With apologies to The Cosmic Web.
Today I came across this image, burried deep in the windows on my computer desktop:
This picture popped up almost entirely by accident, when I was attempting to do something else - it is just a series of random numbers, picked from the normal distribution, connected together with very thin lines. The grey shading you see is because most numbers tend to fall in the middle, with less moving out to the edge - lots of very thin lines merge together to make a darker grey. To me, it looks like an ink sketch of a section of waterfall, or perhaps a city-scape seen through a rain-drenched window.
We are always used to seeing scenes of nature that suddenly strike us as beautiful, and to me this looks like the same class of thing. While it came from a computer, it is a naturally occurring pattern, that was generated without being asked for, for no purpose. It does not look pretty because it was designed to do so; like a sunset, I find it beautiful, but it does not belong to me, it was not placed there for me. I just happened to be there.
I should probably have put a Sentimentality Warning at the start of this post…
What are you talking about? God put it there! He likes picking random numbers from normal distributions. That’s how he made the universe remember.
I’ll forgive you since it is, I agree, a pretty picture. I particularly like the rainy cityscape interpretation.
Jesus: how then do you explain non-Gaussianities in the CMB?
wow. that is pretty. Certainly good enough for a gallery if you put it in a pretty enough frame and gave it a meaningful title
It looks like unnormalised ChIP-chip data.,