What This Is All About

This website and blog, I mean.

I have been thinking about writing overview posts. But then – it felt like a boring, almost “administrative” exercise.

Until THE INTERNET and its open standards have inspired me – again!

Old posts escaped to the Fediverse – again! It had happened last November. I made little tweaks to very old posts, and they were “federated” – sent out like a new post with an old date, to the audience on platforms like Mastodon. Obviously, I had not figured out the settings of the ActivityPub plugin which turns your blog into a little Fediverse server.

Two weeks later, the same thing happened again.

Yesterday, I have been raking this virtual Zen garden (again). Of course, I forgot to turn off the federation for old posts (that had existed before I installed the plugin and that I had not tweaked since last November). They still had their chance to escape!

But I am delighted – again – by the lovely, random selection. I will use the escaped posts to tell a random, stream-of-consciousness story about what this site is about. This is very similar to how I approach Found Poetry: Unleash your creativity by limiting yourself, by imposing silly rules.

The rules:

~ Process the posts escaped to the Fediverse in the chronological order in which they were federated in September 2026.

~ Link to the post

~ Create a very short Found Poem from the text snippets of this post (used in the order in which they appear in the post, must not be edited.

~ Wrap the story of this blog around it. Don’t overthink, just let the subconscious do the work!

~ Repeat for the next post.

~

~

I keep creating
replaced by a matrix
Determined by the moments
how can you find the intersection?

~

Since a few years, this blog has gradually been shifting towards visual art. Art inspired by – or mostly: firmly rooted in – physics, math, and engineering. In most posts, I aim at explaining the underlying physics, and how it can be captured with math. But there is a second level of math: The equations and logic governing the geometry to display the concepts of said physics.

In the beginning (since 2021) I have used (hand-written) code: Software frameworks that let me write python code or JavaScript code to display functions in three-dimensional space. I started with “code-crafting” 3D sculptures from the physics of diffraction.

But in 2024, I was drawn to (pun intended) restricting myself to the most ancient tools: Pencils, ruler, and compass. I wanted to create slowly what code could create quickly. It was an intuitive shift, not some grand artistic statement.

Today I feel vindicated by the acceleration of AI’s capabilities. Threejs, the JavaScript framework I was using the most, has become a standard tool certain AI communities use to test new models. I do not dare to test it, but I am pretty sure that AI can already or will soon be able to re-create code like the one I wrote, just being fed the vague descriptions I gave in my blog posts. How on earth would I be able to prove that I “hand-wrote” the code? And what if I learned that code using the time-honored tradition of googling and reading stackoverflow threads? I am not a seasoned 3D developer. I cobbled together just as much JavaScript I needed to bring my vision to life. My code has been ugly.

This is not an attempt at humble-bragging. I liked my art – the final result. But I had not been proud of my code and my debugging. I had mixed feelings when it came to the creative process. I felt I was way behind anybody doing “3D” professionally.

But constructing the ancient way was very different. Something was clicking. I felt home. I loved the process more. The slow creation was in line with a steady exploration, not driven by anything. I knew I would always be orders of magnitude slower than software. And that was the point.

“Fate” could not have chosen a better post than this one – about drawing the intersection of a sphere and an ellipsoid, as is of relevance in the theory of the force-free gyroscope. I had created a digital art series of the same concept before; at least I had solved the equations manually on paper for this code art version. But it felt very different to solve them again geometrically. Time and time again, I come to the conclusion that we have lost something when we traded in the direct manipulation of geometry for the manipulation of mathematical symbols, and later: code.

I haven’t recognized it myself when constructing my first 3D Lissajous figures on paper, but I had intuitively decided to explore this method of visualization – despite or because it feels so out-of-date.

~

~

I cannot be proved
as we learned to think about words
used as exponents
What we did was what we expect

~

The second post blasted out to the fediverse is my 2020 summary of a popular little book about Gödel’s Proof – the one that inspired Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. I wanted to compare this version to GEB – and I was delighted by how succinct it was.

Now I wonder if the ability to boil down knowledge to the point – and to create expositions like this – has become the prototypical AI task. Twenty years ago I / we use this metaphor to form an artificial German word as the name of our two-person consulting and engineering business – punktwissen (“point knowledge”).

When I started this blog, the idea of “punktwissen” was the motivation of many of my “science explainers”. But now I wonder if those explanations ever helped anybody anyway. I am writing to express, not to impress. I am writing to let my thoughts crystallize. To boil my ideas down while I write, to think through the process. I even wrote text by hand and only digitized it later, to forcing myself to honor every word.

Only now, that I muse about this random post, I see the relation to my geometric drawing: Work through it. Slowly. No shortcuts.

And of course, thinking of Hofstadter, I also have to quote myself, from my first GEB post in 2014 – (about the book and what Hofstadter later said about it, and how we all had misunderstood its intentions).

I vividly remember this little tangent:

Re-reading the blurb of my old version of the book I am able to connect some dots: I had forgotten that Hofstadter actually has a PhD in physics – theoretical condensed matter physics – and not in computer science or cognitive science. So the fact that a PhD in physics could prepare you for a career / life of making connections between all kinds of hard sciences, arts and literature was certainly something that might have shaped my worldview

Many of earliest posts here (from 2012) were about leaving the academic world (for good reasons), but still trying to integrate my renaissance ambitions into my world. Having finally found art as a grand unification of everything, I feel at peace.

~

~
It is not impossible
The future owner of a key
is broken into blocks of
all the numbers in the series

~

And then, this random post selector picked another brief “explainer” – now punktwissen from computer science! The RSA algorithm is at the heart of the technology I spent most of my professional life with: Public Key Infrastructure. Alice, Bob, digital certificates.

From an entertainment perspective though, this article would have been the better choice: Certificates and PKI. The Prequel. Long before I zoomed in on PKI, I had been choosing the algorithm as a topic when I taught … a course for tradespeople (metalworkers and the like) who retrained to become IT technicians.

I had recently left the research center where I had analyzed stainless steel samples. The research center had been my first job after I had worked as a scientist at the university, fabricating thin superconducting films by shooting laser pulses on ceramic pellets.

But I wanted to leave all academic and academy-adjacent jobs behind, as I explained in The Dark Side Was Strong in Me. I was thrilled to do something that somebody else was really needing right now – and willing to pay for – without me having to jump through byzantine hoops and please governmental agencies to give me money for research.

So, I became a down-to-earth freelance IT engineer and trainer, frowned upon by former academic colleagues.

The preview image with the glowing security token was added later, by my future self – when I was exploring the offensive side of Public Key Infrastructure. I got backlinks and mentions by cyber security legends – of which I am still proud of. In retrospect, it again confirmed why I was drawn to IT and information security in the first place. What counted were your demonstrated skills.

~

~
the simplest, sparsest way to
capture the vibe
I turned off the light
I am walking into the future
~

This is finally a post containing a found poem! But note I used the non-poem content to craft this “poem”! The “real poem” starts like this. It was also created from my own blog posts, one snippet per post, chronologically ordered.

~

There is so much to unpack

it manages to lift its head
in an unlikely place
when the zero point is crossed

where I am coming from
connecting rays
thinking about anything

…

Found poetry has been the backbone of this blog; I haven’t been this consistent with any of my other topics! This is my manifesto: Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape.

~

When I was watching the infosec video featuring the elkement, an image of this series of code-generated artworks had been my header.

My art had become dark during the pandemic, and so had my artwork titles. But in 2024 I put it in a new context, showing the dark series versus its original colorful counterpart.

I owe to Sir Roger Penrose: The function on display here has peculiar mathematical properties; or better: its cross-sections have. Only when grasping its true existence in the world of complex number can you see why it behaves so weird.

Penrose’s hand-crafted old-school drawings in his book The Road to Reality had been my greatest inspiration to pick up pencils and to try code art. I will forever be grateful!

~

~
I feel the Babel Fish in my ear
I checked the source
we need stories
so we can identify your face

~

Speaking about the pandemic: I owe to the COVID virus, too. I had taken a break from this blog, from about autumn 2019 to spring 2020. I had mothballed this blog, migrated the content (by re-writing an app from scratch, a static site generator that I fed the XML backup file generated by WordPress). All posts here became private, and I considered to delete them.

Then the pandemic hit, and I needed an outlet for expression. I started writing stream-of-consciousness again. And I read Douglas Adams again. And Umberto Eco. And at some point I gradually took all the posts online again, started blogging here, and “synced” the new content to my other site.

The other site I invested so much time in developing finally became an enigmatic time capsule. These cycles are repeating again and again. Quoting myself again

Like living organisms, like seasons, like universes in a crazy cosmological model my websites breathe. Growing bigger, growing more tentacles and connections, categories, FAQs, lists and explanations … then shrinking and withering again to enigmatic and confusing experiments, borderline artistic.

Right now, I am on an internet break as well. I do not post to social media. I do not want to signal and notify. I do not even send a “newsletter” for this post. I feel every channel is congested, everybody is screaming into a digital void. They declared the renaissance of the newsletter. You need one, especially as an artist! Circumvent the algorithmic platforms! Now everybody wants to force their newsletter on you.

I for one have started to use bookmarks again. Even RSS is too much for me.

~

~

you are oh-so-innovative
before you start something
leave the numbers empty
to convert the signal

~

I feel enchanted that my antique telephone sketch was chosen twice! This had been the first drawing I completed … after a break of decades.

Shortly after that I focused on code art, but now I know my initial intuition was right. My genres of art are 1) Precise geometric constructions based on descriptive geometry and 2) Freehand sketches of scientific instruments and technical devices.

Therefore, I am picking my “inverted drawing” of our fire extinguisher as the featured image of this post:

I created it exactly as the drawing of the phone: Take a photo of the fire extinguisher, change to grey scale, invert it. Draw the inverted image with blue pencil on light green paper. Scan and invert again.

~

~

I try to mirror
an innocuous parameter
Maybe a very good AI will predict
that they are first world problems

~

Did I miss anything? Academic, physics, IT, security, blogging, art … Wait, the heat pump era is missing! But “fate” again picked a proper post!

For nearly 10 years I was at the same time building public key infrastructures for large corporations while also supporting private home owners with self-building a very special heat pump system, following the blueprint of a system we (The Chief Engineer an I – the Science Office) had developed and prototyped. This system uses an underground water/ice tank and a ribbed pipe solar/air collector as the combined heat source.

I was the theory department, in charge of numerical simulation and software development of tools for sizing systems and for analyzing measurement data. Remembering why I left academia, I was proud of having done research and prototyping at several levels as a two-person business, actively refusing to apply for government grants.

~

There should be some conclusion now, I guess! But the future is wide open! I use all those different ideas and experiences and turn them into art.

And of course, one of the additional posts I’ve linked here – the one about the Certificates Prequel – got federated, like a ghost from the past. I am sure I haven’t edited this one? But maybe the current post tried to ping it somehow which already counts as a change? What a mundane way of ending this wall of text.

~

I wonder who will read this? I will not send a “newsletter”; I want to replicate the experience of HTML-crafting-blogging into the void, early 2000s-style!

You, people of WordPress and RSS users, will be notified!

But then, also you, people of the Fediverse, deserve a follow-up to the zombie posts. So, I will federate!

~