Bio

When Jason was six, his father told him that if you type the proper set of instructions into a computer, it can do anything imaginable. Jason has been hooked ever sense. In high school while most kids wore doing homework, staying up late to date, and skipping school, Jason was not doing homework, staying up programming his computer till 4 a.m., and skipping class to get more time in the computer lab. Post high school, Jason went to work moving up the programming ladder of various companies, and then also moved into consulting. Today if you buy a bag of chips, have a managed 401(k)pension plan, get a title to a house, or if you simply buy gas, more then likely you went through some of Jason’s code.

Jason currently works for Retalix, a company that produces software for the full range of retail industries, and he works for the Ante Institute underneath the supervision of Mihai Nadin. Jason is also a non-degree-seeking student at UTD, but he has been known to take random junior college classes from welding to “The Social Impact of Television.”

Jason’s interests include, but are not limited to, computers, music (Jason plays guitar, bass, piano, recorder, and accordion), graphic design, charcoal/graphite/pen drawing, whiteboard art, non-linear systems, fuzzy logic, mountain biking, traveling, food/cooking, media studies, writing in the third person, questioning authority, and most importantly anything concerning fun.

Jason also has a website.

Project: Nursing, Growing, and Cultivating Data with Automata

Substitution systems allow for complexity to grow yet are always a reference to the initial states of the system. My hypothesis is that you can build a synthesizer that depending on the speed of the note will create subtle dynamics within each note. Each note produced within a scale for a given substitution method will be related, yet have it’s own dynamics. This is much like an analog instrument (guitar, piano, tuba) has different note dynamics for each note played.

In order to do this process I will take the beginning and end of a sample, then create the dynamics for the middle of the sample based on a substitution system similar to what we see on page 83 of A New Kind of Science.

Favorite Four-Color, Radius-1/2 Rule

Rule chosen: 11122

I am a minimalist at heart. I wanted an automaton with symmetry and motion. I see this, and I think Lohse.