Reasoning

Part of the exercise in improving/building the reaction-diffusion simulator was so that I build the code needed to explore the next tattoo I plan on getting. I thought of this tattoo after a challenging vipassana course (although it was many years in the making). The tattoo represents my evolving relationship with engineering and science. The tattoo will be a Turing-pattern, generated via the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations, which is by-design, different in length scale to the patterns I generated in my final paper during my PhD. The tattoo will use pointilism as a way of deconstructing the patterns into discrete units, like protocells in nature or transistors in computation. The pointilism will describe concentration - denser number of points in the parts of high concentration, and fewer points in darker parts of the pattern.

A key macroscopic feature will be that the design will have a sharp break in the middle that represents embryogenesis, the phenomena I find most fascinating in biology, while also representing a break in my views/hopes of science. This break will take the form of two cells splitting, a symbolic representation for me; from viewing science as almost a spiritual endeavor to a more practical view of finding challenging problems without compromising on my lifestyle and goals.

Interactive Visualization