the internet is fantastic. you can explore an effectively infinite space while eating pringles. some rooms of the giant jungle gym have leaves, some have ferns, and some have animated gifs of baby jesus. you never know precisely what you’ll find, and there’s enough that the joy of discovery rarely fades… but you can still have at least some say in where the results go, leaving you feeling comfortably in control.

the jungle gym that is the web is N-dimensional… well, more like a giant network of boxes you could climb around and explore. many sites – this one included – link to more than 6 sites, giving them more than six degrees of freedom. this means the space must have more than three dimensions. this has a ceiling of infinite links to infinite sites, but that’s kind of hard to do in practice. so, i’m just calling it N-dimensional due to the presumption that a given site will be somewhere between some and maNy.

pages are chained together, little pageclaves in the giant jungle gym. most pageclaves have a purpose: sell books, confuse the book-buying consumer, blogging about either of the aforementioned book-related topics. you name it, there’s likely between one and many pageclaves covering it… but there would, likely be fewer pages about blogging about blogging about any of the aforementioned three book-related topics… this is interesting, my brain is translating that referential recursion of probability as a chain of decaying slopes. i’ll have to look into this avenue of research more… later.

anyways, many web pages today are dynamicly generated. the server gets this post from a database, gets the template from the drive, and mashes the two together according to some computer programs written in PHP. if you think about this, you realize that rather than designing a single web page, the programmer is specifying an entire SET of web pages. this page, for example, is the set of every possible blog post as rendered by the template we are using: an infinite number of pages. if you expand our definition to include the programmatic features, such as switching templates, the set size would become an even larger infinity (lol mathematics).

the great-grandaddy set, of course, is the set of every page ever possible. it’s theoreticly possible to code up something that has the potential to specify this set using some bastardization of turing machines and perl, but most programmers settle for something a little less painful to define: a smaller infinity of web pages, or even a finite set.

here are some DYNAMIC web pages:

http://www.qtard.com/
http://www.strangebanana.com/generator.aspx
http://www.superbad.com/
http://randomwebsite.com/
http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/headerimg/
http://www.perl.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://wizardishungry.com/
http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/wtf/
http://www.chinscratcher.com/
http://www.actsofkindness.org/
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
http://www.fxbox.110mb.com/

remember: when in doubt,  use F5.

A ubiquitous drum solo of 5.20 seconds, 4 bars, The Amen Break, has been found to posses characteristics nearly identical to the Golden Ratio. Michael S. Schneider expounds on the Golden Proportion and the Amen Break and points out concepts such as the peaks of the Amen Break corresponding directly with Golden Ratio intervals, fractal structures, appearances of the Golden Ratio in worldwide music and by classical composers such as Mozart, Bartok and my favorite, Debussy.
Michael’s study of his subject is laudable and worth a thorough reading. I like how he summed things up:

Human bodies and created sounds, like flowers, crystals and galaxies, can never exactly equal any ideal mathematical template. But the major wave peaks of the Amen Break, and many of its smaller ones, seem reasonably close to being an expression of the fractal nature of the wonderful Golden Ratio. I wonder what it would sound like if it was more precisely proportioned to the ideal, but I also know that slight differences are what make it human and alive.                   

For more, read about The Golden Ratio in detail, watch a Golden Mean video, or review a brilliant survey of the Amen Break by Nate Harrison.

Johns Hopkins and government scientists have recently discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains shut down areas of inhibition and censor, and instead unlock areas of self-expressive creativity.

When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a trained jazz saxophonist himself. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind,” he adds, “during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous. 

The scientists found that the region of the brain known as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, slows down during improvisational play. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is linked to planned actions and self-censoring, and when shut down could lead to lower inhibitions says Limb. Furthermore, research indicates an increase in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain linked with self-expression and activities which express individuality.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”