CatSynth

We have been having a gorgeous week here in San Francisco. September is our real “summer” season, the warmest, clearest and driest month of the year.

Luna is an indoor cat, but today she was given a special opportunity to venture outside. It all begins with an open door:

All these new sounds and smells from the open portal pique her curiosity. Of course, they’re not entirely new, as she has experienced them through open windows. But this is different, and even a bit scary.

But curiosity wins out, and Luna steps over the threshold into this strange world.

Tentatively at first, she begins to stroll out onto the patio, taking in all the new sights, sounds, smells and textures.

Just as with our indoor habit, Luna’s natural beauty shines outdoors as well, against the plants and artwork.

The way she strolls about seems even more “panther-like” than usual.

Of course, this excursion only lasted a few minutes, as Luna made a hasty retreat indoors for a “shelter within a shelter.”

We are fortunate to have a large private patio with high walls here at CatSynth HQ, an usual feature in this section of the city. Part of the motivation for this outing is simply to share the experience of a sunny day on the patio with Luna, but also to give her a chance to become familiar with it, less frightened and more confident, in case she does get out accidentally; and to let her see how easy it is to find the door and come back inside. The walls are probably too high for her to scale, but one should never underestimate the athletic abilities of cats. I would not allow her out on her own. And I am sure some will question with wisdom of letting her out at all.

Nonetheless, it is a reminder that in life we do sometimes need to venture out and take risks. Not stupid, reckless ones, but at least some. Certainly, our move her was one such move, but it was worth it. And perhaps it is time to start taking more…

We at CatSynth are also thinking about our human and animal friends along the Gulf Coast, Cuba, and the Caribbean, whose weather will be anything but clear and sunny in the next few days and who may be facing evacuation exactly three years after Hurricane Katrina. Stay safe and dry, friends.

Puddy is definitely more confident outdoors than Luna, but this weekend they had even more in common than usual strolling on their respective patios. Puddy and Katie host Weekend Cat Blogging at A Byootaful Life.

The Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos is being hosted by Pet and the Bengal Brats.

The Carnival of Cats will be hosted by Mom Robyn at a crystal and jewelry adventure.

And of course the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

From matrixsynth.

According to the image names in this anonymous post, the cat’s name is “Tweak” (great name for a “synth cat”).

The ARP 2006 has an interesting story as well:

Another story to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
“around may of this year in seattle, there was a electronics recycling thing going on which i helped with… it was insane piles of electronic waste, all of which would be disassembled and sold as scrap. during this event i asked the guy in charge if i could have a old ‘music keyboard’ i found (arp 2600 + 3620keys)! (no one knew what it was but me!!!!) once home i and it was taken apart for cleaning i found it had the old ‘moog filter’ and was missing 1 speaker,only thing wrong with it! plus someone had modified it (8 extra holes plus toggle switch) sorta like 70s circuit bending i suppose.” via anonymous. Not sure about the cat connection, but there it is.

If you want to connect with more cats, check out Cats on Tuesday.

The big convention starts today, and we at CatSynth are ready!
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Luna is joining the other Cats for Obama, and the Catster group.

A simple photo of Luna for a quiet day.

Sometimes she just strikes a perfect pose.

We received “hugs” from a couple of our friends. So we reciprocate:

Mr Hendrix ,the only cat brave enough to read are Carnival of Mathematics posts.

Kashim, Othello and Salome. They had a bit of a scare when Salome got lost the other night, but fortunately she’s back home safe.

And also:

Our favorite Luna look-alike Puddy.

Mickey, Tillie and Georgia

Samantha and Tigger, who are still a little “damp” from tropical storm Faye in Florida. We hope all our friends in Florida were safe during the prolonged storm.

Our “neighbor” Sophia, the “Diva Kitty”.

Weekend Cat Blogging 168 is at a new site As the Squillion World Spins.

The Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos is at its new headquarters.

The Carnival of the Cats is being hosted by Kashim, Othello, Salome and Astrid.

And of course the Friday Ark is at the modulator

Today we explore the topic of Knot Theory. Most of us have a conventional idea of what a “knot” is; and those who were once Boy Scouts may have a more formal idea. But in mathematics, a knot has a very formal defintion: an embedding of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, R³, considered up to continuous deformations (isotopies). An example of a mathematical knot, the “figure eight knot”, is illustrated below:

Basically, it is a continuous curve in three-dimensional space that loops back on itself, crossing an arbitrary number of times but never cut or spliced. It relates to the conventional notion of knot as a piece of string connected at the ends.

Knots relate to other topics that have been explored here at CatSynth, such as Lissajous curves.

Many knots, when projected onto a two-dimensional plane form Lissajous curves.

It also relates to our interest here at CatSynth in highway interchanges, such as this the intersection of I-105 and I-110 in Los Angeles:

Indeed, our friend whaleshaman of Jelly Pizza suggested the link between highway interchanges and knots, although mathematically such interchanges are really tangles.

Knots (and tangles) can be arbitrarily complex with twists and crossings. But there is order in this twisty world, and indeed knots have properties analogous to numbers, such as equivalency and prime decomposition.

Two knots are considered equivalent if one can be converted to another by simple scaling (stretching or rotating), or performing one of several Reidemeister moves, twisting or untwisting in either direction, moving one loop (or segment) completely over another, or move a string completely over or under another crossing. Basically, this is any operation you can do on a closed string without cutting or splicing it.

Here at CatSynth, we are quite familiar with Reidemeister moves, as they seem to occur spontaneously on our audio cables:

Even more interesting is how knots can be decomposed into prime knots. Just as any integer can be expressed as the product of prime numbers, any knot can be expressed as the “sum” of prime knots.

Here is a chart of the first 15 prime knots:

[Click image for original and more info]

Here, the prime knots are grouped by the number of crossings. For example, the trifoil knot (second from the left on the top) has three crossings. The circle is a degenerate case, known as the “unknot”, with zero crossings. As the number of crossings increases, the number of possible prime knots also increases. For example, there are seven unique prime knots with seven crossings.

For any positive integer n, there are a finite number of prime knots with n crossings. The first few values are given in the following table.

This sequence (formally listed as A002863), appears to grow exponentially. Indeed, results by Welsh show a lower bound of 2.68 for the exponential base, and an upper bound of 10.40 due to Stoimenow. However, as far as I can tell, there is know known analytical formula for this sequence, and the values for n=17 and above are not known.

I find such sequences of numbers fascinating. Where to they come from, and how does one figure out the next value? In the case of prime knots, these appear to be open problems.

For more information, Giovanni de Santi has an excellent introduction to the theory of knots. Another paper by [url=http://algo.inria.fr/bsolve/constant/constant.html]Steven R. Finch is a resource for advanced analysis of knots and tangles, including more on counting prime knots.

Submitted by Alex Ookpik:

Austin poses with a modified Roland JP-8000.

Check out more Cats on Tuesday.

Last night I got out to hear the second concert in the 6th Annual Festival of Contemporary Music hosted by the New Music Forum. That is quite a grand name, and of course the festival gave but a small sampling of contemporary music.

By coincidence, this was at the Community Music Center, the same location as the Edgetone New Music Summit. Although both ostensibly “new music,” this program had a much more traditional feel to it.

The second night focused on pieces for piano, electronics and wind ensemble, all instrumentation I have experience with (as opposed to my more limited experience with string ensembles). The programming seemed to have been done to balance the instrumentation, rather than the pieces themselves, with one piano, one digital media piece, and a piece for wind ensemble in each half.

The second half opened with a virtuosic and theatric performance by pianist Jerry Kuderna of Schematic Nocturne by Bruce Bennet, and probably the best performance of the evening. It was followed by Staring at the Sun, a piece for “stereo digital audio media” by Andrew Cole. It interesting how programs are finally catching up to the contemporary world and no longer calling such pieces “tape music.” I did recognize in Cole’s piece many examples of key clicks and other extended woodwind techniques, which made it fit better into the full program than just a piece for computer-generated sounds. The final piece, Woodwind Quintet by Martha Stoddard was a departure from the rest of the evening in that it was the only piece with multiple movements, and also had a more traditional feel, with traditional harmonies, Middle Eastern scales, and other elements that almost made it seem like the curators were saying “now that you have sat through all this new music, here is something simpler to enjoy.” But of course, I came specifically to hear “new music”, so I preferred the earlier pieces.