Just for fun!
Rotating monkey saddle
Ripples (believe it or not)
Hyperactive flatworm
When I bought my first computer (a Commodore 64
Unfortunately, as you'll know if you've ever been a C-64 owner, programming
graphics on that machine involved quite a bit of "mucking about". You had to
learn lots of PEEK's and POKE's, and you were limited as to what you could do
with colour - unless you were a whiz programmer. Also, C-64 BASIC was
S-L-O-W !
However, I persisted; and I produced some quite nice stuff, if I may say so.
Of course, the C-64's 320×200 resolution wasn't great, but it was adequate
for a first-timer; never having had anything flashier, I was quite happy
with what I was doing. I always thought, however, that... someday...
That day came. A PC with a decent version of BASIC running on it was a
gateway to doing some quite respectable graphics. Then, with the coming of
the internet and associated things like GIF's and GIF animators, the door
was finally opened to a fairly easy way to produce animations.
It still involves a bit of "mucking about", but it's worth it. So what if
animated GIF's are a bit "old hat" or "retro" now? I'm still a fan of them,
in case you haven't already noticed!
Just a bit about the animations themselves:
1. Rotating monkey saddle
Ever since I first ran across this surface in an advanced calculus textbook
at university, I was amused by the mental image of a monkey on horseback,
using a special saddle with allowance made for a tail.
(Perhaps jockeys should grow tails. They could then thrash them from side to
side and use them as whips, thus having both hands free to hang on for dear
life!
By the way - if we remove all but one of the closed curves which make up the
monkey saddle, and move our vantage point so that we are looking at the
rotating curve from the side, guess what we get? The rotating 1:3 Lissajous
figure from the
previous page
- the old ABC logo!
2. Ripples (believe it or not)
A book on C-64 graphics programming, "Commodore 64 Graphics and Sound" by
Steve Money (Granada, 1984), first turned me on to the idea of attempting
this. Very soothing to watch, I find - although some people think that the
pointy bit appearing in the middle every cycle looks a bit yucky! (You can
see a scanned printout of the C64 graphic which inspired this animation on
my
Humpty Dumpty Book
page.)
UPDATE, Saturday, 6th March 2010
A slightly scaled-down version of the "ripples" animation now appears within
each of my "ZPE research" pages, to suggest the presence of the zero-point
energy which is the subject of those pages. Click
here
to visit the menu page for this part of my site; you'll see two copies of
the animation near the top - and similarly for all the ZPE-related pages
whose links appear there.
UPDATE, Friday, 30th July 2010
If you'd like to see my original 640×480 version of this animation (just
over one megabyte) - which, as I write this, is currently gracing my Windows
desktop as its wallpaper - click
here.
(I can't imagine why I've never posted this before - still, better late than
never, I suppose!
3. Hyperactive flatworm
If you've been to an aquarium, or watched aquatic wildlife programs on TV,
you may have seen those weird creatures that get about by
muscular contractions
of their edges - though not, as a rule, quite as rapidly as suggested
here! (The program I used was a modification of the one I used to create the
frames for the monkey saddle.)
UPDATE, Saturday, 5th July 2008
Recently I noticed that the link just given no longer works. I sent an email
to the creator of that page, who has informed me that the page has moved
here.
At the moment, the move is not yet complete, with some photographs not yet
in place. The original page was beautiful, and I have no doubt that the new
one will be also when it's finished - do check it out!
UPDATE, Friday, 30th July 2010
I've just tried to revisit that page, without success - so perhaps it's
gone (I might try it again later). In the meantime, however, I've discovered
another delightful website with some very attractive pictures of beasties of
the type to which I'm referring, plus lots of other equally intiguing
aquatic critters - click
here
to see it.
No
quaternions
were harmed or injured during
To close, here's a still photograph of a strange, mountainous little island...
(You can click on it to see the original 640×480 version.)
My home page
Preliminaries (Copyright, Safety)
Animated surfaces
), I
was fascinated by the idea of doing some graphics programming. I'd always
liked 3D computer images of mathematical surfaces, and so it was with great
relish that I made the first moves toward generating some of my own.
)
)
the production of these animations.
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