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…
Spins, Rotations, and the Beauty of Complex Numbers
This is a simple quantum state … |➚> = α|↑> + β|↓> … built from an up |↑> state and a down state |↓>. α and β are complex numbers. The result |➚> is in the middle, oblique. The oblique state is a superposition or the up and down base states. Making a measurement, you…
Galaxies of Diffraction
These – the arrangement of points in the image below – are covectors, sort of. I wrote about them, some time ago. They are entities dual to vectors. Eating vectors, spitting out numbers. Vectors are again ‘co’ to vectors; they will eat covectors. If vectors live in a space with axes all perpendicular to each…
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…
My Elliptical Cone
I’ve still been thinking about this elliptical cone! It has been the main character in my geometric proof on stereographic projection mapping circles to circles. The idea has been to reduce a three-dimensional problem to a two-dimensional one, by noting that something has to be symmetric. A circle on a sphere is mapped to some…
Circles to Circles
Using stereographic projection, you create a distorted image of the surface of a sphere, stretched out to cover an infinite plane. Each point on the sphere is mapped to a point in the equatorial plane by a projection ray starting at a pole of the sphere. Draw a circle on the sphere, e.g. by intersecting…
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…
Reality and Imagination
Grey and colorful. Cutting through each other. Chasing each other. Meeting in the center, leaning on each other, forming an infinite line. ~ Reality and Imagination: Real and imaginary part of complex function 1/z: ~ The real part of 1/z is painted in shades of grey, the imaginary part in rainbow colors. Plots are created…
Vintage Covectors
Covectors in the Dual Space. This sounds like an alien tribe living in a parallel universe hitherto unknown to humans. In this lectures on General Relativity, Prof. Frederic Schuller says: Now comes a much-feared topic: Dual vector space. And it’s totally unclear why this is such a feared topic! A vector feels familiar: three numbers…
Super Motivational Function
I’ve presented a Motivational Function, a while back. It is infinitely flat at the zero point: all its derivatives are zero there. Yet, it manages to lift its head – as it is not analytic at zero! If you think of it as a function of a complex argument, its weirdness becomes more obvious. Turn…
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…
Secure Poetry: “I have been quite confident”
A poem from snippets of two postings on cybersecurity. Trying to carve words out of jargon. Details on the creative process at the bottom of the post. I have been quite confident I have been inspired In this simple way to find both options take note of an extra stealth factor I hardly ever…
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….
Have We Changed After All?
A poem from googled snippets of text – details on the creative process at the bottom of this post. ~ ~~ ~~~ Have We Changed After All we’re unearthing the biggest questions Why do we have such strong preferences If we think we know better struggling to believe that God will provide traverse this landscape…
Injecting an EFS Recovery Agent – and Let the Virus Scanner Help You!
How can you read files encrypted with Windows’s Encrypting File System if you neither have access to the owner’s encryption certificate and key and nor that of a legit data recovery agent (DRA) … but if you are a local administrator? This work is still inspired by the hackthebox machine Helpline. You were able to…
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…
Dirac’s Belt Trick
Is classical physics boring? In his preface to Volume 1 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman worries about students’ enthusiasm: … They have heard a lot about how interesting and exciting physics is—the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and other modern ideas. By the end of two years of our previous course, many…
Parse Certificates Stored in the Windows Registry
You can parse the binary blobs that represent certificates stored in the Windows registry with certutil correctly, even when the Windows Explorer / GUI tells you that this is not a certificate. certutil seems to be able to handle / ignore meta data better. Once upon a time I played with the machine Ethereal provided by…
Motivational Function
Deadly mutants are after us. What can give us hope? This innocuous-looking function is a sublime light in the dark. It proves you can always recover. If your perseverance is infinite. As x tends to zero, the exponent tends to minus infinity. The function’s value at zero tends to zero. It is a zero value…
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…
Gödel’s Proof
Gödel’s proof is the (meta-)mathematical counterpart of the paradoxical statement This sentence is false. In his epic 1979 debut book Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter intertwines computer science, math, art, biology with a simplified version of the proof. In 2007 he revisits these ideas in I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter writes: … at age…
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…
Statistical Independence and Logarithms
In classical mechanics you want to understand the motion of all constituents of a system in detail. The trajectory of each ‘particle’ can be calculated from the forces between them and initial positions and velocities. In statistical mechanics you try to work out what can still be said about a system even though – or…
elkemental Force 