Dave HuggardA co-post with the Society for Algorithmic Perambulation, of which I am a member. Well, actually, the member. The Society motto is “Who knows where you’ll end up? Only the algorithm knows…” We (in the sense of “I”) wander following a set of rules that let chance determine where we go.
This week’s algorithm is for a night walk in places and times with lots of lights. That’s Christmas season around here. But it might work at Diwali in some places, or for Lantern Festivals, or…? Here are the rules:
- Walk until you come to an intersection.
- Go in the direction that has the best light displays, excluding the direction you just came from.
- Repeat and continue until completion.
“Best” can be to your tastes – brightest, most colourful, most sophisticated, most tacky inflatable figures. (There’s even a curmudgeon-friendly version: shake your fist in the direction of the most lights and then go the other way. Eventually you’ll come to a place with no lights.)
My walk following these rules took me on a zig-zagging path for several blocks to our local main street, down that for quite a few blocks, then off onto a well-decorated block of apartments, and eventually looping back to a place not many blocks from home. I helped corral an escapee dog, and that seemed like a good end point. I saw tasteful displays, exuberant ones, many modest ones, and a few houses that looked like a cross between Disneyland and a honky-tonk. I appreciated the few remaining hold-outs with old-school incandescent lights and their gentle glow. They were all on modest old stucco bungalows – they may use more power, but the owners haven’t sent an entire house to the landfill to build a bigger new one. I also noticed that balconies in the older apartment buildings – ones with names like “Mountainview” or “The Cedars” – went for diverse colourful lights, while new buildings went for plain white or nothing at all.
Geeky notes: I did the painting in watercolour. Here’s the trick – I took a photo, used the “invert” function in PhotoShop, painted in my usual quick sketchy style based on that image, then inverted the scanned painting. I have to say, this was fun!