Religion ... Science ...
I try not to run one of those blogs that mostly link to something else out there on the web. I.e., “here’s an interesting thought or article”, end of post. I try to contribute some content, put in some original thought, via my little corner of cyberspace.
But I did come across something of linkable interest the other day, i.e. an article on the British Telegraph site about an auto repair franchise in the southern USA called “Christian Brothers”. They’re not called that for nothing! The whole point is that the owners of the shop are Christians and are going to treat you as a good Christian should – with fairness and respect. I.e., they’re not going to rip you off for repairs that aren’t needed. That’s the theory.
I’m not a religious man, but I still respect religion and acknowledge the general social good that it can accomplish. The emphasis here is on “can”; unfortunately, religion too often turns into a harmful agent itself. This kind of “customer service ministry” — if it’s sincere – could help Christianity (and maybe religion in general) get some street credibility back. I’m all in favor of Christian car shops, Christian laundries, Christian accountants, Christian exterminators, etc. — so long as they focus their Christianity on doing a good job and charging a fair price to all who do business with them. And that would include Jews, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, sinners, saints, all comers regardless of their own faith or lack thereof. If these Christian business managers would judge not and preach not, given their Christian humility, then I’ll say that there might really be something to this Christian business movement.
On another note: Computer-generated artwork based on fractal patterns caused by chaos-theory equations (i.e., equations with exponential factors where past output values are fed back in as inputs for each new output) is nothing new. But I was fooling around with a fairly simple Excel spreadsheet that some math guy put up on his web site recently, just having some fun looking for critical threshold values for the two parameter inputs, seeking combinations where interesting things happen on the output graph, and I came across this pattern. I thought it was kind-of neat, so I’m sharing it with the world. It looks almost like an octopus. It truly does lie at the boundary of chaos – just a slight increase in the parameters send the output values skyrocketing, breaking up the spiral; just a slight decrease in both parameters changes the pattern whereby the “tentacles” are lost. I.e., the system is at a sensitive point, whereby the “butterfly over Beijing” effect can actually be seen and demonstrated.
It’s pretty neat what you can do with a simple spreadsheet and a little chaos theory. If you want to fool with it, here’s the site link where you can download the Excel program (DYNAMIC.XLS). Oh, and the parameter values for the “octopus” are: REAL parameter: 0.046; IMAGINARY parameter: 0.61.