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Sunday, Jun. 30, 2024

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Complex Numbers

by Robert Waltz

Rated: 18+ · Book · Personal · #1196512

Not for the faint of art.

Complex Numbers

A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number.

The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi.

Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary.

Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty.

http://www.ddewey.net/mandelbrot/

Signature for Honorable Mentions in 2018 Quill Awards

A signature for exclusive use of winners at the 2019 Quill Awards

Signature for those who have won a Quill Award at the 2020 Quill Awards

Show Recent Comments

10 Most Recent Blog Comments:

Kåre Enga in Montana

a day ago
In response to "Je Voyagerai"

I once was allergic to going on a cruise. But... I should... just for the experience. I've gotten out of my comfort zone for experience.

With the crush of tourists these days any travel should include how much you want to put up with "other people's vacation" as opposed to your own.

1 Like

Lazy Writer est 4/24/2008

a day ago
In response to "Je Voyagerai"

Happy traveling..be safe.

Elisa: Middle Aged Stik

a day ago
In response to "It Ain't Wrong"

Ain’t apparently begins as amn’t, a contraction for am not, which you can still hear in Ireland and Scotland today

I mean, an abundant number of Scotch and Irish immigrants ended up in the American South, so this tracks.

While a lot of people consider ain’t improper, it’s a very regular and legitimate part of many forms of English, including in Black English (AAVE). Be mindful that judging someone’s use of ain’t as “wrong” can be a very socially loaded act, to say the least.

For some reason, this reminds of one of the reasons I stopped reading Ask A Manager. A bunch of people were getting real uppity about the use of the phrase "baby daddy". Unsurprisingly, many of these people appeared white. One Black person in the comments finally had enough and threw down with this remark:

"I gotta say, as a black woman it grates to have phrases that come out of AAVE be appropriated, assigned negative connotation (likely because they come from black culture), then discarded with prejudice. If you’re using the phrase to conjure up stereotypical imagery, I can get on board with putting an end to that. But there are plenty of people for whom baby daddy or baby mama are not pejorative at all, just descriptors of the relationship in their dialect, and correcting them to “Father of my child” is just another case of denigrating minority speech patterns and legitimate AAVE grammatical constructions and upholding “white is right” standards."

(For more context, check out this link

1 Like

🌕 HuntersMoon

Jun 28, 2024 at 10:54am
In response to "It Ain't Wrong"

Ain't you on a roll today...

3 Like

Adherennium Dr of Phoolishness

Jun 27, 2024 at 11:53am
In response to "Wave Rider"

Horrifying fact, I once painted a reproduction of the Hokusai wave on our bathroom wall. Eventually of course it was painted over, but I like to fantasise that in some distant future it will be archaeologically excavated and held up as an example of early cultural appropriation, (badly executed too.)

1 Like

Annette

Jun 26, 2024 at 8:16pm
In response to "The Oz Hypothesis"

The nekked wimmin look like something that I might have drawn in first grade.

1 Like

Aiva Raine

Jun 25, 2024 at 10:16pm
In response to "Can't Spell Success without Sucs"

Ok- this made me truly LOL- "sipping a gin and tonic made with low-paid laborer tears"

Thank you. Totally agree with the rest of your article.

Money doesn't solve all problems but it sure as hell eliminates many and makes it easier to go places or buy things that can create some happiness. IE- a property somewhere quiet and peaceful and a trailer with which to chill on said property.

Rich people are typically clueless assholes.

1 Like

Anni Pon

Jun 25, 2024 at 9:30am
In response to "Can't Spell Success without Sucs"

I've never heard anyone say, "That guy is so successful, but he doesn't really make much money." Or anything similar. Sure, you can have a positive impact on the world without making lots of money, but people won't call it success.

2 Like

Annette

Jun 23, 2024 at 1:28pm
In response to "Revisited: "Experience""

This is how I coped:

1 Like

Elisa: Middle Aged Stik

Jun 23, 2024 at 9:51am
In response to "Revisited: "Experience""

Not gonna lie I kinda miss Zoom parties, at least for this community since people on WDC are so spread out. Meeting in person is pretty tricky and/or expensive. It's certainly more socializing than I've been doing regularly since, oh, 2022 or so.

As for server migration, well, I work in the IT world. I've been through that. And honestly, server migration is a bit nerve wracking, as some stuff can go missing. It's still more manageable than a complete redesign. Complete redesigns are awful. You can test in different environments that the public can't see till kingdom come, but things always go wrong when the public version is rolled out. A local grocery store recently redid their website, and the old site held thousands of recipes. When the new site was unveiled, none of those recipes made it over. I ended up reaching out on Messenger and was able to get a copy of a recipe I use somewhat often, but I'm kind of annoyed that the text recipes are currently MIA because somehow that data didn't transfer with the site rebuild. Absolute madness.

1 Like

June 4, 2024 at 9:27am

#1072131

Drakes and Pains

There are topics I've never discussed before in here. This isn't one of them. From Gizmodo:

Updated Formula on Alien Intelligence Suggests We Really Are Alone in the Galaxy
An adjustment to the famous Drake Equation could radically refine estimates of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

Sigh.

Using the adjective "intelligent" there just begs people to make tiresome "no intelligent life here, either" jokes. In an effort to forestall this, I'll use "tech-capable," as that's really what we're looking for, and there's little debate over whether we fit that description (any such debate that takes place on the internet would be the dictionary definition of irony).

Astronomer Frank Drake...

Unclear if he's related to Sir Francis Drake.

...formulated his influential equation in 1961 to estimate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way capable of communicating with us.

Eh... not really. It's more subtle than that. Look, this article fails on many levels, but the very top level is that it doesn't explain the Drake Equation, which isn't really an equation but a way to think about these things systematically.

I'm not going to copy it here, either, because I can't be arsed to do the formatting. But at least I'm providing a link to the Wiki page on it.

I also want to emphasize that the search for tech-capable life (or, by extension, any autonomous machines they might have created) isn't the same thing as the search for extraterrestrial life. The latter doesn't necessarily result in the former; as I've noted before, there's nothing inherent to evolution that requires the development of tool-using species who go on to build spacecraft. All we know for sure is that it can happen, as it did happen here. On the other hand, I think it's a safe assumption that tech-capable life requires non-tech-capable predecessors.

Fortunately, the Drake Equation explicitly separates those two.

Since Drake thought up this way of looking at things, we've gotten a better handle on a lot of the parameters. For one thing, back in 1961, we had absolutely no evidence that other stars had planets orbiting them. Now, based on the sample set of our relatively close stellar neighborhood, it seems likely that the vast majority do.

Anyway, back to the article.

Our understanding of planetary science has changed a lot since then, leading a team of scientists to propose a pair of important adjustments that produce an answer that could explain the Great Silence.

This is, as the article notes in the next paragraph, related to the Fermi Paradox, which I mentioned last week.

However, as we'll see, these "adjustments" don't need to be incorporated into the Drake Equation, as they're inherent to one of its factors.

Planetary scientists Robert Stern from the University of Texas at Dallas and Taras Gerya from ETH-Zurich, the two co-authors on the study, suggest that the presence of both continents and oceans, along with long-term plate tectonics, is critical for the emergence of advanced civilizations.

With all due respect to the credentials of the scientists in question, I, though admittedly an amateur, feel like it really just puts a lower limit on the f_i term in the Equation, the one that represents the fraction of life-bearing planets that go on to produce tech-capable species.

In other words, as we have absolutely no idea what f_i actually is, having only a sample set of 1 to work with, it's just as valid to incorporate the ideas of continents and continental drift into that term, which probably makes it lower. That fraction might be 1/1. But it also might be 1/10¹⁰⁰. Or lower. Or anything in between. As I've noted before, we might have won the planetary lottery, and once you've won the lottery, the prior chance of having won it is irrelevant.

They consequently propose the addition of two factors into the equation: the fraction of habitable planets with significant continents and oceans and the fraction of those planets with plate tectonics operating for at least 500 million years. This adjustment, however, significantly reduces the value of N in the Drake Equation.

So does plugging in arbitrarily low values. I've seen online Drake Equation calculators, and none of them that I've found allow for what I consider to be realistically low guesses. And "guesses" is what they would be.

“Our work suggests that both our planet Earth with continents, oceans, plate tectonics, and life and our active, communicative, technological human civilization are extremely rare and unique in the entire galaxy,” Gerya told Gizmodo.

To be clear, I have little doubt that they're right about the continental drift thing, and a slightly higher but not significant doubt that they're right about this guess. What I object to is further muddying the waters by adding terms to the DrEq (I'm calling it that from now on), which is already confusing to a large number of humans, thus adding fuel to the "no intelligent life down here, either" crowd.

The researchers argue that the presence of large oceans, plus Earth’s shift from single-lid tectonics (a stable surface layer) to modern plate tectonics about 1 billion years ago, were critical to the rapid development of complex life.

Again, not arguing that point. But it's just part of f_i.

According to the new study, plate tectonics are crucial for developing complex life and advanced civilizations. Earth’s plate movements create diverse habitats, recycle nutrients, and regulate climate—all vital for life. It’s important for plate tectonics to last for 500 million years, Gerya explained, because biological evolution of complex multicellular life is extremely slow. “On Earth, it took more than 500 million years to develop humans from the first animals, which appeared around 800 million years ago,” he said.

Something about that math doesn't work out, as humans branched off from other apes something like 6 million years ago, admittedly with a large error bar.

I should take this opportunity to point out that the other reason I use "tech-capable" instead of "intelligent" is that there's more and more evidence that "intelligence" is not unique to humans. Nor is tool use. But the idea of making a tool to make other tools, and so on recursively until we get spaceships, well, that seems to be unique to humans on this planet. Dolphins don't seem to show any interest in creating computers. Crows (see yesterday's entry) just seem to use their intelligence to fuck with us.

The modified Drake Equation suggests that advanced civilizations are extremely rare, with the chance of planets having the right conditions being between 0.0034% and 0.17%. This means there could be anywhere from as few as 0.006 to as many as 100,000 active, communicative civilizations in our galaxy, with the actual number likely being on the lower end, considering the limited time these civilizations might communicate due to potential societal collapse or extinction.

Oh, Thor's balls. 0.006 is obviously wrong, because we'd make it 1. And that's still a damn wide range. Not to mention the "limited time" bit is already in the DrEq; it's represented by L.

Because the low estimate is really close to zero, it means there’s a good chance there might not be any other civilizations in our galaxy. This would help explain why we haven’t detected any signals from other civilizations yet.

Well, DUH. That's what I've been trying to say.

In the past, the Drake Equation gave a much higher low-end estimate, suggesting that it was almost certain we weren’t alone and that there should be at least 200 civilizations trying to communicate with us.

That's not a failure of the equation. That's a failure of humans to comprehend the possibility of really large denominators.

Stern and Gerya aren’t the first to propose the idea that suitable planets for advanced life are few and far between. This suggestion, known as the Rare Earth Hypothesis, was first articulated in the 2003 book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, written by scientists Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. Interestingly, Ward and Brownlee were likewise fixated on plate tectonics as a factor.

I don't think this is an ad for that book. But, full disclosure here, I've read it. Some of its hypotheses, such as the requirement to have a relatively big moon to help stabilize polar shifts, have been pretty much ruled out, from what I understand. Not surprising; a lot has been discovered in the last 21 years. But that doesn't negate the whole book.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis, while seductive, fails to account for the adaptability of life and the potential diversity of habitable environments.

Neither of which guarantees the development of tech-capable species. It's been a while since I've read that book, but as I recall, their guess was that life is pretty common, but tech-capable life, not so much.

Another limitation of this study, and this is no fault of the researchers, is that we’re still far from knowing which values to plug into the equation.

Exactly. Though, as I've said, we continue to refine some of the estimates.

Part of the problem with adding more terms is that each term magnifies the possible range of the result. Say you have a=b*c. Each term on the right of the equation has a range of possible values. By multiplying them together, you're also multiplying the range. Now incorporate d and e into the equation, both ranged, and those ranges multiply, too. All of which is to say that the "we just don't know" factor increases substantially with each term. And that's pretty much the reason Occam shaved with his Razor.

None of this gets past the "we don't know" stage. I know some people are dead certain, one way or the other. What's important, to me anyway, is that we're prepared to adjust our prior beliefs in the face of evidence. If aliens landed in my street, for example, I'd suddenly believe in them (provided, of course, someone hasn't slipped me some psychedelics).

What I really object to is lazy science reporting. Especially when the article, at base, does make some good points.

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