Quantum Void: September 2008

Aspirin

The other day I wasn't feeling so well so I went to the local Walgreen's to get some old fashioned aspirin. Well when I got to the drug aisle, I was confronted with a WALL full of modern day pain killers, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and multiple variations thereof. All by itself way down in the little bitty right hand corner was what I was seeking, 500 tablets of Walgreen's brand aspirin for $3.99.

Now somebody please explain to me why generic brand aspirin that is just as effective or better pain killer (and largely natural) than the rest (and has many other beneficial properties) is now a hard to find item?

Yes I would rather much pay 3.99 for about 10 pills of ibuprofen. NOT! Just because aspirin is not a copyrighted item anymore, money can't be made off of it, so guess what, nobody sells it (except Bayer if they boost it with caffeine)!

Best Adapted Screenplay

The best-selling book comes to terrifying life.

Computer Generated Art

I came up with a way to algorithmically generate "power law" images. Power laws show up everywhere in nature, including but not limited to; clouds, coastlines/topography, occurrence of natural disasters, the stock market, and the internet. A power law is considered to have a frequency power spectrum proportional to 1/f^alpha, where the alpha variable is the slope of the power spectrum in log-log space. In addition I generate a random color scheme using another algorithm I developed.

These images are completely randomly generated, and I picked a few of the more aesthetically pleasing ones to share. Some of them look as if you could even see the artist's brushstrokes.

Definitely some people will dismiss this as not art because it does not accurately recreate real life situations such as an ant crawling up a dogs nose, and I will admit this is quite abstract. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are surely more permutations and improvements to be made.

I really think (and have made) some of these pictures the perfect Windows(TM) wallpaper. They are modern, artistic, and soothing to the senses due to their natural mathematical basis.

You can click on the picture for the full sized image, and then right click to download into your Windows(TM) folder. After that right click on your desktop background and select properties (or personalize in Vista). Select the image of choice and checkbox the "stretch image" option. Though these images are tileable (another neat feature), they still have a border around them so they don't quite look right if you do so.

Though I don't want to sway the artistic interpretation of viewers, as some people do, I will give names to all of the creations.