{"id":255,"date":"2003-02-23T17:28:40","date_gmt":"2003-02-23T22:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=255"},"modified":"2003-02-23T17:28:40","modified_gmt":"2003-02-23T22:28:40","slug":"the-self-made-tapestry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=255","title":{"rendered":"The Self-Made Tapestry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At a recent book exchange, I gave away a copy of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/0198502435\/qid=1046039619\/sr=8-1\/ref=sr_8_1\/102-0221525-9092901?v=glance&#038;s=books&#038;n=507846\">The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature.<\/a>, by Philip Ball, an editor for Nature.<br \/>\nThe book covers the structure and development of patterns in nature: bubbles, waves, animal and plant bodies, branching patterns in trees and rivers, convection patterns in boiling water on a scale of minutes and in the earth&#8217;s crust on a scale of millions of years.<br \/>\nThe book has good, detailed explanations; history of the scientific concepts, and beautiful pictures. It doesn&#8217;t have enough math and computation for my taste, though. It seemed to me that a small amount of not-particurlarly advanced math or modeling would make the points more clearly.  The book mentioned several times that the phenomena were modelled by cellular automata. I&#8217;d be curious to find out how. The book has references to the scientific papers, so one could look the works up in the original, should one have the time and\/or skill.<br \/>\nIt is a good complement to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/0262561271\/qid=1046041788\/sr=1-1\/ref=sr_1_1\/102-0221525-9092901?v=glance&#038;s=books\">The Computational Beauty of Nature<\/a>, which has overlapping subject matter, covers a narrower range of patterns, and explains the basic math behind the concepts.<br \/>\nI bought the book at &#8220;A Clean, Well-Lighted Place&#8221;, an independent bookstore in San Francisco. I&#8217;d never been there before, and it was very impressive that they had it in stock. Oxford University Press, paperback 2001.  I definitely got the impression that the books were selected by humans rather than best-seller algorithms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At a recent book exchange, I gave away a copy of The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature., by Philip Ball, an editor for Nature. The book covers the structure and development of patterns in nature: bubbles, waves, animal and plant bodies, branching patterns in trees and rivers, convection patterns in boiling water on a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=255\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Self-Made Tapestry&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-47","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}