• About me
  • Bible Translations

Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

A Prayer

Posted on May 29, 2012 Written by savage Leave a Comment

Father, I do not believe it is your Will that my desire be fulfilled.

If that fulfillment is Your Will, and I am misunderstanding it, then please give me confidence through correction, and create the circumstances by which your Will might be fulfilled, even in this small thing, because I have no faith in this matter and I will resist its completion with every fiber of my being.

If my assumption and conviction is correct, then I beg of You that You show me some way to endure my own selfishness and pride.

I feel like I am at war with myself, that the edict of the body is a contrast with the edict of the Spirit, and I only desire what is good and right in Your eyes, not mine.

If it is Your Will that I attempt to endure as best I am able, and You do not desire to grant me some relief from my burden, so be it; Your Will supercedes my desires, and I only choose to serve You in any way I am able to.

Filed Under: Lifestyle Tagged With: prayer, pride, self-control, selfishness

Art and Noise

Posted on May 2, 2012 Written by savage Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking more about the role of art and self-control (as referenced by Self-Control and Art, if you can imagine.)

I thought to myself, “I wonder if this can be illustrated somehow?” and the answer, of course, was “yes.” As an artist and musician, there’re countless ways to illustrate such a concept.

I was going to use a MiniMoog V, actually, which is cheating a bit.

Since I’m primarily a musician, I thought of cranking up a MiniMoog and recording a sine wave (as an example of “full control”) – such a sine wave would be a horribly dull sound. Then I’d introduce other things, like perhaps a LFO that affected the note or the wave (creating warbles or beats), with the variations eventually degenerating into pure noise.

The purist musicians out there are thinking that it wouldn’t degenerate to pure noise, from a virtual Moog – it’d be noise from the very start. Shh, purists.

That’d work, but to really illustrate the point I’d need to introduce some other toys into the mix, and by the end of it you’d have a soundtrack that evoked Wolfram Alpha’s music generator.

The problem with that is that Wolfram Alpha is exactly contrary to the point I’d like to focus on: Wolfram Alpha generates music that sounds random and is certainly complex, but is actually deterministic in nature – it’s fully and tightly controlled, and can sometimes sound beautiful, but it’s not art.

So then I got the idea that I’d use something a little more visual – which would be more appropriate for the web, in any event.

That means I got to play with a tool I’ve used only in passing: gnuplot.

So let’s see what we get, trying to illustrate self control and art as a mixture.

It’s not going to be perfect – and I wouldn’t call it beautiful (or, really, “art”) but it certainly gives a better idea than just a rough explanation.

First, let’s look at total control. Here we have a rather ingenious graph, which plots y as a function of the square root of the absolute value of x. (In gnuplot, the command was plot sqrt(abs(x)).)

One study showed that beauty to the human form was expressed as a factor of regularity in the features of the human face. It wasn’t too regular, or else it looked inhuman, but “mostly very regular” was the “ideal.”

Now, is this “beautiful?” Well, it’s certainly sort of… regular. It has some aspect of beauty, especially to mathematicians.

Now let’s look at something where the control is less managed – or, well, not managed at all:

Jackson Pollock fans would possibly see it as art.

This was created with a gnuplot command of plot rand(0) which means there’s no correlation whatsoever between… anything. It’s a line where the vertical point is entirely random.

This is “irregular.” It may qualify as “beauty” to some, especially those who find beauty in randomness.

But it’s not “art” either.

Let’s try one more, and with this one, let’s use some imagination:

Here we have a bit of a mix between the two original processes. The gnuplot command was plot rand(0)/sqrt(abs(x)); this means we’re following our original (“controlled”) formula, except adding a bit of a jagged edge to it. (And inverting it, to boot.)

Countless games on the Commodore 64 used this concept.

Now we have something… unique, at the very least. And if you wanted to see something in it – the Tower of Barad-dûr, for example – you could see it as a tower reigning supreme over a mountain range.

It may not be good art, but I’d dare say it’s more artistic and meaningful than the random noise image, and more meaningful also than the “fully controlled” image.

The use of control gives it structure and the ability to have meaning.

Filed Under: Arts Tagged With: art, gnuplot, self-control

Tags

500words abimelech about action apologetics art assyria behavior church cnn covenant esv ethics exegesis faith forgiveness grind history homosexuality homosexuals inspiration jesus jonah law love music nehemiah paul persistence philippians power prayer pride proverbs reason redemption romans samuel self-control selfishness shema sin trump truth writing

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2023 · Focus Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in