I am trying to co-operate with ChatGPT, creating Found Poetry, again. Rules and process: I pick the title, then I prompt ChatGPT: Write the opening paragraph of a novel titled: Prismatic. Dispersed. Triangular. The bot creates a paragraph, I pick a short phrase. This becomes the first of each ‘stanza’, in italics. I use this…
Category: Life the Universe and Everything
Stargate of Diffraction. Escaping the Labyrinth of Colorful Wires.
This blog has been many things. Experimental poetry playground, notes from the field by a small business owner, popular science and tech blog, compilation of dry research reports, self-referential musing of a web developer. The only intersection between all of this has been me being interested & invested in it. I had tech-blogged myself into…
Found Prose: Retrospective 2012-2022
You will not want to read this. Nobody does, me included. But creating it has been an interesting experiment. I have been scouring this blog for sentences, one from each blog post. In chronological order, starting in 2012. I had permitted myself to re-order sentences, but I have rarely used that option. The fountain pen…
Innovation and Scarcity (and Panic)
I tried to avoid such words. They sounded like hollow buzzwords in times of abundance, used by advertizers playing on fears. But our complacent world is taught a lesson, right now, at furious speed. I am following news as everybody else, I am reading about gloomy forecasts. An Austria paper mill has announced today it…
Lone Black Telephone
It’s a relic of the Cold War era. It is black. Once shiny Bakelite became dull. Maybe it was the chemicals. It found shelter in a darkroom. In a research center dismantling its nuclear reactor. There was no future for nuclear science after the iron curtain had crumbled. It was voiceless, robbed of its carbon…
Creative Process. Evolution.
My creative process has been evolving gradually in the past year. ~ I am thinking about a little piece of physics, and how it is described with math. ~ Then I am creating a SageMath notebook (plus custom code) that outputs a set of functions as parametric curves in a three-dimensional space. Here, diffraction patterns…
Complex Alien Eclipse
My colorful complex function lived in a universe of white light. I turned off the light. Turned it into its negative. Expected it to look bleak. Like thin white bones on black canvas, cartoon skeletons of imaginary alien creatures. But it is more like the total solar eclipse I watched in 1999. There is interference,…
Trapped inside the Light Cone
Trapped inside the light cone on a path of eerie fire. Causally connected to your past . . Onward. Celestial spheres embrace the future cone gather round your burning self.
Familiar Wave. Come to Rescue.
A poem from text snippets of my last three posts, interlaced with a metamorphosis of my last drawing. ~ ~~ ~~~ The familiar wave is in the middle, oblique. accessible to intuitive interpretation. To tame it, sort of, come to rescue Or are they? Going from up to down you only care about directions What…
Joys of Geometry
Creating figures with math software does not feel like fabricating illustrations for science posts. It is more of a meditation on geometry. I want to literally draw every line. I am not using grid lines or rendered surfaces. I craft a parametric curve for every line. A curve is set of equations. Yet, playing with…
Elliptical Poetry
look at these towers Using the map creating a distorted image projected up to the sphere All connecting rays follow this rule Imaginary number i makes an appearance that borders on the poetic It’s nothing more than a whisper construct the proof for yourself something of a dying art avoid thinking about anything there has…
Lines and Circles
I poked at complex function 1/z, and its real and imaginary parts look like magical towers. When you look at these towers from above or below, you see sections of perfect circles. This is hinting at some underlying simplicity. Using the map 1/z, another complex number – w=1/z – is mapped to z. Four dimensions…
Looking Back: Hacking and Defending Windows Public Key Infrastructure (ADCS)
I live at the fringes of the cybersecurity community. I have never attended infosec conferences. There will be a talk on PKI hacking at Blackhat 2021 soon: Top AD offensive security gurus are presenting comprehensive research on abusing ADCS (Active Directory Certificate Services). I only know about that, because I noticed backlinks from their article…
Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape
Found Poetry found me. I started this website as a science blog, but then I saw poetry in mundane texts – just as you see faces in things. I created poems from spam comments, from search terms, from physics textbooks, from book spines, from error messages, from Facebooks ads, from any text anywhere in the…
The Art of Removing the Right Things
Some metaphors feel so clichéd that you avoid making use of them – even if they are true to the core. Gardening has been likened to many phenomena. Programming may be like gardening. Picking the best ideas to guide your work and life may be. Once the first of them appeared out of nothing. A…
Farewell Pandemic Poetry
I’ve lost many chances to create poetry from pandemic politics. So many metaphors weren’t used to serve the fine arts. But finally I rise to the challenge. Our grand opening-up-anything is being celebrated in each of our provinces. Text snippets from one of these press conferences this week are intruding my waking and sleeping mind….
Peter M. Schuster on History of Science
The late Dr. Peter M. Schuster was a physicist and historian of science. After a career in industry, he founded a laser technology startup. Recovering from severe illness, he sold his company and became an author, science writer, and historian. He founded echophysics – the European Center for the History of Physics – in Pöllau…
The Calm Before the Wave
A poem, created from text snippets taken out of a National Geographic article on tsunamis. ~ ~~ ~~~ The Calm Before the Wave as the sea pulls away from the coast We thought we would be safe defenses have improved tremendously false sense of security the uncertainty in that forecast seemed high too…
Poets Who Speak of Jupiter
In the third chapter of the first volume of his legendary physics lectures, Richard Feynman discusses the relation of physics to other sciences. He says that astronomy got physics started, and its most remarkable discovery is that stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth. He adds this famous…
Infinity
New Year’s Eve 2019 seems infinitely far in the past. It was the first day news about this mysterious disease had been published in my country. Yet it seems infinitely far away at that time, somewhere in China. Today we see something glowing at the end of a weird long corridor. Despite horrible news, I…
5470 Data Points
5470 people in Austria have died from COVID to date.
This image is made of 5470 yellow characters.
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.
Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Enthalpy
When you move from fundamental principles (in physics) to calculating something ‘useful’ (in engineering), you seem to move from energy to enthalpy. Enthalpy is measured in Joule, as well as energy. It is assigned to a ‘system’, a part of the physical world separated from other parts by interfaces. The canonical example is a vessel…
Edginess: What I Was Searching For
First Spam Poetry since a long time! Every line is an unedited snippet from about 100 spam comments on this blog. Process: View spam comments at random Either pick a phrase from the comment or discard it, then delete the comment. Jump to the next spam comment – spam comments can be processed in any…
Connectedness and Independence
My websites ebb and flow. After 23 years of writing online, I am recognizing recurring patterns. I am keeping ancient hyperlinks intact. All articles I had published here before 2020 are still available elsewhere, also under the former main domain used at WordPress – elkement.blog. My frustration about other referenced websites’ ever changing and abandoned…
Hacking
I am joining the ranks of self-proclaimed productivity experts: Do you feel distracted by social media? Do you feel that too much scrolling feeds transforms your mind – in a bad way? Solution: Go find an online platform that will put your mind in a different state. Go hacking on hackthebox.eu. I have been hacking…
Infinite Loop: Theory and Practice Revisited.
I’ve unlocked a new achievement as a blogger, or a new milestone as a life-form. As a dinosaur telling the same old stories over and over again. I started drafting a blog post, as I always do since a while: I do it in my mind only, twist and turn in for days or weeks…
Computers, Science, and History Thereof
I am reading three online resources in parallel – on the history and the basics of computing, computer science, software engineering, and the related culture and ‘philosophy’. An accidental combination I find most enjoyable. Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky’s blog – a collection of classic essays. What every developer needs to know about Unicode. New terms…
Tinkering, Science, and (Not) Sharing It
I stumbled upon this research paper called PVC polyhedra: We describe how to construct a dodecahedron, tetrahedron, cube, and octahedron out of pvc pipes using standard fittings. … In particular, if we take a connector that takes three pipes each at 120 degree angles from the others (this is called a “true wye”) and we…
The Future of Small Business?
If I would be asked which technology or ‘innovation’ has had the most profound impact on the way I work I would answer: Working remotely – with clients and systems I hardly ever see. 20 years ago I played with modems, cumbersome dial-in, and Microsoft’s Netmeeting. Few imagined yet, that remote work will once be…
elkemental Force 