Unknown Pleasures

Motivation

It’s been a while since i’ve just coded some visual just for fun. On a bus ride a while back i had the idea, that while iterating, the stroke i could Math.max it with the one beneath it. This way there would be no need for painter trick or even boolean / intersection math.

So here’s what i learned.

Algorythm

First of all i had to draw the strokes from front to back so the trick would even work. Because only then can you carry the height in the correct direction. On a downside, when drawing strokes over the same pixels again and again the anti aliasing starts adding up and the line looks fatter than the rest.

According to LLM feedback, this is called a skyline and is on leetcode the-skyline-problem

#000

Copy chain

For future reference

  1. 1967 Jocelyn Bell (Burnell) finds the first pulsar at Cambridge
  2. 1970 Harold D. Craft Jr. makes the plot from Arecibo data for his Cornell thesis Christiansen 2015Christiansen & Craft 2020
  3. 1971 Scientific American prints it with "The Nature of Pulsars" (Jeremiah Ostriker), credited to Arecibo Christiansen 2015Adam Cap
  4. 1974 Graphis Diagrams (ed. Walter Herdeg)
  5. 1977 The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy (ed. Simon Mitton)
  6. 1979 Unknown Pleasures (Joy Division) Adam Cap
  7. 2015 Jen Christiansen of Scientific American finds and interviews Craft Christiansen 2015
  8. 2024 Mauricio “Pachá” Vargas Sepúlveda publishes a CSV of the data, found on an old external drive. Who made it, and when, is unknown Vargas Sepúlveda 2024cp1919 repo
  9. 2026 now