Matthew C Good : Musician, Web Developer, Hobbyist.

Some of my friends were trying to have an aesthetics discussion on twitter today. And I wanted to quote this bit from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Timequake” that I thought was rather applicable, but being as it was twitter, I couldn’t fit it in 140 characters, so I just made a snide comment instead. But I promised I would post the excerpt on my blog, so here it is. It’s a bit long, but it is very good.

So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of environmental calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima baby carriage. Our underarm deoderants have eaten holes in the ozone layer.
And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can’t draw for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn’t like paintings because they didn’t do anything, just hung there year after year, has this summer become an artist!
I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the poor man’s Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and consistencies between two flat sheets of impermiable materials, such as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. The pulls them apart, et voila! This has nothing to do with his cancer. He didn’t know he had it yet, and the malignancy was in his lungs and not in his brain in any case. He was just farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife to ask him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voila! Better late than never, that’s all I can say.
So he sent me some black-and-white Xeroxes of his squiggle miniatures, mostly dendritic forms, maybe trees or shrubs, maybe mushrooms o umbrellas full of holes, but really quite interesting. Like my ballroom dancing, they were acceptable. He has since sent me multicolored originals, which I like a lot.

The message he sent me along with the Xeroxes, though, wasn’t about unexpected happiness. It was an unreconstructed technocrat’s challenge to the artsy-fartsy, of which I was a prime exemplar. “Is this art or not?” he asked. He couldn’t have put that question so jeeringly fifty years ago, of course, before the founding of the first wholly American school of painting, Abstract Expressionism, and the deification in particular of Jack the Dripper, Jackson Pollock, who also couldn’t draw for sour apples.
Bernie said, too, that a very interesting scientific phenomenon was involved, having to do, he left me to guess, with how different glurps behave when squoozled this way and that, with nowhere to go but up or down or sideways. If the artsy-fartsy world had no use for his pictures, he seemed to imply, his pictures could still point the way to better lubricants or suntan lotions, or who knows what? The all-new Preparation-H!
He would not sign his pictures, he said, or admit publicly that he had made them, or describe how they were made. He plainly expected puffed-up critics to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of masonry when trying to answer his cunningly innocent question: “Art or not?”

I was pleased to reply with an epistle which was frankly vengeful, since he and Father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college education: “Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees,” I began. “There are many good people who are beneficially stimulated by some, but not all, manmade arrangements of colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense.
“You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the cellar stairs, and then say to you that the racket I had made was philosophically on par with The Magin Flute, this would not be the beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and complete response on your part would be, ‘I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did.’
“Contemplating a purpoted work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or your don’t. You don’t have to say why afterward. You don’t have to say anything.
“You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear brother. If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, ‘art or not,’ you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens.”

I went on: “People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?
“There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.
“I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game.
“Pictures are famous for their humanness, and no for their pictureness.”

I went on: “There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.
“Good luck, and love as always,” I wrote. And I signed my name.

(From Vonnegut’s 1997 novel “Timequake,” which I kinda liked, even though it was kindof all over the place, because it occasionally contained some really good stuff like this. Please don’t sue me, owners of Vonnegut’s rights. Just trying to make conversation.)

This little bit does a fairly tidy job of responding to the volumes of stuff that has been written trying to pin down really specific definitions of what this crazy thing called art is. Coming from a technical background (with a little artistic goodness thrown in), my inclination was to try to come up with a really nice reductive definition of art (of course ignoring the social conversation going on). But good ol’ Kurt does a good job of making sense, as always.

As many of you are aware of by now, I have a (un)healthy obsession with fish. I also have a terrible memory. And the ability to program web applications. And the tendency to enjoy taking ideas all the way to their logical conclusions.

Possessing any of these attributes in isolation is not so bad of a thing.  But when all of them combine into one person, well…  You end up with some really oddball (yet fun) projects.

Bearing all that in mind, I’d like to tell you about a project I’m in the middle of right now – the FishApp.  FishApp started out as a PHP/MySQL web application that I created to help keep track of the water quality in my fish tank, and to view changes in water parameters over time (to identify trends and causal relationships, for example).  That didn’t sound like such a difficult project…

FishApp Screenshot

This is where things started getting out of hand (in a good way).  I decided that there may be other fish nerds on the internet who may want to use the service, so I added multi-user capability to the FishApp.  Which meant I had to make everything more user-friendly and build out the Admin area a little btter.  I had to give users the option to upload a fish tank picture (and resize it for them, etc).  And what if they had multiple tanks?  And so on.  All of those features are currently built into the fishapp.  We’ll see if anyone decides to use it or not!

There’s nothing too crazy going on in the FishApp code.  The graphs are generated by Flot (using a custom PHP wrapper I wrote and dubbed “phlot”).  There’s jQuery and the jQuery UI tools all over the admin area, and of course a rather simple MySQL database in the back.

There were a few technical challenges to address, however.  The last graph on the page displays the average “age” of the water in your fish tank.  It is a good idea to periodically change out some of the water in the fish tank for fresh water (to reduce things like Nitrates and accumulated minerals).  This reduces the weighted average age of the water in your fish tank.  This is my favorite feature, as it adds a visual display to an important piece of information that is normally invisible.

I also wanted the app  to send reminders to do maintenance tasks now and then.  However, if you have a large fish tank, you may only do a water change once a month, but if you have a small tank, you may want to do it every week.  I needed to give the users the opportunity to decided their own parameters for alerts.  In addition, I wanted users to be able to get an alert when their tank’s water age reached a certain number of days.  The SQL code necessary to aggregate across all the different maintenance types and tanks and users became quite large, however well-placed database indexes keep things running smoothly.

If you haven’t nodded off yet, you might be thinking that I’ve just about pushed this idea as far as it can go.  You would be mistaken.

Sometime in the middle of the project, I discovered this awesome open-source hardware/software microcontroller project called Arduino.  The Arduino project does what frustrated software engineers have longed to do since they days they first fired up QBasic on their friends’ computers – interface with the REAL WORLD.  Easily.  You can program the Arduino using a comfortable C-like language in its easy-to-use development environment.  It can read sensor values, move servos, control motors, light LEDs, make sounds, etc.  Anything you can wire up to it, you can use (basically).  People were doing cool stuff like improving their espresso machines, building real-life pong interfaces, tweeting their energy usage, and the like.  So naturally I decided my fish tank had to be web-enabled.

I am still in the middle of this section of the project, but here are some ideas of what I plan on doing with the FishApp:

• Use an ultrasonic distance sensor & some code to determine when I have just done a water change, and automatically post JSON data to the FishApp’s API.  No more forgetting to put water changes into the app.
• Monitor the tank’s temperature over time using a neat little National Semiconductor chip.  I should be able to detect and diagnose any big swings in temperature in real time.
• Control some LED moonlights for my tank, both on a programmed schedule, and using an infrared remote control.
• Allow web users to feed my fish a special treat (once a day) by pushing a button on the web page.  AJAX + Arduino + Servos for the win!
• Set up a FishCam – a webcam to view the action in the tank.
• Every now and then, tweet what is going on in the fish tank.
• Buy a PH probe and graph real-time PH values (especially important if I decide to do some CO2 injection in the tank at some point).
• Build a turbidity meter to measure the water clarity (following instructions from an awesome Forrest Mims electronics book).

As you can see, the list goes on and one.  The first few features are already in development, the rest may follow afterward.

As I said, the FishApp is not finished.  It is not very polished currently, and not really ready for prime-time.  I just wanted to post this blog to give a sneak-peak of what’s in the works.  Now go check it out!