Pattern Recognition

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No one is afraid of ghosts when the sun is high and strong. The thing to remember is - it's a cycle, the sun sets. It always sets.

The tyranny of the sun is that it will set.

Look around you in the afternoon, the warm sun on your skin, your empire bright and hot; yourself strong and fearless. Nothing can go wrong. But you know, deep down inside, you know that it's a cycle and eventually that golden orb will sink. You know that everything you see around you will eventually be recast by deep, chilling night and you will be called upon to make it through that darkness or perish in its depths.

You know that. Slap yourself if you don't know that. This is important stuff.

Everything is rotating, everything is circling, everything moves through repeating cycles. Protons and electrons whip frenzied circles around the nucleus; the moon carves dusty arcs around the earth and the earth caroms worrisomely around the sun, which in turn loops hazily around the steadily cycling fires of the Milky Way. The physical universe moves in cycles.

Oh that it ended there.

The tyranny of the sun is that it will set.

It doesn't end there, of course. The economy, man-made construct that it is, moves in cycles. Steadily repeating cycles that occur in spite of our valiant and educated attempts to stop them. Ask Alan Greenspan if he likes the cyclical nature of the economy. He doesn't. And it's his job to prevent it, but there's not a lot he can do about it. Alan is an accursed man – doomed to failure. He is judged by the degree to which he fails.

Take a moment to feel Alan's pain. Then move on. There's no standing still.

Fashion moves in cycles – repeating itself over and over at safe intervals. Pop culture moves in cycles, as demonstrated by the recent and somewhat unfortunate return of eighties hair metal. It's ok to like the music, but guys in Spandex pants was never a good idea. We knew that was coming back for us someday, didn't we?

Here's an experiment.

Try this. Pick a word, any word, and start saying it over and over. Say oven. Oven. The word conjures up clear pictures in the mind. Keep saying it though. Say it aloud preferably. Say it over and over and soon, very soon, something odd happens. The word dissociates itself from its meaning – it becomes a nonsense sound. Oven – sounds like burping.

Experiment's not done yet. Stay with me. Almost there.

I saw an art exhibit recently. It was composed of rubbings where the artist put canvas over sections of rope and/or rod, and produced rubbings of them – I'm not sure how that's done; it's probably self explanatory. Anyway, he had prints of three pieces of rod or five feet of rope, and they looked like three pieces of rod or five feet of rope. Pretty unremarkable. He also had rubbings of things like thirty-five pieces of rod, or fifty feet of rope. These didn't look like thirty-five pieces of rod, there was a little too much rod for that. They looked like a mess. The images became dissociated from their meanings, became nonsense. The rods and rope vanished.

Still, not much going on so far, right?

Then he had pieces like, Five Hundred Feet of Rod. These rubbings were so dense with rod, that they were almost black with it. Unintelligible masses of rod. But there was something weird about them. I discovered that if you stared at them for awhile, and this wasn't the case with the others, the dense mats of texture suddenly became things. They became landscapes and gardens, calm lakes with light reflecting off of gentle waves. I was caught off guard.

Massive repetition of simple elements produced structure. Produced nature.

This is what fractals are all about. Formulas that repeat over and over and over, with minor variations in each cycle, until they suddenly produce landscapes just like those found in nature. Nature, the natural world, as a simple equation that produces a small, random variation each time it repeats, and builds a world full of airliners, equity markets and cheesecake.

There's something vaguely unsettling about it.

Music, good music, is typically a repeating pattern with minor variations. Music is cyclical. Our brains like that. They did some studies on the exact frequency of repetition and variation that humans prefer, found a mathematical range that defined it, and then discovered that a lot of great art and architecture embodied this frequency. And Van Gogh certainly wasn't calculating this when he painted – he was just doing what felt right, what looked right.

Makes you feel ever so slightly less human and ever so slightly more mechanical doesn't it? This might be one of those cold nights of which I spoke earlier. Hope you brought a warm jacket.

I know I didn't.