The adventures with Mathematica continue, and I have been working on developing machine learning applications for remote sensing. 

Below is an example where 14 Google images have been analysed to extract the layer representing land then coloured to stand out, from that we made a gif to show change over time. 

I'm quite chuffed, and love the way it shows the rapid development of the coast line, not just the building of islands but also the digging of canals. 

The next step will to be to create a higher resolution mask (this one is 5x5 pixels) but for the time being we're off to an excellent start demonstrating proof of concept!

And another, using a slightly different image visualisation tool

Our homework piece for the New Kind of Science Summer School is related to two dimensional outer totalistic cellular automata. 

I decided to use this as an opportunity to investigate the potential of using Cellular Automata to generate unique and "geeky" knitting patterns, based on the tradition of Fair Isle knitting. I have been convinced since I first saw a cellular automata that they were a computers enthusiastic attempt to spread the love of knitting, as the patterns are visualised so similarly to the majority of knitting patterns. 

This kind of Cellular Automata (CA) is generated step by step and builds up to something like seen below, a 3D creation which is created layer by layer. The pattern of each layer is dependant on the layer before and the "rule" used to control this CA. In this case the "rule is 123,499...

However, Rule 30 (as seen below) demonstrates the concept with much more aesthetic interest. 

For my homework I decided to work within the ideas of Fair Isle knitting, due to its challenging nature and allure. According to the rules of Fair Isle, patterns must only use two colours per row and should have no more than 5 stitches of one colour in a row, however this last rule has been bent in this pattern. One pattern was developed to knit a scarf in the round with two distinct sides somewhat similar to this. The "Front", being knitted from a vertical cross section of the CA above, and the "Back" from a collection of horizontal cross sections.

Three example patterns have been developed which demonstrate three distinct scarf styles, and therefore three different Cellular Automata aesthetics. For each pattern selection a personal approach is required and will differ between patterns and individual styles and therefore cannot be fully automated. My current favourite can be seen to the left, and is a representation of Rule 123,499. 

These squares are to be used as the scarf "Back" and any combination of these squares could be combined as according to personal preference.

I'm hoping to get a chance to actually knit this further down the line, although the weather so far, with the hot humidity hasn't been conducive to working with wool. Stay tuned for more radical excitement coming from cells, mathematica and New Kind of Science. 

So it was all go in Boston last night with celebrations for the 4th of July, and for a bit of a break from science, philosophy and pages of code. You might note that this was actually the 3rd of July. It turns out that no matter the level of patriotism felt the weather will still triumph. In this case Hurricane Arthur is heading its way up the coast. We had about 1/2 hour of fireworks (which I will admit were starting to look a bit like cellular automata..) and then almost immediately were instructed by the police, various kinds of police, that we were to evacuate. 
This was shortly followed by the skies opening and the ocean falling out. 

Hurricane Arthur is on his way, exciting times! Thankfully for any stereotypical residents of Boston they're likely to be safe what with Arthur being a male name. Statistically hurricanes with female names kill more because people tend to assume that women are weaker, apparently hurricanes haven't heard about this. Go Hurricanes of equality! For more information check out the Nat Geo article here. 

All up it was a very exciting evening, fireworks, music from Frozen and the sampling of a Hurricane. We're back into school today, and the rain is expected to turn up a notch. So it'll be back to the Science next post!

So, today there was a lot of lectures. About 11 or so hours of lectures. And since I'm not uber maths person, nor uber programming person, nor super gaming person, I didn't pick up a lot to share. The best part of the lectures today was doing some super basic programming and instruction in Mathematica, I was stoked to follow it all, and get a vague idea of how this funny cody stuff can actually DO anything. 
Cool though it is, and potential though it has, I remain dedicated to my GeoGeek programs (ArcGIS and QGis) where you can see your data in a form that makes sense in my little spatial mind. People who can actually work in such a theoretical space all the time, to me they deserve all kinds of credit. 
You can see below some of the basic stuff I was doing, and possibly see why it's a bit challenging to blog about.  

One of the interesting things is the challenge that teaching coding to people who've had no exposure to coding. There were some arguments floated that it should work in the same part of the brain that processes language (being as computer coding is referred to as languages) however in my limited experience this isn't the case. Kids I know who have big challenges with language (particularly dyslexia) are coding ninjas and coding ninjas are pretty rarely linguistic ninjas. 
So something cool is going on there. It's a whole different way of thinking, that involves breaking thoughts and ideas down quite differently to how we would do naturally. 

Below are some cool things that we've been playing with, they're pretty, though I'm yet to appreciate them for any deeper reason yet. 

Next up, I'll start chatting about the project I'm going to be working on at the school, it's looking pretty awesome! 

So, today is our first day of lectures, lots of the usual disorganisation, handing out of pieces of paper, passwords, links to various things etc. etc. etc. In some ways pretty reassuring to see that hardcore tekkie people face the same standard tekkie issues of us mortals, drained computer batteries and getting kicked off WiFi. It's a thing people. 

In a moment of computational confusion, where Mr. Wolfram himself is contemplating the complexity of Mathematica I'm stealing a moment to write and share the beauty of the classroom. 

We've had some introductions to Mathematica and the Wolfram language. Looked a little bit at some things that are coming in the future (with Wolfram and offshoot companies) and then heard about our homework, choosing and analysing a pet Cellular Automaton (CA). Who wouldn't want their own pet CA? Personally I'd love to have one knitted into a scarf, subtle geek all the way, and yes, that is a mission for later in this class. 

But for the time being we're learning about what is possible with Mathematica, and once again been exposed to the importance of talking with colleagues to work through problems, something Mr. Wolfram has been doing for the last hour, taking suggestions from the audience as to the appropriate pieces of code to use. As a novice coder, I'm pretty stoked to see this, you are allowed to ask for help! 

The most interesting thing I've found today, was that they're looking into education, particularly coding education, and how that can be achieved. It's always exciting to see people thinking beyond their comfort zone of the theoretical. So I'll be looking to track down an ear to chew about that.. definitely an exciting element of the whole thing. But now, we're at the end of 11 hours of lectures..