Do andriods dream of electric sheep?

Does anybody reading this use Electric Sheep? Is it any good?

I had a go with it last night. I got it to display one looping 
animation, but that's all I could get it to do. Hmm.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible escribió:
> Do andriods dream of electric sheep?
> 
> Does anybody reading this use Electric Sheep? Is it any good?
> 
> I had a go with it last night. I got it to display one looping 
> animation, but that's all I could get it to do. Hmm.
> 

I used to, but stopped because the MPEG video showing at fullscreen 
(plus the fact that you may end up rendering frames for them) needs some 
CPU time, which means less CPU available for BOINCing 
(http://boinc.berkeley.edu/).

Recent versions of the screensaver get the videos via BitTorrent. The 
server doesn't overload as much since then :) But may cause problems to 
download. For example, it may take a while to connect to enough people 
to get a decent download speed.

Try getting a sheep pack for a start:
http://draves.org/blog/archives/000470.html

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Invisible wrote:
> Do andriods dream of electric sheep?

I don't know, but I just finished a book called "The Android's Dream" 
which was rather amusing. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Do andriods dream of electric sheep?
> 
> Does anybody reading this use Electric Sheep? Is it any good?
> 
> I had a go with it last night. I got it to display one looping
> animation, but that's all I could get it to do. Hmm.

	I do. It's my default screensaver. Tend to turn it off when doing heavy
compilations (using Gentoo here). Then forget to turn it on again for
days/weeks.

	Takes a while before it builds up some nice patterns. Sometimes it just
plain doesn't work and leaves a message along the lines of "Failed to
retrieve sheep" or something.

	Nice patterns. No regrets.

-- 
Cartoon Law: Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.


                    /\  /\               /\  /
                   /  \/  \ u e e n     /  \/  a w a z
                       >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                   anl

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> I used to, but stopped because the MPEG video showing at fullscreen 
> (plus the fact that you may end up rendering frames for them) needs some 
> CPU time, which means less CPU available for BOINCing 
> (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/).
> 
> Recent versions of the screensaver get the videos via BitTorrent. The 
> server doesn't overload as much since then :) But may cause problems to 
> download. For example, it may take a while to connect to enough people 
> to get a decent download speed.

Hmm. I seem to be getting between 3 and 20 KB/sec. It managed to 
download 6 sheep in fairly short order, but I'm getting really bored of 
watching the same 6 animations endlessly repeating now. A few sheep seem 
to be quite excellent, and the majority are unspeakably lame. (This is 
based on a sample of 6 though, so perhaps unrepresentative?)

> Try getting a sheep pack for a start:

A sheep... pack...

LOL! That's wrong on so many levels! :-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> Do andriods dream of electric sheep?
> 
> Does anybody reading this use Electric Sheep? Is it any good?

I only read this because the thread title is the same as a title of one 
of my IRTC entries.

Regards,
John

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Invisible wrote:
> Do andriods dream of electric sheep?
> 
> Does anybody reading this use Electric Sheep? Is it any good?

I used it for a long time. Even used a few of the sheep 'formulas' in
Apophysis to make some backgrounds. Then I started needing CPU time for
other stuff and for some reason never enabled a shiny screen saver again.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> Hmm. I seem to be getting between 3 and 20 KB/sec. It managed to 
> download 6 sheep in fairly short order, but I'm getting really bored of 
> watching the same 6 animations endlessly repeating now. A few sheep seem 
> to be quite excellent, and the majority are unspeakably lame. (This is 
> based on a sample of 6 though, so perhaps unrepresentative?)

Well, last night it finally downloaded a 7th sheep.

This morning I turned it on and did see it peak at 95 KB/sec. So 
apparently my Internet link is much faster than the 20 KB/sec typical 
download rate I've been seeing. (I have no idea what 2 kilobits per 
second of theoretical bandwidth equates to in kilobytes per second of 
*useful* data. In particular, I don't know what percentage TCP adds...)

I left the screen saver running this morning before I left for work. 
Hopefully by the time I get home tonight it will have downloaded at 
least 1 additional sheep.

PS. Do you think changing my firewall to allow incomming connections 
will make any positive difference?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> PS. Do you think changing my firewall to allow incomming connections will 
> make any positive difference?

If it is downloading via bitTorrent then yes, you should forward the port 
that the software is using to speed things up.

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> PS. Do you think changing my firewall to allow incomming connections 
>> will make any positive difference?
> 
> If it is downloading via bitTorrent then yes, you should forward the 
> port that the software is using to speed things up.

Right, OK.

I wonder if I can configure that...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible escribió:
> PS. Do you think changing my firewall to allow incomming connections 
> will make any positive difference?

In BitTorrent, you may connect to other people, or other people may 
connect to you. If mostly everybody else didn't bother setting his 
firewall, then you won't be able to connect to them, so let them connect 
to you! :)

Also, did you try the sheep pack?

Post a reply to this message

Invisible escribió:
> scott wrote:
>> If it is downloading via bitTorrent then yes, you should forward the 
>> port that the software is using to speed things up.
> 
> Right, OK.
> 
> I wonder if I can configure that...
> 
Oops missed this post.

Yes, you can configure the incoming port on the screensaver options.

Post a reply to this message

Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Invisible escribió:
>> scott wrote:
>>> If it is downloading via bitTorrent then yes, you should forward the 
>>> port that the software is using to speed things up.
>>
>> Right, OK.
>>
>> I wonder if I can configure that...
>>
> Oops missed this post.
> 
> Yes, you can configure the incoming port on the screensaver options.

No no - I mean I wonder if my [hardware] firewall is configurable...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Well, I left my PC running all of yesterday, and it managed to download 
exactly 350 sheep. My viewing experience is now significantly more 
interesting.

I find that much of the time, the action is too fast. There's a lot 
happening, and you can't really watch it properly because it's too fast. 
It would be nice if the transformations were slower so you could 
appreciate the level of detail present. (OTOH, that would require more 
render time, bandwidth and disk space...)

Also, often you'll see a transformation, it transforms into something 
for a split second, and then instantly begins transforming into 
something else before you even get to look at it properly. Which is 
quite annoying.

And finally, often you get a slow moving loop, and then a very abrupt 
change as it goes into another rapid morph. That's quite jarring.

However, overall it's rather fun to watch. Most of the time it hardly 
looks like segments of pre-rendered video spliced together. It looks 
like a single, long, fluid motion. (Shame about the low sample density 
in places...) Many of the looping images are quite interesting and/or 
beautiful. A rather larger number are quite bland. Overall it's quite 
pleasing.

Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 
would be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, 
plus 15! morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)

Oh, and during all of yesterday, my PC rendered 2 frames.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote?
> Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 would 
> be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, plus 15! 
> morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)

Why 15! ?

For X images, wouldn't the necassary morphs between them be only X*(X-1)/2 
and not X! ?

Rune
-- 
http://runevision.com

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Invisible escribió:
> Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 
> would be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, 
> plus 15! morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)

There aren't morphs for all possible combinations. Nowhere near that.

Post a reply to this message

Rune wrote:
> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote?
>> Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 would 
>> be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, plus 15! 
>> morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)
> 
> Why 15! ?
> 
> For X images, wouldn't the necassary morphs between them be only X*(X-1)/2 
> and not X! ?

Hmm. Your knowledge of combinatorics clearly exceeds mine 
considerably... :-}

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Rune escribió:
> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote?
>> Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 would 
>> be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, plus 15! 
>> morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)
> 
> Why 15! ?
> 
> For X images, wouldn't the necassary morphs between them be only X*(X-1)/2 
> and not X! ?

Note that morphs cannot be played backwards and make sense. A->B and 
B->A videos are different, so both are needed if you wanted all possible 
combinations.

Post a reply to this message

>> Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 
>> would be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, 
>> plus 15! morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)
> 
> There aren't morphs for all possible combinations. Nowhere near that.

My point is that there seem to be several morphs for each loop, meaning 
that the number of morphs dawfs the number of actual loops...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Note that morphs cannot be played backwards and make sense.

Yes they can. But MPEG-2 doesn't make that real easy...

> A->B and 
> B->A videos are different, so both are needed if you wanted all possible 
> combinations.

They *can* be different, but no mathematical law that says they must be. 
(However, ES seems to implement it this way.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible escribió:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
 > > Note that morphs cannot be played backwards and make sense.
 > Yes they can. But MPEG-2 doesn't make that real easy...

I know MPEG doesn't make it easy, but they wouldn't make sense anyway- 
Try it. Make a video of A, A, B->A backwards, B, B. See if the morph 
looks OK.

>> A->B and B->A videos are different, so both are needed if you wanted 
>> all possible combinations.
> 
> They *can* be different, but no mathematical law that says they must be. 
> (However, ES seems to implement it this way.)

In the way ES works, the loop is "rotating". The morph is interpolating 
sheep A to sheep B and *also* rotating. If you play it backwards, it 
would be rotating backwards, and the sudden jump in "direction" is 
really noticeable.

Post a reply to this message

Nicolas Alvarez escribió:
> Try it. Make a video of A, A, B->A backwards, B, B. See if the morph 
> looks OK.

Actually, don't. I'll try to do it for you.

Post a reply to this message

>> They *can* be different, but no mathematical law that says they must 
>> be. (However, ES seems to implement it this way.)
> 
> In the way ES works, the loop is "rotating". The morph is interpolating 
> sheep A to sheep B and *also* rotating. If you play it backwards, it 
> would be rotating backwards, and the sudden jump in "direction" is 
> really noticeable.

I see. So there's a discontinuity in the 1st derivative then? ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> I used to, but stopped because the MPEG video showing at fullscreen 
> (plus the fact that you may end up rendering frames for them) needs some 
> CPU time.

<I'm old>

I can remember when decoding MPEG-1 in realtime required specialised 
hardware - and encoding required a very high-end computer system!

And today, my PC is decoding MPEG-2 in realtime using idle CPU cycles... 
How times have changed!

</I'm old>


-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible escribió:
> I see. So there's a discontinuity in the 1st derivative then? ;-)
> 

On the What?

o_0

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Invisible escribió:
>> I see. So there's a discontinuity in the 1st derivative then? ;-)
>>
> 
> On the What?
> 
> o_0

Speed is the first derivating of position with respect to time.

In other words, the consecutive frames match, but the movement does not.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Nicolas Alvarez escribió:
> Nicolas Alvarez escribió:
>> Try it. Make a video of A, A, B->A backwards, B, B. See if the morph 
>> looks OK.
> 
> Actually, don't. I'll try to do it for you.

Isn't as noticeable as I expected (maybe it's because of the morph I 
picked) but definitely there is a jump.

http://www.wikifortio.com/798356/test.mpg.zip (10MB)

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Invisible wrote:
> I can remember when decoding MPEG-1 in realtime required specialised 
> hardware - and encoding required a very high-end computer system!

Bah. I was out of grad school and people were still building and selling 
hardware JPEG cards, let alone MPEG. :-)

The 6 minutes of mpeg we had to demo the system took 14 weeks to encode 
at a service beureau.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Rune wrote:
>> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote?
>>> Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 
>>> would be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, 
>>> plus 15! morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)
>>
>> Why 15! ?
>>
>> For X images, wouldn't the necassary morphs between them be only 
>> X*(X-1)/2 and not X! ?
>
> Hmm. Your knowledge of combinatorics clearly exceeds mine considerably... 
> :-}

Sounds odd, given that I don't understand most of the math you normally post 
about here...

Anyway, since both forward and backwards morphs are needed, as well as the 
loops themselves, that would be exactly X^2 animations if all loops should 
be connected to all other loops (X loops and X*(X-1) transitions between 
them).

Rune
-- 
http://runevision.com

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>> I can remember when decoding MPEG-1 in realtime required specialised 
>> hardware - and encoding required a very high-end computer system!
> 
> Bah. I was out of grad school and people were still building and selling 
> hardware JPEG cards, let alone MPEG. :-)

Ooo... LOL!

> The 6 minutes of mpeg we had to demo the system took 14 weeks to encode 
> at a service beureau.

ADVANCED!!

[Hmm, POV-Ray service beureau, anyone?]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Now, if I could make it download some more sheep... (You'd think 350 
>> would be enough. However, it seems to be more like 15 actual images, 
>> plus 15! morphs between them. Which isn't so interesting.)
> 
> There aren't morphs for all possible combinations. Nowhere near that.

For what it's worth... I just checked the stats page. Flock 202 (the 
current flock) contains 74 loops and 457 edges.

Weirdly, 74 loops *sounds* like a lot, but doesn't *look* like a lot 
when you see them all at once:

http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/cgi/status.cgi

Also surprising, most of the votes are counted in single figures. I 
would have expected them to run into tens of thousands, but apparently 
not. I'm not sure whether this means each one gets approximately 50% up 
and 50% down votes, or there are only about 10 people voting worldwide...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> [Hmm, POV-Ray service beureau, anyone?]
> 

I have one.

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Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> or there are only about 10 people voting worldwide...
> 

Are *you* voting? :)

Post a reply to this message

>> or there are only about 10 people voting worldwide...
> 
> Are *you* voting? :)

Yes. Quite a lot.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting my few votes to make a difference among 
the many millions of other votes... but now I'm not so sure. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Well, it seems [with some difficulty] that it is possible to reconfigure 
my ADSL router to allow inbound connections. I also adjusted the upload 
and download limits on ES to 200 KB each way (was 100).

So far, the most noticable effect is that my outbound has gone from 
about 3 KB to 20 KB.

Also, I notice with some puzzlement that in the evenings my download 
rate is between 9 KB and 20 KB, but in the mornings its 90 or so. 
(Actually, this morning it hit 120 KB. I guess those changed settings 
make a difference...)

I also notice virtually no rendering taking place. I saw a comment 
somewhere in the forums about "I'm keeping the flock quiet in 
anticipation of ES 2.6.7 and high def rendering..." Interesting.

And finally... why does the "number of sheep on this computer" go down 
from time to time?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Well, today I got home to find that my PC has downloaded 630 sheep. And 
yet, there are only 450 sheep on the machine.

*sigh*

So I increased the cache size, and that seemed to fix the problem. 
However, now some of my favourit sheep are gone. And I can't figure out 
how to get them back. :-( [Most puzzlingly, I can't find them on the 
sheep website either...]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> Well, today I got home to find that my PC has downloaded 630 sheep. And 
> yet, there are only 450 sheep on the machine.
> 
> *sigh*
> 
> So I increased the cache size, and that seemed to fix the problem. 
> However, now some of my favourit sheep are gone. And I can't figure out 
> how to get them back. :-( [Most puzzlingly, I can't find them on the 
> sheep website either...]
> 

The screensaver deletes sheep to keep the cache size within the limit 
you set. Factors to choose which to delete are: older, and less voted. 
The server also deletes videos from the website (it doesn't exactly have 
infinite disk space). Same factors used in choosing.

The preview image and the "genome" are kept on the server for *all* 
sheep, even year-old ones. So try harder and you may find it. If the 
video was already deleted, I could help you re-render it :)

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 schrieb:
> Well, today I got home to find that my PC has downloaded 630 sheep. And 
> yet, there are only 450 sheep on the machine.
> 
> *sigh*
> 
> So I increased the cache size, and that seemed to fix the problem. 
> However, now some of my favourit sheep are gone. And I can't figure out 
> how to get them back. :-( [Most puzzlingly, I can't find them on the 
> sheep website either...]
> 
Caused by this thread I downloaded electric sheep. Now I'm curious how 
you get the numbers (at least how many sheeps stay on your local 
machine). I'm missing all those statistics terribly. How many sheeps are 
there, how many edges, how many loops... How many frames (or lines of 
them) has my dreaming cpu rendered...?

So - where do you get at least the count of local sheeps?

thanks
kalle

Post a reply to this message

> Caused by this thread I downloaded electric sheep. Now I'm curious how 
> you get the numbers (at least how many sheeps stay on your local 
> machine). I'm missing all those statistics terribly. How many sheeps are 
> there, how many edges, how many loops... How many frames (or lines of 
> them) has my dreaming cpu rendered...?
> 
> So - where do you get at least the count of local sheeps?

While the screensaver is running fullscreen, press "S" to toggle stats 
on/off.

For your next challenge: Figure out what all these things *mean*. :-S

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

> 
> So - where do you get at least the count of local sheeps?

only idea so far: counting the mpegs in win/system32/electric sheep 
cache/ (or similar)

something better?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Also surprising, most of the votes are counted in single figures. I
> would have expected them to run into tens of thousands, but apparently
> not. I'm not sure whether this means each one gets approximately 50% up
> and 50% down votes, or there are only about 10 people voting worldwide...
> 

It's a pretty screen saver, but how many people are going to sit and
vote on each one that goes by? Maybe they vote on just the one that was
displayed before grabbing the mouse and going back to checking email.

Post a reply to this message

"KalleK" wrote:
> Caused by this thread I downloaded electric sheep.

I did too, but I don't miss stats. Instead, I'm rather disappointed that the 
screensaver is not continuous at all times as I had expected, but often 
jumps from one loop to another without a proper morph between. It's totally 
ruining the fluid experience.

Rune
-- 
http://runevision.com

Post a reply to this message

Sabrina Kilian wrote:

> It's a pretty screen saver, but how many people are going to sit and
> vote on each one that goes by? Maybe they vote on just the one that was
> displayed before grabbing the mouse and going back to checking email.

Mmm, apparently I'm weird... heh.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

>> Caused by this thread I downloaded electric sheep.
> 
> I did too, but I don't miss stats. Instead, I'm rather disappointed that the 
> screensaver is not continuous at all times as I had expected, but often 
> jumps from one loop to another without a proper morph between. It's totally 
> ruining the fluid experience.

Depends on how many of the morph sequences it's downloaded so far, but 
yeah, that is kind of annoying.

(The problem I'm having here is that it keeps playing the same sequence 
endlessly because those are the only ones with morphs available. I have 
MPEG files on my harddrive that it never plays because there's no morph 
to it...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

> While the screensaver is running fullscreen, press "S" to toggle stats 
> on/off.
> 
hmm. didn't work for me, but thanks anyway. I decided to uninstall this 
cpueater (and hddeater with standard cachesettings).

kalle

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Do andriods dream of electric sheep?
> 
> Does anybody reading this use Electric Sheep? Is it any good?
> 
> I had a go with it last night. I got it to display one looping 
> animation, but that's all I could get it to do. Hmm.
> 

So, it prerenders a bunch of stills, and then creates MPGs transitioning 
between them?

No, thanks.  Aside from the fact that I set my monitor to turn itself 
off when I'm not using it, I recommend that people use Folding @Home to 
waste their spare CPU cycles :)

Speaking of which, there's a POV-Ray team here: 
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=34383

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Chambers wrote:

> So, it prerenders a bunch of stills, and then creates MPGs transitioning 
> between them?

Pretty much, yes.

> No, thanks.  Aside from the fact that I set my monitor to turn itself 
> off when I'm not using it, I recommend that people use Folding @Home to 
> waste their spare CPU cycles :)

I'd actually prefer to run it as a stand-alone application rather than a 
screen saver, but hey.

I guess I'm the sort of low-intelligence person who is easier fascinated 
by simple visual tricks like this. I also enjoy watching fire, and I 
used to sit and watch the washing machine. Sometimes I sit and watch 
rain, or river turbulence... I guess I'm just stupid.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:57:54 +0000, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:

>I guess I'm the sort of low-intelligence person who is easier fascinated 
>by simple visual tricks like this. I also enjoy watching fire, and I 
>used to sit and watch the washing machine. Sometimes I sit and watch 
>rain, or river turbulence... I guess I'm just stupid.

When I worked offshore a lot of us indulged in wave counting. And in the early
days before the gas was exported or re-injected it was burned off. Hundreds of
cubic meters of gas per minute going up the flare. You could become mesmerised
by it at night. 


Regards
	Stephen

Post a reply to this message

Am Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:57:54 +0000 schrieb Invisible:

> by simple visual tricks like this. I also enjoy watching fire, and I
> used to sit and watch the washing machine. Sometimes I sit and watch
> rain, or river turbulence... I guess I'm just stupid.

Oh no, not at all! Fire is one of the most fascinating things to watch, 
you can spend all the time closely watching and you'll never notice the 
animation looping (just kidding!). The same with rivers etc... I also 
enjoy watching the waves at the shore.

Post a reply to this message

>> by simple visual tricks like this. I also enjoy watching fire, and I
>> used to sit and watch the washing machine. Sometimes I sit and watch
>> rain, or river turbulence... I guess I'm just stupid.
> 
> Oh no, not at all! Fire is one of the most fascinating things to watch, 
> you can spend all the time closely watching and you'll never notice the 
> animation looping (just kidding!).

Mmm, I guess it counts as a kind of complex reaction-diffusion system...

> The same with rivers etc... I also enjoy watching the waves at the shore.

Not so much waves, but where water runs across sand, it rapidly erodes 
complex "river systems" into the perfect surface. I find this fascinating.

In fact, it seems I've developed a family reputation. Take me to a sand 
beach, and likely the first thing I do is to dig a hole in the sand. 
People wonder why I just dig a hole and then look at it.

If you dig deep enough, you find water. And if you keep removing sand 
from the middle of the hole, the turbulence of the water undercuts the 
sides. And eventually they cave in. Theoretically, if you keep digging 
in this manner, you could make a very wide, shallow hole. But usually by 
this point the tidy comes in, and you watch the fluid dynamics as the 
waves wash over the edge of the hole and fill it on. And...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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