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Hey internet!

It’s been a pretty quiet week at home for me – most of the interesting stuff I’ve been working on has been at work (so much juicy data to mine).

I did discover the beauty and fun of Whitney Music Boxes – a kind of mathematical spiral that is fun as hell to play with. I built a few of them: one musical, one non-musical. They have this beautiful, self-organising, resonant nature to them that I find really interesting.
Most of the Whitney Music Boxes you find online are musical (duh), which is probably where they’re at their most interesting. But I found it really cool that when you increase the number of elements into the tens of thousands, the patterns just get more complicated, intricate and resonant (but you have to have everything happen slower to see them). Which makes me think that there must be some ‘true’ pattern that is revealed when you have infinite elements rotating infinitely slowly. But that’s the kind of mathematics that’s way beyond me. The Featured Image above is a Whitney Music Box with about 2000 spinning elements.

I’ve also been adding more bits and pieces to Mountaineer – I’m thinking I need to create a github repo for it, since at this point it’s stabilised to a point where I’m kind of working on it in a branch-like way anyway. It’d also be a good excuse to learn how to use Github!

The one other major initiative this fornight has been me starting up a somewhat organised modelling practise. I’m a decent enough programmer at this point that I don’t really run into situations where the coding is the barrier to my creativity. But I’m constantly having ideas that aren’t possible because I don’t know how to do modelling / texturing work that well. So once a week (at least) I’ve been devoting to just practicing Blender. I’ll probably create a page on OmniPudding to share renders of stuff I work on. Last week I did the calculator on my desk, and this week I started work on a nice 3D model of a Hearthstone card.

So yeah, that’s all for this fornight, a little boring, sorry chaps and chappettes!
– Lachlan