Every year, in order to raise a large portion of the school budget, St. Andrews Catholic School holds Taste of the Town. Local restaurants love it because it brings new customers to their establishments. And the people like getting a taste of the restaurant’s best for a buck or two. Bob Natale, my brother, is the big-shot weekend dj at the Easy Listening station in Myrtle Beach , South Carolina (WEZV-FM). He’s in charge of publicity for this event. Bob’s the Orson Welles of Myrtle Beach, writing, directing and narrating the video. Listen to those dulcet old-time radio tones.

Bob’s dream, and I’m sure it’s the dream of many of those sweet children of the school, is for Rachael Ray to come down this Fall and be the Taste of the Town celebrity judge. I’m throwing the whole weight of the GammaBlog organization behind this quest. Rachel, it’s for the children.

These images were generated on an Amstrad PC in the early to mid 90’s. I wrote the program in Basic (Basic came bundled with the computer) to play with the idea of generating whole images similar to the way movement is generated in cellular automata, like John Conway’s Game of Life. Even though the only thing I knew of Conway’s Life was what I’d seen on a Nova science program. What this program allowed me to do was to create a grid of approximately 80 x 50 squares that could be filled with gray scale values from 0 - 9. I started off with randomly placed black and white squares and the program took over from there. The program looked at the value of the surrounding squares and the value of the four squares two places away at cardinal points, and then replaced the original square with a value computed from the weighted values of the surrounding squares. The more proximate the square the more weight it was given. Running the program without putting in the symmetry generates images very much like looking at a sky full of fluffy cumulus clouds. Add the symmetry and faces etc. magically appear. Our simian brain has trained over millions of years to quickly recognize the symetrical eyes of predators. Not all the images are as striking as many of these are, I edited them down from about twice the number. I recorded them off the crt display with my video camera, thus the degraded quality of the images.

I’ve often wondered what such a program running on a current day PC at a much higher resolution would produce. When I got my first PC running Windows 95 I was disappointed to find no Basic there. I’ve not done programming other than some simple stuff in Flash ever since.
Cellular Automata models in Java

If the player above is not working try this link.

Among other things, Peter Fusaro wants a market where environmental costs are tied to production, generating economic incentive to go green, save the planet and the economy. Speaking at an NDN Green Project event in New York City on Understanding the Cleantech Investment Opportunity.

I’m experimenting with a new themes for the GammaBlog. Feedback is welcome. Please excuse any temporary strangeness.

I’m going through many of my old video tapes. This one was undated but my best guess is 1995. My improvisational group, The Gametones (Pronounced Gamma Tones), performs at the Exit Art Gallery.
If you can’t see the video embedded above try this link.

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