*rC3 Wikipaka Music*
Herald: Dear galactic beings, get ready for the nerdiest niche topics, the most
interesting ideas and the most absurd discoveries from computers, art and the
world - Operation Mindfuck! Directly from rC3 world to your home and into your minds
and hearts. Please welcome your hosts: bleeptrack and blinry!
bleeptrack: Hi everyone at rC3. This is bleeptrack and blinry and we are already
back to our yearly little talk about computers, art and other curious stuff.
And yeah, we already reached volume 4 this year. So this is the fourth episode of
this talk. And if you want to watch the older talks, you can find them on blinry's
website. They're all called Operation Mindfuck and yeah, have fun with them. I
think the older ones are, some of them are in German and now we do them in English so
more people can have fun. And the talks work as follows: We have prepared
different, very small topics and we will explain them in alternating order. And
today, blinry will start with an interesting variation of keyboards.
blinry: That's right. It's not the kind of keyboard you might be thinking about right
now, but it's about musical instruments. So this is about isomorphic keyboard
layouts, because in the beginning of this year, I was like starting to learn how to
play the piano. And I was researching a bit of how that system works, basically.
And I was a bit... started getting a bit frustrated with it for the following
reason: I can't give you a whole intro about music theory right now, but what you
need to know is that these little keys on the piano keyboard are specific notes and
the distance between them is always one semitone, one semitone between them. And
they are arranged in this linear fashion, basically. And then, if you want to play
some part, what you do is that you count the right number of steps between these
notes. So for example, to play a major chord, what you do is always you start at
the base note and then you count one, two, three, four for the second note of this
chord and then one, two, three for the third. And you press those three together
and then you have a major chord, which sounds like this pleasant, positive chord.
But then, there is this weird property of this keyboard where... it's designed in a
way so that if you play all the white keys on the keyboard, you get the scale in C
major. You can just play the whole scale from C to the next C and the black keys
are the ones you would skip in the scale. And because of that, if you start your
major chord at a different note, like F# for example, you do the same counting -
you would count one, two, three, four, for the second note and then one, two, three
for the third. But now the shape is a bit different, you'll start playing on black
keys and sometimes you have to mix them. If you'll start playing a D-major chord,
you'll have one black and two white ones, for example, which is the strange
properties of this keyboard, I thought, because often when you play the song, you
play it in a specific transposition, you start playing with a specific tone. And
moving all of the notes up and down by a specific amount. And then you have to kind
of try to re-learn how to play all these chords and the melody, because they will
have this different shape. Your fingers have to do different things. And I thought
this was really weird. And I researched a bit about that. And the first thing I
found, I think, was this instrument, which is called the "Dodeka", which is just the
name the company has given this thing, where actually all the semitones are
arranged next to each other without a specific shape. I think, still the black
keys here are like the C, the middle C or something here to give you an impression
of where you are in the scale, but then you have 12 semitones until the next C
just the way in a linear fashion, meaning that if you know the shape of the major
chord, for example, like you count four and you count three, you can move this
shape anywhere on the keyboard to, like, move it up and down, which, I think, is
pretty cool. Back then, I asked a specific person who knows how to play keyboards
really well in the greater community: What might be the reason for this strange
layout? And they gave me two reasons. One was that if you have this shape with the
black keys sticking out, you can, kind of, feel where you are on the keyboard when
you play it, which makes sense, I guess. And the other reason is that, like the
classical music notation also uses that system where notes, which are directly on
the lines or in the gaps of this classical music notation, are the white keys on the
piano keyboard. And if you put a b or a # in front of it, you would use the black
keys. So that kind of fits together. And to change the layout, you would change the
past few hundred years of music notation, which I think might be worth it, but yeah.
There are some even more advanced ways to arrange the notes and they use hexagonal
keys, which, I think, is really cool. So this is the harmonic table layout where...
like you arrange the notes, according to this diagram here: If you are at a
specific tone like a C here and you want to go to the C#, you move one key to the
right over these columns here and like if you go diagonally up to the right, you do
a major third, which is four semitones. And if you go directly to the left, it's
three semitones. So basically to play a major chord, for example, you would push
the bass key like the C and then in addition, you go four semitones up to the
E, right. And then this one above it is always seven semitones up. So to play a
major chord you would kind of... you can play this with one finger and you press
your finger in the middle of this three and then you have a major chord. And to do
a minor chord, which is like a sad sounding sound, you can press your finger at this
corner here. This would be a C minor chord. And this is a really cool property.
The harmonic table layout has some properties which make it pretty weird. For
example, to go an octave up, you have to do a really big jump. You have to jump
from this C up to all the way over here, which is kind of inconvenient. So people
also came up with another arrangement of the Wicki-Hayden Layout. I think, this was
invented in the 19th century already, where you, if you start at a specific key,
you go a whole step to the right. This is like two semitones. And then, if you go
diagonally up to the right, you have seven semitones... perfect fifth. And to go an octave
up, you go two rows up. And this is a pretty nice layout. And, I can just show
you how this works, actually, because people made like a web-based demo on this.
So you get this hexagon grid. If we start at a D for example and want to play a
major chord now, what we do is, we go four semitones up. So we end up at the E. And
then we add one seven up from the original base note, so it's a G. And you can
actually play this on your keyboard, like I pressed the E and G - we have a major
chord and again, you can move this shape around anywhere. So if I start here and
this sounds... it's a major chord here. Here. Here. The minor chord is just
another symmetric version of this form starting at C. We add this one and this.
This is minor. This is major. And you can start transposing specific keys up and
down, like this is the first inversion of the chord. And yeah, this is... for me,
this was really surprising to see that you can build a structure like this, and then,
if you remember the shape of melody, you can just transpose it anywhere, which is
cool. People are actually building hardware for this. So this is something
people call a Jammer Keyboard. And if you're interested in this, you will find a
small community on this who build their own input devices like this. And also,
while preparing this talk, I learned that accordion, the specific accordion also
uses structures to places where you put your hands and one of them is used for
playing chords. And the other one, some of them use like a piano key layout, but some
others, like this one, also have an asymmetric layout where - I think it's
another variation of this, where, if you move diagonally up, it's one whole step.
And to go up means to go two whole steps, basically, and that defines this layout.
But then it's, again, really easy to play a melody and move it someplace else and
play another key. Yeah, you know. What have you prepared next?
bleeptrack: All right, so I like a lot to work with generative art and tiles and
tiling is a super simple way to make really fancy pattern. And two years ago, I
looked a bit deeper into truchet tiles, and that's still really fascinating to me.
So I thought, might be a nice topic today to show you a bit around truchet tiles.
So, this was basically the first version. So the idea of truchet tiles is, that you
have rectangular tiles that are not symmetric along their X and Y axis. So for
example... or this other... like the first proposed truchet tiles are these four
tiles on the top that are basically made off... that are rotated by 90 degrees. So
you get all variations that you can make out of them. Now you can use these tiles
to make larger patterns. So you put them in a large grid and you have different
possibilities to do so. For example, the left version and... ah, the most
important: For example, like the left version here - you can just throw in
always the same tile and you get a very nice repeating pattern, but maybe it's a
bit boring and you wouldn't really need tiling for that. But it's also possible.
But you can also say, like you go on alternating road and switch them every
second place, so you get a bit of a mosaic shape. And you can also play around more
of that and place them in very certain ways and directions to create bigger
patterns. And that's usually what I find really interesting. And of course, you can
just place them randomly like the example below here, which also makes a really
intriguing pattern to me, maybe a bit... like, it's not so quiet, sometimes a bit
exhausting to look at, but it's fun to see pattern emerge that are not planned. So
this is the earliest version of the truchet tiles. And I think this version
here... ah, right. This is basically every bit of the tiles that I just showed you.
Maybe you know that one, this is called 10 print. And this is basically a super
famous way of pattern generation, where you just put diagonal lines instead of
triangles. And in this case, you'd have basically only two tiles. Right. You have
this line that is flipped to the right and you have the line that is flipped to the
left side. And you can place it randomly in it. This 10 print pattern became so
famous because you can just write more or less a one liner in nearly any coding
language and this will come up in the area. And yeah, in a time of Basic, when
you can just write a one-liner in Basic and have your whole screen field a random,
nice pattern. So this is also derivative truchet tiles, actually, but these are the
ones that I think most people know when they think of truchet tiles. It's a
version where you don't work with Rectangles or lines, but you have parts
of, like quadrants of circles placed in the edges. And in this case, you can't
make four tiles. You can only make two because if you rotate them by ninety
degrees, third flip, so you can only get two. And when you place them in a random
order, that's the example you can see below, you get a super fancy pattern that
basically contains off - either you can accidentally basically form a whole circle
or like parts of circles, that get entangled and form super long lines. And
it looks really fun. And this is also the first picture that I saw of truchet tiles.
And I found that very intriguing. And, well, it turns out, you can do even more
cool stuff with that. For example, I need to find my mouse. Here we go. You can,
basically, you can start scaling the pattern in different ways. And, for
example, you can use it for ditherings. So here, the background image is the image of
Mona Lisa, as you might have recognized, and you can take the image, darkness and
then scale your pattern accordingly to that point on your image. So you get sort
of a dithering and it looks super fancy. And what I also found recently, what I
think is exceptionally good looking, is a very special way of scaling truchet tiles
by Christopher Carlson. And he published a paper at Bridges, which is a super nice
math and art conference - I'm not sure if it's a whole conference or more like a
workshop, but they have super nice papers. So if you're interested in these
intertwined maths & arts stuff look into these papers, they are supercool. And
Christopher Carlson came up with a nice way... a nice esthetic of having these
scalable truchet tiles. And you can see these are three scale sizes. So this is
basically the original size and then you go one step smaller and you can see that
he - in his case, he works with white and black areas and you can now combine them
in ways. For example, this is a super, super quick and easy example. So here on
the left side, you have that large tile and you add on the right side two of the
smaller tiles. And you can see that the posit let's, for the big one, let's say
the dark one is the positive space, that your white space or your negative space
here becomes the positive space in the next smaller scale. So this also always
iterating when you go one scale-step smaller. And now you can think about how
can I combine these different scale... these different scales? And he had - he
prepared some examples of, for example, the left one. It's more or less like a
Quadri. So you can just choose a rectangle and divide it by four and you get it one
scale smaller. You can do this recursively, randomly, basically. Or you
can also do it in the form of a pattern or maybe in a certain shape. So, when you
want to approximate certain outlines, you can go smaller there to reach a certain
shape. And when you fill that in with these tiles, you get this result. And that
looks super fancy, especially the left one for my taste is super awesome and looks
really, really nice. And even in this paper he even goes one step further and
thinks about different additional motives that he could do with these different
scales. So I'm not sure if this would be considered truchet tiles, because they
lose this not symmetrical attribute in some occasions like the TS version here
that would be symmetrical along this axis. So I'm not sure if this would actually be
considered truchet tiles, but it looks nice, so who cares? So he made different
versions that can also be applied or added to that set of tiles. So you just have,
basically you have these four entry or exit points like on the top, bottom left
and right. And you need to have at least a circle there or connect your entry or exit
points in different ways. And he just tries out different shapes. And if you add
this to the regular scaling truchet tiles, you get these results and that looks super
fancy because you have very, very nice fitting shapes that are still super
randomly distributed. And, ya. So this is where I think, I should stop maybe talk
about tiles, but if you want - you fall into a rabbit hole. We have rabbit holes
prepared at the end also, but if you want to go further into tiling, especially
maybe check out penrose tiling, this is such a huge and fancy and complex topic. But I
think that it would fill several of its own talks. But if you want to dig further,
I can also highly recommend penrose tiling. That's it. So I will give back to
blinry. blinry: Yeah, penrose tiles might be a
topic for some Operation Mindfuck in the future, right. Now, the section is
settled. What even is art? I'm often really fascinated by artworks and art-
installations, which kind of push the boundary of what's still considered to be
an artwork. And I wanted to show you some of those. For example, last year, there
was an Italian, Mauritio Cattelan, who just bought a fresh banana at a grocery
store and taped it to the wall of a museum and then declared this as art, the title
is "Comedian". And because Cattelan was rather well-known and popular, this was
also worth a surprising amount of money. I think this was.... like 120000 $ was what
an American couple paid for this artwork to buy it. And after the sale took place,
the following thing happened: Another man walked up to this artwork and explained to
the people watching and recording this, that this was an art-intervention called
"hungry artist" and just, yeah, said it was very tasty and that he didn't want to
be disrespectful to the original artist, but this was an intervention. And yeah,
this artwork came with a kind of certificate that said that you had really
bought it and that it's yours now. And it specifically mentioned that you can
replace the banana as needed. So after this happened, it was just like people
bought a new one and taped it to the wall again and it was repaired. But yeah, I
like this combination of these two artworks, interleaving with each other. I
think, this artist was like... he was asked to leave the museum, but nobody
pursued legal action. The next artwork I'm going to show you, has to do with this
material, which you might have heard about, it's called Vanta-Black, and it's
one of the darkest materials known to humankind. It's a specific... on a
microscopic level, it has nanotubes which are in parallel, kind of sticking up from
the surface where this paint is on. And then if lightweight falls on the surface,
it kind of gets trapped between these little tubes and can't escape anymore,
which is why it looks so pitch black. I think like there are a numbers where
people state, that this swallows 99.4% of visible light or something. And this was
developed a few years ago by a company for a pretty diverse applications, but there
was an artist who was really interested in this: Anish Kapoor, a British Indian
artist, who had... who was interested in playing with black color anyway. And they
came to an agreement where they said that Kapoor was the only artist allowed to use
Vanta-Black in artworks. So one example is this one, "descent into limbo", which
Kapoor had already made installations of like many years back, but in a recent
revival of this artwork, he actually painted the inside of this, with Vanta the hole that
is several meters deep. And because he was using this special paint, you can't really
see the shape of it. And at one point, there was a visitor to this artwork who
tried to look into this hole and didn't believe that this was actually a hole,
tried to step into it and fell in and had to be rescued after that. So, yeah, the
situation where only Kapoor is allowed to use this color made several people really
angry. For example, there is another artist called Stuart Semple who's making
his own pigments, colored pigments and he designed the "world's pinkest pink" one
time. And this is the store website where you can buy this pigment, which states
that it's available to everyone except Anish Kapoor. Right, a kind of revenge
action. And if you click on the "Buy It Now" button, you actually have to, like,
verify that you are not Anish Kapoor and you have no plans to share it with him.
Well, some time later, Anish Kapoor posted this picture on a social media channel. So
apparently someone had broken this contract and sent Kapoor some of this
pigment. Well, I think Stuart Semple was really angry and disappointed about this
and asked him to give it back, but also didn't have really any means to take legal
action against this. You might have heard of Banksy, who is an English street artist
who chooses to remain anonymous, and he's well known for making graffiti on just
walls on the street somewhere. But at this point, he also is so famous and well known
that he is starting to sell his artworks. For example, this is a painting with a
girl with a heart shaped balloon. And this went up for auction in an auction house
some years ago. And because Banksy is such a mystery and so popular, this is also
worth a surprising amount of money. I think, over one million US dollars was
paid for this at this auction and after the hammer fell and this was sold, the
following happened: I can show you the video or the thumbnail gave it anyway. So
it's just been sold and then a loud beeping noise was heard and this artwork
just was sucked into the frame of itself, which shredded the artwork. Actually,
Banksy had prepared this stunt in several years in advance and built like this
shredding-device into the frame. Probably he or someone he knowed was present at
this auction and pressed the remote control button to activate the system.
Yeah. So this is an example of self- destructive art, which maybe not so
surprisingly even made it worth even more. I think at this point it's valued at
around three million U.S. dollars. So, yeah. Also, it was supposed to shred
itself completely, but apparently some of the mechanism failed and so it's now half
shredded. And yeah, I think I had that on the slide here, it's now called "Love is
in the Bin" after the stunt. This is an artwork, the last one I want to show in
the section by the German artist Josef Beuys, who is often working with unusual
material. And yeah, this is an artwork consisting of several kilograms of butter.
It's called "Fettecke" which translates to Fat Corner, literally. And he just took
the butter, put it in the corner of the museum and let it stay there for many
years, which I'm pretty sure developed an interesting smell. Mm hmm. And after Beuys
died, the custodian of the gallery where this was exhibited accidentally cleaned it
up. You might have heard of that before. He didn't know what it was about and just
removed it and put it in the trash can. And one of the students, of course, was
really angry about this, went to the trash can to recover it, treasured the remains
really deeply and I think also received a payment from the custodian because of this
destruction. And now I also learned that not very long ago, a couple of artists got
these remains of the butter and distilled liquor from it. I have a picture of it
here like this. Yeah. Even another artistic intervention on top of this. So
this is a really strong liquor. And they tasted that and said that it tasted really
strongly of cheese. Yeah, that's all the strange artworks I wanted to show you in
this section. bleeptrack bleeptrack: Oh, amazing, amazing. I think
that's where the German "Ist das Kunst oder kann das weg?" comes from. Like "is
it art or can I remove that?". Perfect. Yeah, let's stay with art. So I really a
lot enjoy watching machines work and especially pen plotters, and they are
perfect to produce art. And I never, in an Operation Mindfuck talk, I never showed
you different types of pen plotters and realized that's actually really
interesting, because there are quite different constructions. So let's do a
small walk through the history of pen plotters. And this is to my knowledge, one
of the oldest pen plotters. It's a ZUSE Graphomat. And this one - I took
the photo in the technical museum in Berlin, it's in an exhibition now, I think
it's in a permanent exhibition now. Sadly, it's not running, but I think they can run
it. At least there is that piece of paper that is in the machine. Looked to me like
they plotted it on plays. It could be. I'm not really sure, but it would be extremely
awesome. And these are... what you can't really see on these photos is that these
are like huge devices. If you stand before that, it's like over a meter long, over a
meter deep, I guess. And it's like, I think it's also maybe, a bit, maybe l...
it's about a one meter square, like it's super huge and it just can grab a pen and
draw it. There is nothing else that it can do. But of course, it's also quite an old
machine. And there is a person called Georg Nieß, who worked at Siemens in the
60s and 70s, and he was one of the pioneers of generative art and plotter
art. And he bought one of these ZUSE Graphomat machines for Siemens at that
time. And it was extremely modern and futuristic thing to have, like a machine
that can plot, of course you have to mention that they never know printers.
Everything was, also in architecture was, of course, still drawn by hand. So these
machines that can draw extremely precise lines, this is totally fancy. What you can
also see these pens and ink on the bottom. These are all graphed pens. You can still
buy them and they are still extremely expensive, but they are really nice for
pen plotting because they work a bit different than most other pens. They have
a metal nip, a very flat metal nip and along the nip the ink will get sucked out or
runs down and the nip is completely flat, because the pen is meant to be used like
on the point and dragged along on the point. Because most modern pens like
roller pens will not really like that if you use them directly in 90 degrees on the
paper. So these are... the Graphomats are the, basically the first drawing machines.
A few years later you will find machines that were more usable for companies and
they have the size of a regular printer or maybe a bit bigger for A3 plotters. And this
one is from HP. And you can see that our hackspace had quite a lot of fun with it
and tried to get it to work again. And this model, for example, works in a way
that the paper is moving forwards and backwards. And the pen, that's the blue
thing you can see here. This is... ah, right. There are two. Like you can store
one and you can put one pen in this device and the pen can only, like, move left to
right. And the paper will be dragged along with two little wheels, basically, these
are here and here. And then you can plot. These are one kind of the devices that you
can find a lot still on on your local craigslist. And these are the other ones.
This one is a Rolan Pen Plotter and it completely moves along two axes. So the
paper stays in place. And these Rolan plotters, they have some really nice
features. For example, you can see that the plotter is standing up a bit and the bed
is an electrostatic bed. So you can put your paper on, press a button and the
paper gets sucked to that bed. It is super fancy and also on the left side here.
Oops, I lost my screen sharing for a reason. I still see it. Oh, I'm sorry.
It's back. Like on the left side here. These are like basically parking stations
for pens. So the pen plotter *(incomprehensible)* or exchange different
pens on itself. That is super fancy, and if you want to get one of these older pen
plotters, make sure that they are not too hard to communicate with and make sure
that they can do the thing that you want them that they can do. Because, for
example, this older HP plotter, that was really hard to talk to, because it did
only speak very... sort of proprietary language and only the newer HP plotters
started to speak HPGL. And the Rolan plotter also can do this, for example. And
Rolan also has its own language. So just make sure you know what the device
wants to speak to with you, because this can make your life a lot easier. Yeah, and
these older plotters, they also often have a nice function that they have a direct
text mode. So you can... you need to boot them in a certain way, like flip some
switches on the back side and they will boot into a text mode. So you can just
send text over serial and it will just write that down. It has its own matrix of
letters and its own fonts store net. And that's super fun and makes a great
tutorwall plotter, for example. And then, there are also a lot of, yeah,
DIY home-brew sort of plotters, and this one is maybe the one that's the easiest to
build. You can find them either under the name Michaelangelo or Polargraph. I think
these are the two most common names for these. And they work super differently. So
on the left and on the right side, on the top here and over here, you have two
motors on - also, you need some sort of control device or a little computer.
And around these motors, you will find a string that is attached in the middle to a
gondola that can hold a pen and that gondola usually also has a servo motor
that can push away that gondola from your drawing area. So you can lift and put down
your pen. And to make this more stable, usually you put down some weight on the
left and right side so that the string has some force on it and works better. Yeah,
these are super easy to build and they are really nice communities around them. And
the very positive thing about this construction is that they scale extremely
well, because like the way the old Rolan plotters, for example, worked, you have
these two Axes that can move and you are very defined on how long these Axes are.
But with this, you can basically scale it indefinitely. And I've seen some
installations where, like, plotted over a whole five meters wall with this, because
you just need to have a very long string and that's basically all. That's super
fun, so if you want to build one yourself, this is a very nice way to go. But there
are also new commercial versions that are quite fun. This one is called Linus. It's
super tiny and basically only consists of, I guess, two servo motors and a little
Arduino or something. And it can only draw on a super tiny area. And it's also so
wiggly, it can't - no matter what - it can't draw a straight line. But it's super
cute to watch and super easy to take with you and has some nice APIs and it's quite
hackable. So that's also a really neat device. And well, this is basically, I
think, the most professional one that you can buy up to date, which is called
AxiDraw. But I've also seen some self- built versions of this. And you also have
your two axes, there's a little controller part over here and the funny thing here is
that you can put in very different types of pens here. For example, this is a
fountain pen, but you can basically put any pen in that you want. That's different
to the old plotters. They had very specific, very little, specific plotter-pens
and they are really expensive now if you want to buy them and if you actually
draw, you can basically use whatever you want. And you can also put your pen in a
certain angel that's especially nice for fountain pens or sort of brushes. And I've
seen a lot of people not only using pens, but also going to use acrylic paint or
very different materials or also, this is one example, where someone just basically
put in a sort of a toothpick and drew onto some sort of flat clay and made pattern in that
and that's super fun. So you're not limited to going... you're not limited to
use pens, but yeah, be creative and use all kinds of stuff. So if you ever come
around some sort of pen plotter, try it, it's super fun for a very quick and nice
creative coding output. blinry: I really love how plotters combine
this kind of handmade esthetic, which impositions and stuff with this digital input.
bleeptrack: Yeah, totally.
blinry: And I think people sometimes joke, that it's easier to get these plotters to
run and to, like, produce something compared to actual printing devices we
would use. bleeptrack: All right.
blinry: Apparently like printing out a piece of paper because of driver issues
and stuff. And these are very clear defined things, yes. I wanted to show you
some RFCs. That abbreviation is short for "request for comments". And it's
really... it's a really common way to define protocols for the Internet of how
the Internet works. For example, TCP and IP would be defined in our RFCs and HTTP
and how Mails work and stuff. And yeah, there are several thousands of those. And
sometimes people publish RFCs on April Fools' Day. And these are sometimes really
interesting to read. One really well known for example, is "RFC 1149: IP over Avian
Carriers", which suggests to use like carrier pigeons to carry information from
one place to another. So it specifies that you would like put your information on a
piece of paper and roll it around the leg of a pigeon and then send it off that way.
And it will fly to the target, maybe. And then you can retrieve the information
there. And this RFC states some very good technical properties, systems like this
have, for example, that the carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance system
which increases availability. Right. Or that multiple types of service can be
provided with a prioritized pecking order. So this could be used to prioritize
certain types of information over another. It says that "with time the carriers are
self-regenerating", which is a nice property to have for a network and an
additional property is "built-in worm detection and eradication". And some time
ago, a user group, a Linux user group in Norway, I think, actually implemented this
system. And they got the pigeons and they set up all of the required infrastructure
and then tried doing a ping command from one node to the other. And this is the
result. You will see that they try to send nine data packets here. And I mean, the
runtimes of these ping commands are... it's like most often over an hour or
something for the pigeon to go to place B and return. So, yeah. And only four of
these packets arrived back. So they stated here that they have 55 percent packet
loss. But it works. Now. Another RFC is 6592, the "null packet". This specifies
"null packet", which "are neither sent nor acknowledged when not received". There is
like an informal definition where they say that "The Null Packet is a zero-dimensional packet"
and that it "exists since it is non-self-contradictorily definable".
And then in this specification follows the formal definition that it's
intentionally 0 of the reference, not "NULL", and in the end of
this document, there is like a list of references and related work and there is
like the key "NULL", which points to an empty string. So this is all you need to
know about the NULL packet. It goes on and lists some properties of this packet, for
example, that it is inherently good: "The Null Packet cannot have the Evil Bit set,
by definition. Consequently, it is rather clear and undeniable that the null packet
is harmless, having no evil intent." Now, what is the evil bit? - you might ask.
RFC 3514, let's look at that one. The authors of this RFC noticed that the
definition of an IP fragment - it is about IPv4 - has a single bit, which is not used
for anything, it is just undefined. It doesn't have... it doesn't carry any
meaning. And the authors thought we should change that and play some meaning to this bit.
So here is the layout of this field. It's the first bit in the sequence and
they give it like this shorthand E, E for evil bit. It can have two possible values:
If it's set to zero, the packet has no "evil intent, host, network elements
should assume that the packet is harmless and should not take any defensive
measures." And another possible value is one. "If this bit is set to one, the
packet has evil intent and secure systems should try to defend themselves", while
"insecure systems may choose to crash, to be penetrated, etc." And then there's our
seagull's and great detail about how exactly and in which situations this bit
should be set. For example, if you are doing pentesting on a system, trying to
attack it, you should set this bit so that the receiving system will recognize that
this packet has evil intent and can take defensive measures. And you must do this
if you are attacking, yes. And here's just a list of some more fun RFCs. If you're
interested in the stuff, you should check them out. Fun is the "Hypertext Coffee Pot
Control Protocol", HTCPCP, which like gives some specific HTTP requests, for
example, to make sure, that a coffeepot which is connected to the Internet, that
you can request to know its status, whether it's empty or full and how full it
is and stuff. And this is also where the HTTP Code 418 comes from, which says: I am
a teapot. Now, if you try to send a packet like that to a system, which is actually a
teapot, it can reply with this and this is an error, sure. There is an RFC for "TCP
Options to Denote Packet Mood". So this allows you to set a specific mood in a TCP
packet if under some circumstances... I don't know, you're building a software and
the software notices that there is a lot of delay in your communication and stuff,
it could send an annoyed mood in the packets, that it is sending, to let the
other system, that it is communicating with, know. And then the system could
respond to that accordingly. And there is an RFC called "Scenic Routing for IPv6",
which suggests, that traffic should be sent over specific, very nice pathways,
along with nice landscape and in a lot of fresh air. For example, it says to
prioritize communication channels that are wireless, for example, to give the data a
very scenic pathway to its destination. That's the RFCs I wanted to show you. You
will find a Wikipedia article with a list of April Fools' RFCs. If you are
interested, there are several dozen of those and take those out. Yeah.
bleeptrack: I especially love the packet mood, when you think about upcoming AI.
That might be interesting. So it can communicate how it feels. I don't know.
Maybe that's good. Maybe it's not good, who knows. All right. To dig a bit into
game development and indie game development and while doing some research,
I stumbled upon some people who called it their own fancy, I guess, interesting
applications. And so there are three short videos I wanted to show you around a bit
and all three of them... I think they are very interesting because they try to
implement game rules that could not exist in our world and are very different and
it's quite mind bending if you walk around there and interact with stuff. So this is
the first one, as it's called Non- Euclidian game, which is, I think, is not
really correct, because, I think, it would be still Euclidian, just insisting on
Euclidian room. But as you can see, you can make photos of the scene and then put
that photo in the scene and suddenly everything appears there. And that's...
like it's super mind bending and super fun to play around with that. So far, I've
just found that video and not a really playable version. But maybe there is one
now and here also, for example, like gravity gets applied to stuff that is
placed in the scene and it's just yeah... It's just super fun and crazy. Crazy to
watch. Here it would like... like this scenario, I think that will be... would be
a really nice parlor game. All right. That's the first example. Second one is
this one. And this is actually really a Non-Euclidian room, basically. You can
imagine that it works a bit like, for example, Herveini's back or the Tardis, if
something looks small from the outside and very big from the inside. So you made some
tunnels that have this effect. So this one looks super from the outside. But actually
when you walk through it, it's quite short of this one. This is the opposite one. It
looks super, super small from the outside and extremely large from the inside. And
here's... I think the YouTube channel is called Copen, and he has a lot of
different versions of that. So this is also... this is also a nice example. So
you have rooms and you can walk in a circle and the longer you walk, you start
to realize it's just three rooms. There's just a blue one and a red one and a green
one. But the shape of the, let's say, house lets you think there should be at
least four rooms, but it's just three. So you can do these crazy effects. And yeah.
I don't... I'm not sure, I don't want to spoil you too bad - uh uh I made something
fullscreen that I did not want to have fullscreen, give me a second. Here we go.
I just... I think it's codeparade, yes, sorry. So check out the videos because he
does a lot of fun examples if you continue here. He also has a version, where you...
he still has these tunnels, but some let shrink everything when you go through it,
so everything... and you cover up at the end everything's smaller or everything
gets bigger. That's also super fun. And I can see, I can see him making super fancy
tunnel games with that. We're already at the last one, which is a world in
hyperbolic space. And it's also... yes, it's really fascinating for me to look at,
because when you walk around here, everything is bended so weirdly, because
when you think you could look at the sky, it's just wraps around you. The world
wraps around you. So you see, I don't know the other end of the world on top of you.
And this is just.. it's just so crazy to walk around there. They always have a bit
of problems with motion sickness. And I think this would not make it better for
me. But it's so fun. And also, I think in a few seconds, he will also check out the
house more to walk into or to in front of that house. It's just, it's just crazy.
And it's hard to imagine why it should look like... now he's moving backwards and
then he reaches a point where he's basically from the world side on the
opposite side of the house. So the house starts walking around him. That's super
funky, and I think game engines and games are perfect, are a perfect medium to
experience such mathematically fun ideas that you can have and I think some
Operation Mindfuck talks back, blinry also explained a 4D puzzle game.
blinry: In the very first one, yeah. bleeptrack: Yeah, exactly. And I think that goes
like in the same direction as these games and these test engines. All right.
blinry: I heard that it takes a long time to build these types of games because there
are basically no pre-made tools for you and you have to do everything yourself.
bleeptrack: Yes, right. blinry: Model a four dimensional object or
hyperbolic one... you have to code your tools for that, basically. Yeah.
bleeptrack: Yeah, yeah. blinry: It's really fun to look at. I also have
some geometric things I wanted to show you, related to topology. That's a field
of mathematics where you are looking like more at the geometric structure of the
object, not its concrete, precise... dimensions, for example. There is this
joke, that for a topologist there's basically no difference between a coffee
pot and a donut. Because, if you... like all substance, which you can squeeze and
pull, you can kind of transform the cup into a donut without making any cuts or
without doing anything together. Now, that's often the rules in topological
transformations, that you cannot create additional holes. And because this shape
only has a single hole going through it in the middle of the donut or in the handle
of the cup, these are basically the same object, topologically speaking. Right. And
yeah, then you can do interesting observations with this. A really well
known example is the Mobius strip, where you take a long piece of paper and you
glue the ends together. But before you do that, you rotate the strip like one end of
the strip once and then you paste it together. And then this is an object that
has an interesting property. It only has one side. Now, if you were to take a pen
and start drawing on the top of the surface here and follow it along the
strip, you would get behind the ring here and draw and then get on front here again.
And then as you wrap around, you are now at the back side of the strip and you like
kind of opposite to where you started, but you're still not done. Now you're still
drawing. You can go behind here and there and under this and on the top side, on the
backside of this. And then you are going to where you started, you made a long line
and you would do the... all of the surface in one stroke, basically, because there
was only one of them. There is really fun stuff that happens if you try to cut into
this strip. I have a video and can try to find a good point where you can see it. So
this person is taking a Mobius strip and is then using scissors to cut along the
middle line of the strip. Something to cut. And after cutting around the strip
once, it doesn't fall apart into two pieces, it's just still a single strip.
Yeah, "single strip", wow, surprise! Right. And yeah, the same thing could be
done if you took a strip of paper and twisted it twice before doing it together
and then you start cutting in the middle. I *(incomprehensible)* for yourself, if you are
intersted, it's another really surprising thing that happens if you do that. But the
thing I really wanted to show you is this one. This was in a tweet I found the other
day and I thought: I have to note this down into the list of ideas for Operation
Mindfuck, because it's so surprising.This tweet stated that if you have this, like,
double donut shape and there is a long rod going through one of the holes like this
is an infinitely long rod where you can't go over the edges of it. Then this tweet
said, that it's possible to transform this shape so that the rod goes through both
holes. And I said, what? There's no way this is possible. And then I clicked on
this tweet and looked at the video. Let's do that.
*[video runs]*
Let's look at it again, it's seven seconds.
*[video runs]*
Right. So by pushing and squeezing in the right way, you can
actually get to a stage where this rod goes kind of through both of these holes
and this is not a trick. And this is really like a property of this shape, that
you can transform it in this way. This is kind of, like proof by example, which
feels a bit unsatisfying to me. And that really makes me want to learn more about
topology to, kind of, in a formal way, state what's going on there. But I guess
the trick to, kind of, understand why this works, is that somewhere in the in the
middle of this transformation, you get to the stage where you have this shape,
that's basically like a symmetric... it's rotational symmetrical. If you hold the
bottom and the top part with your fingers, then you can imagine that like the middle
of this object is hollow. And there are three holes going in from the side, one
from the front, one is from the back left and one is from the back right. And all of
these holes connect to the interior of this hollowed out shape now. And this rod
is now going through two of those to the back. The two binded. if you are at this stage, it's up to
you to choose in which direction you want to go. You can either, like, take the
front hole and, like, pull it out and stretch it to make it really large and
kind of disappear into the edge of the shape. And then you get in this situation
where you have this rod picking through both holes at the back and the front one,
you can't really see it anymore. But you can also, if you were at this position,
you can choose to take the right handle of the shape and push it inwards to
go between the other two handles. And then it's a situation where you arrive,
finally, at the shape like this one, where it appears to go through only one hole,
but this is just this weird property of this object that you can do topologic
transformations to go in both directions. And I think that's really fascinating and
not very intuitive. And there is a second thing like that, where you start with this
kind of Bretzel-like shape, which is, like, interlinked into itself. And then
the question is, can you transform this in a state where the handels are free? And it
turns out of that you can, which is also, again, really surprising. And this is...
like this diagram shows how to do it. You would start taking these two holes which
interlink and stretch them out and stretch them down, make them larger until they
almost touch the bottom here. And then you have this string of material, which you
can still remain between these two holes. And then you're at a state where you have
this little twists in the material. Then you can just start and twist this, twist
once again. It was twice and then it's free and then you can make the hole
smaller again until you are at this stage. And I think that's pretty cool, and that's
the topological things I wanted to show. bleeptrack: That's so cool, o man. I could
look at these forever. Also, that clay animation of the rod... it's nice to have
really an animation that's a bit easier to get this...
blinry: still after looking at it for ten times, it is so *(incomprehensible)*
bleeptrack: Yeah. Like you can... yeah, completely. All right. We already reached our last
section, which is about PCB art. So this year, I tried to learn more about PCB
design and electronics and I found that nice little community about people who
like to make very artsy PCBs. For example, here is a person who made a very nice
schematic, an image, what possibilities you have with PCBs or if you... I'm not sure,
maybe you have had one in hand, a PCB usually has like a base plate, which has a
yellowish color. And on top and on the bottom of this plate, you have a copper
layer. And on top of these you can have a solder mask, which is some sort of plastic
coating that... you can cover contacts that you ... because we don't want to have
every part of copper traces be open to the air, open to touch. So you might want to
cover that. So this is the solder mask in this example. This would be the purple
color. And also, maybe you can have some screen printing on top. This is usually in
a white or in a black color, in this example as white. So you can have a lot of
different combinations of these materials, like you could have the copper and then
put on solder mask, for example, and you will get a lighter color. This is the
number four in this case. And if you just, if you mill away the copper and just put
the solder mask onto your base plate, you will get usually the darker color. Now,
this would be the number five. And then also you can have either just the base
plate. I think in this example it's number three and you can also... the copper that
is open to the air or to touch, usually gets a coating and often this is silver,
gold or some... what's it called in English - and solder... solder.... Yeah.
Which is also like a silverish color and, yeah. And the screen printing which is
some white or black. So these five sorts of colors are your color palette that you
can play with. And when you go to different manufacturers, you can also get
different solder mask colors. I think that very typical one would be green. In this
example, it's purple. You can also get blue or black or white, whatever you want.
And yeah, get your stuff manufactured. That's super easy. And there's also some
nice examples what else you can do, because you have these two-layered PCBs
with copper on both sides. You can leave copper out on one side, only on certain
places and leave it out on the other side completely so you can get a very fancy
shine through optic. Also, of course, when you work with electronics, you can very
distinctively place some light sources on your board, if you want to, if you want to
play with certain ways of lighting. So that's fun. And also, as you can see on
the right image, you can choose your cut- out shape anywhere you want, the
manufacturers are usually quite open and can do, I guess, most of the shapes. And
they can mill in extremely fine details, especially if they want to mill the copper
on the copper layer. And that's super interesting because, when you design PCBs,
you often want to have very extremely fine traces. And this is interesting for art,
of course, because you can engrain extremely fine details like this very nice
example of a broken, half broken-down leaf, where the copper layer is used to
have the fine vaines that are still intact and a solder mask is used to have a bit of
hole leaf cells that are starting to break down. And the yellowish color that you can
see, that's the color of the base plate. So you can create extremely fine
details. That's super fun. And then, there's, for example, boldport. I can
highly recommend boldport. He does a lot of extremely crazy PCB art. And this one,
I think, is also very nice. It's a chameleon. And he uses the PCB not only as
the base material, but also he uses it in a very innovative way, I'd say, because he
uses it, yeah, upright. This is quite unusual. And you can see that he soldered
the LEDs on the edge of the PCB to give that chameleon a nice LED back row of
lights, that is super fun. And he also somehow got two solder mask colors on one
PCB, I'm not sure who he contacted to get that. That's rather unusual, but it seems
that it can be done. And he also used resistors for little feet. That's also
really nice. So he thought about integrating parts into the shape of the
end-design that are usually more functional and not used esthetically. And
that's what's really interesting and really nice. And he has a lot of these
projects, and I think you can also buy them as DIY kits. And that's really nice.
And if you, yeah, if you can combine all these layers - this is a project that I
came up with, because, as I said, I really like to do generative art. And of course,
you can then start to write code that generates shapes and patterns that you can
put on your PCB for esthetic reasons and these boards that you can see here, they
were produced or created generatically or procedurally, you would maybe say. And
these three planets, they act as capacitive touch buttons, so you can touch
on them and it gets recognized by the MCU on the board. And yeah, it was, it's
really fun to... for me, when I work with generative art to find a new material, but
you need to figure out how to use it. And PCBs are just, for me, a super different
material than paper or other stuff. And it's also really nice that you get these
high quality coatings like gold or silver that make stuff a lot more valuable and
really nice to look at. So I can highly recommend the hashtag #pcbart on Twitter
and Instagram. There are a lot of people posting really, really nice stuff. All
right. And I think it's time for us to wrap up.
blinry: Yeah. Our last slide, we thought, because we are sending you into all kinds
of rabbit holes anyway. That's what we're trying to do. We might, as well, list some
of them very quickly. Mention them, just maybe see what sticks in your heads. This
is very mean. So, mechanical keyboards: There are huge communities around building
your own keyboards, like picking different key-caps, different switches, different
layout. Look into that. Some people are really interested in skin care and look
into what different products do and their ingredients, communities are on this.
Amateur astronomy. You can... if you know where to look, you can find some really
cool things in the galaxy that we can see without any instruments - if you're in a
good environment. You can try baking your own bread, make your own sourdough with
bacteria just from the air and use it to bake your bread. Some people are into
backpacking and optimize for weight, so they try to have equipment that weighs as
little as possible, so that they don't have to carry as much and then come up
with really interesting shapes for their tents, where they spend these thin tarps
basically between trees, for example, with ropes to sleep under that.Oh yeah. And if
you have... if you're into cooking and you have these dull knives, which I am always
annoyed about, you can get wet stones, which is this abrasive material, and you
put water on it and then you can remove material from your knives to make chop.
There are really good YouTube videos about that. Yeah. And with that, we say thank
you for listening to this. Greetings to the future, I guess. I hope you are having
a good Remote Chaos Experience right now. And yeah, you have a link to the slides
here if you are interested in any of those. And I guess, yeah, thanks for being
here, and see you soon. bleeptrack: All right.
*wikipaka outro music*
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