacci Series as the terms go to infin­ity is the Golden Ratio. Lets see this in action: Keep­ing 3 dig­its accu­racy behind the dec­i­mal, the ratios of suc­ces­sive terms in the Fibonacci Series are  Unde­fined = 1/0 (divi­sion by zero is not per­mit­ted), 1.000 = 1/1, 2.000 = 2/1, 1.500 = 3/2, 1.667 = 5/3,  1.600 = 8/5,  1.625 = 13/8, 1.615 =21/13, 1.619 = 34/21, 1.618… 55/34, 1.618 = 89/55, 1.618 = 144/89 etc.  As you can see by the 9th iter­a­tion the ratios of suc­ces­sive terms of the Fibonacci series have con­verged to the Golden Ratio to 3 dig­its of accu­racy behind the decimal.

From an artist stand­point using 1.618 as an approx­i­ma­tion to the Golden Ratio should develop pleas­ing ratio in the scales most of us work in.  There­fore if you wish to sec­tion 36-inch-long can­vas into the golden ratio then 36/1.618 = 22.25 inches will be the larger dimen­sion and 36–22.25 =13.75 inches will be the smaller dimen­sion. Also  22.25/13.75 = 1.618 as it should.

Yours in art – Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

So I admit it. I am a geek.  The beauty of the num­bers has long fas­ci­nated me.   It is one of the rea­sons I wound up get­ting an advanced degree in physics.  I con­sid­ered engi­neer­ing,  math­e­mat­ics, and even art as my col­lege major, but physics won out on the fun fac­tor.  Engi­neer­ing was too pedes­trian, Art too risky, and the math­e­mati­cians I saw really didn’t look like they were hav­ing a good time.  I wound up get­ting a mas­ters degree in nuclear physics. but I am not doing any­thing with it these days.  If I can say one thing about get­ting a mas­ters degree (which prob­a­bly applies to any mas­ters degree, not just physics) is that grad­u­ate school taught me to think, to use the tools my under­grad­u­ate degree gave me.  Physics taught me to look at the big pic­ture as many solu­tions to Physics prob­lems apply to a great many very dif­fer­ent types of problems.

But I digress, I really still am a beauty of the num­bers gal.

So one prob­lem, which is kind of like the prob­lem of all prob­lems, is the P verses NP prob­lem.  What is P verses NP? In a nut­shell, the big ques­tion is whether P = NP or P ≠NP;  if P = NP then every prob­lem has a effi­cient solu­tion and we can find it effi­ciently. One might pos­tu­late all prob­lems are solv­able in an infi­nite amount of time, but what good is that?  Only God, per­haps, has an infi­nite amount of time to solve prob­lems; in the real world prob­lems need to be solved in a finite and rea­son­able amount of time. The amount of time is the crux of P verses NP. Are prob­lems really as com­plex as they appear? Is the only solu­tion brute force over an infi­nite amount of time?

By way of exam­ple, con­sider we have a large num­ber of wed­ding guests we need to seat at tables at the recep­tion.  We might want to pair them up into groups of two peo­ple who like each other, so that no one is lonely.  In 1965 a guy named Jack Edmonds devel­oped an effi­cient algo­rithm to solve this par­tic­u­lar prob­lem, and hav­ing an effi­cient algo­rithm means, among other things, you can feed it to a com­puter and solve the prob­lem in a rea­son­able amount of time. Jack Edmonds pio­neered the lingo for P verses NP.  Prob­lems with effi­cient solu­tions are the “P”, in P verses NP.  This par­tic­u­lar prob­lem is called the “match­ing problem.”

But there are many other ways to seat our large num­ber of wed­ding guests that are by far more dif­fi­cult to solve.  Sup­pose we want to make groups of three wed­ding guests who like each other, OR large groups of wed­ding guests who like each other, OR we want to seat guests around a round table such that guests, who can’t stand each other, are not seated next to each other, OR group  three cou­ples at the wed­ding with other cou­ples in a mutu­ally agree­able tri­ads, OR the evil con­verse social sci­ence exper­i­ment where only guests who can’t stand each other are grouped together in one way or another (hey, maybe the wed­ding plan­ner has a thing for the groom).  All the prob­lems that have effi­cient, ver­i­fi­able solu­tions are “NP”.

So if P = NP then every prob­lem has an effi­ciently ver­i­fi­able solu­tion AND we can find it effi­ciently.  On the tech­ni­cal side, even if this state­ment is true, we still may not have the algo­rithm to effi­ciently solve a given prob­lem. The P verses NP prob­lem is an abstrac­tion, there­fore just because we may do some­thing doesn’t nec­es­sary mean that we can…

Nat­u­rally this ques­tion has ram­i­fi­ca­tions well beyond com­put­ing algo­rithms, such as math­e­mat­i­cal proofs, encryp­tion, DNA sequenc­ing etc.

Why think about it at all?  The P verses NP prob­lem is one of the seven Clay Math­e­mat­ics Insti­tute Mil­len­nium Prize prob­lems; solv­ing it is worth $1,000,000.  Not a bad chunk of change, but also real­ize prov­ing P = NP  might solve other Mil­len­nium Prize prob­lems as well, each worth $1,000,000.  How­ever you should know that many the­o­rists believe P ≠NP. Don’t get your hopes up.