I may have a slightly different definition of “elegance” than most – and its origin is oddly enough, Computer Science! In CS, sometimes we talk about elegant code, or an elegant system. And this is essentially something like a large task accomplished with as few keystrokes, or as few lines of code or even characters as possible. One of my favorite college computer science courses was assembly language – each command was only 3 characters, and each line of code could only contain one instruction. I forget the exact number of lines, thinking it was 3 or 4, but the final exam was to create a program that generated the mandelbrot set using assembly language. After a good sleepless 20 hours, I was the first to get it (something I’m proud of to this day, since certain types of programming have never ever been my strong suit)
Careful with this video, this stuff can induce intense-navel-gazing in certain individuals:
From Wikipedia: the Mandelbrot set is the set of values of c in the complex plane for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial zn+1 = zn2 + c remains bounded. That is, a complex number c is part of the Mandelbrot set if, when starting with z0 = 0 and applying the iteration repeatedly, the absolute value of zn remains bounded however large n gets.
You catch all that? Don’t worry, but if you see me halfway through a cup of black coffee and staring at a blank spot on the wall, I’m either thinking about stuff like this, or like uh atoms and cells and usually the spaces between electrons. No idea why. Please don’t be concerned, and its ok to interrupt.
Thinking to body tissues – what makes up a fat cell? What makes a muscle cell? What makes up these elements? What determines the arrangement of these elements? YOUR actions, your habits. You have control over your body right down to the atomic level. WOAH… careful there, latent navel gazer!
Leave a Reply