Highlights

This paper describes the construction of a smooth outline around a set of circles with a bridge connection between pairs.

Two constructions were developed. A was implemented; B was developed for generalisations and used with A for unequal-radii cases.

We construct a hull, add circles tangent to the hull to carve out the bridge, then use marching squares and quadratic Bézier splines to draw the outline. For n = 3, a selection rule discards one of the tangent circles that interfere with the circle not in a pair, plus a correction to marching squares to remove any stray loops.

Coded in Swift; currently runs only on M-chip macOS 14.2 and above. Code and app are available in the Repository. Release intended for the Mac App Store.

The technical notes cover the 11 steps to achieve the aesthetic presentation, and why mathematical fidelity is preserved for the spectrum.

Neuroscience is starting to edify the dismantling of the self. Lacan has some nice ideas on that.

Social comparison and social-media recognition deteriorate mental health. Hegel presents interesting ideas, which I interpreted in the context of the latest social issues.

Social media hinges on the aesthetic response for amplification. I investigated ideas of beauty and Kant’s idea of Judgement; the build-up of Kant’s ideas is in the Repository.

It is futile to try and understand beauty, but its operations on the mind can yield ideas of social media’s interaction with the mind.

Social comparison was a primitive means of maintaining group identity. With progress in civilisation, other aspects are unveiled. I looked into direct and indirect status signalling in a modern context, with predictions and solutions to decrease its anxiety-inducing effects.

Borrowing the biblical great flood to represent the flooding of the modern world with information. I see so much good advice online, and where it can lead. I present an intermediate between foresight — people knowing history’s cyclic nature — and Hegel’s point that the past is of little use for learning.

I did not employ a metered structure, as those came freely to me; modifying the structure would be alienation. I operated on the rhyming scheme, though. ABAB would seem more natural, owing to a perceived form of progression.

But I chose AABB because I want it read not as someone going through the process of fragmentation, but as an observer who, from experience, now sees how each step is systematic — made up of many subprocesses, each with its start and its finish.

About Pythagoras’ work, adapted to music by Gustav Holst in The Planets, divided into 8 movements. Something music cannot do is play all the pieces at once — a perspective literature allows for.

We usually think of a human growing from a moody child, to providing wealth to society, to retreat from worldly things — moving from Mars to Neptune. I propose instead that all the faculties of humans must coexist in cosmic balance; we must not leave one for the other, but hold all in harmony like the fragile balance of our Solar System.

Jupiter and Saturn are said to be opposites. I map this onto the inner human world and point to the astronomic effect — which allows for life on Earth — as allowing for the proper functioning of the human psyche.

A lament.

Eastern philosophy. Nature speaking to the human.

Inspired by the writing style of the Book of Revelation. I supposed they used heavy symbolism to describe political situations of the time; I do the same, but to describe internal conflict.

A young hero, praised for being virtuous, goes to destroy the defiled in the name of his God. This translates to us being intolerant of what we have not been taught. It ends with the end of judgement and the gift of a wider perception.

A branch of a current project. I was reading a short book on the philosophy of science by Samir Okasha.

It made me consider much of what I took for granted running experiments in science, and how we agree to conventions as scientists which philosophers leave as open questions.

The interpretation of probability is well established in philosophy. I wanted a deeper dive into the other aspect of measure theory — measuring, and the sigma-algebra — to examine the inbuilt assumptions of our system and, if possible, shed new light on the subject.

I wrote this and left it mostly intuitive; strengthening the mathematics would break the poem. I did so to try and find something human that LLMs would not be able to generate.