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Do any of you deliberately integrate the golden ratio into anything you create or do? For me it always seems more like an intellectual curiosity rather than an

Do any of you deliberately integrate the golden ratio into anything you create or do? For me it always seems more like an intellectual curiosity rather than an item in my regular toolkit for design, creative exploration, or problem solving. If I end up with a golden ratio in something I create it's more likely to be by accident or instinct rather than a deliberate choice. I keep thinking I must be missing out. The closest thing I do related to the golden ratio is using the harmonic armature as a grid for my paintings.

Xmd5a 9mo ago
It can be useful in a "primitive" environment: with the metric or even the imperial system, you need to multiply the length of your measurement unit by a certain factor in order to build the next unit (10x1cm = 1dm for instance). But if your units follow a golden ratio progression, you just need to "concatenate" 2 consecutive units (2 measuring sticks) in order to find the third. And so on.
wonger_ 9mo ago
I used it as the proportion for a sidebar layout of a webpage, where the sidebar needed to be not too small yet smaller than the sibling container. .sidebar { flex: 1; } .not-sidebar { flex: 1.618; } But imo using thirds would've worked fine. Hard to tell the difference, at least in this case. 67% vs 62%. (https://wonger.dev/enjoyables https://wonger.dev/enjoyables on desktop / wide viewport)
neonnoodle 9mo ago
I agree with you. The harmonics/diagonals of the notional rectangle(s) of the piece are more important than any one particular ratio. Phi is no more special than any other self-similar relationship in terms of composition. The root rectangle series offers more than enough for a good layout even without phi. And yes, for the people who get hung up on what the Old Masters did, it’s mostly armature grids and not the golden ratio!
samirillian 9mo ago
At least by analogy with sound, it doesn’t make sense to me to use the golden ratio. If you consider the tonic, the octave, the major fifth, you have 1:1, 2:1, and 3:2. It seems to me that the earliest ratios in the fibonacci sequence are more aesthetically pleasing, symmetry, 1/3s, etc. but maybe there is something “organically” pleasing about the Fibonacci sequence. But Fibonacci spirals in nature are really just general logarithmic spirals as I understand it. Would be interested to hear counterpoints.
jerf 9mo ago
The golden ratio is very mathematically interesting and shows up in many places. Not as prolific as pi or e, but it gets around. I find the aesthetic arguments for it very overrated, though. A clear case of a guy says a thing, and some other people say it too, and before you know it it's "received wisdom" even though it really isn't particularly true. Many examples of how important the "golden ratio" are are often simply wrong; it's not actually a golden ratio when actually measured, or it's nowhere near as important as presented. You can also squeeze more things into being a "golden ratio" if you are willing to let it be off by, say, 15%. That creates an awfully wide band. Personally I think it's more a matter of, there is a range of useful and aesthetic ratios, and the "golden ratio" happens to fall in that range, but whether it's the "optimum" just because it's the golden ratio is often more an imposition on the data than something that comes from it. It definitely does show up in nature, though. There are solid mathematical and engineering reasons why it is the optimal angle for growing leafs and other patterns, for instance. But there are other cases where people "find" it in nature where it clearly isn't there... one of my favorites is the sheer number of diagrams of the Nautilus shell, which allegedly is following the "golden ratio", where the diagram itself disproves the claim by clearly being nowhere near an optimal fit to the shell.
- pvab3 9mo ago
  This video helped me solidify my opinion that the Golden Ratio is no more attractive or appealing than any other fraction or ratio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AofrZFwxt2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AofrZFwxt2Y
  - jerf 9mo ago
    I've never seen that one, but yeah, that is very definitely what I was getting at. Very in line with my thinking. Thank you for the expansion.
ColinWright 9mo ago
Yes. We used it for the structures underlying the digital fade algorithm for marine radar images. It's probably no longer "Commercial In Confidence" ... I should probably write it up sometime.
- srean 9mo ago
  Could you elaborate please.
  - ColinWright 9mo ago
    Hmm. This was a long time ago, so we didn't have GPUs or fancy rendering h/ware. We addressed every pixel individually. So a radar image was painted to the screen, and then the next update was painted on top of that. But that just gives the live radar image ... we wanted moving objects to leave "snail trails". So what you do for each update is: * Decrement the existing pixel; * Update the pixel with the max of the incoming value and the decremented value. This then leaves stationary targets in place, and anything that's moving leaves a trail behind it so when you look at the screen it's instantly obvious where everything is, and how fast they're moving. Ideally you'd want to decrement every pixel by one every tenth of a second or so, but that wasn't possible with the h/ware speed we had. So instead we decremented every Nth pixel by D and cycled through the pixels. But that created stripes, so we needed to access the pixels in a pseudo-random fashion without leaving stripes. The area we were painting was 1024x1024, so what we did was start at the zeroth pixel and step by a prime number size, wrapping around. But what prime number? We chose a prime close to (2^20)/phi. (Actually we didn't, but that was the starting point for a more complex calculation) Since phi has no good rational approximation, this didn't leave stripes. It created an evenly spread speckle pattern. The rate of fade was controlled by changing D, and it was very effective. Worked a treat on our limited hardware (ARM7 on a RiscPC) and easy enough to program directly in ARM assembler.
    - srean 9mo ago
      Thanks for the story. What's decrementing a pixel ? I(x,y,t+1) = I(x,y,t) - c ?
WillAdams 9mo ago
When I'm working out where to place hardware or otherwise proportion a woodworking project, if there isn't an obvious mechanical/physical aspect driving the placement, then I always turn to the Golden Ratio --- annoyingly, I don't get to hear the music or bell ring from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BqnN72OlqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BqnN72OlqA or the older black-and-white film which I was shown in school when I was young.
boothby 9mo ago
Fibonacci heaps are nice. They aren't state of the art, but it's a pretty data structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_heap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_heap

Xmd5a 9mo ago

It can be useful in a "primitive" environment: with the metric or even the imperial system, you need to multiply the length of your measurement unit by a certain factor in order to build the next unit (10x1cm = 1dm for instance). But if your units follow a golden ratio progression, you just need to "concatenate" 2 consecutive units (2 measuring sticks) in order to find the third. And so on.

wonger_ 9mo ago

I used it as the proportion for a sidebar layout of a webpage, where the sidebar needed to be not too small yet smaller than the sibling container. .sidebar { flex: 1; } .not-sidebar { flex: 1.618; } But imo using thirds would've worked fine. Hard to tell the difference, at least in this case. 67% vs 62%. (https://wonger.dev/enjoyables https://wonger.dev/enjoyables on desktop / wide viewport)

neonnoodle 9mo ago

I agree with you. The harmonics/diagonals of the notional rectangle(s) of the piece are more important than any one particular ratio. Phi is no more special than any other self-similar relationship in terms of composition. The root rectangle series offers more than enough for a good layout even without phi. And yes, for the people who get hung up on what the Old Masters did, it’s mostly armature grids and not the golden ratio!

samirillian 9mo ago

At least by analogy with sound, it doesn’t make sense to me to use the golden ratio. If you consider the tonic, the octave, the major fifth, you have 1:1, 2:1, and 3:2. It seems to me that the earliest ratios in the fibonacci sequence are more aesthetically pleasing, symmetry, 1/3s, etc. but maybe there is something “organically” pleasing about the Fibonacci sequence. But Fibonacci spirals in nature are really just general logarithmic spirals as I understand it. Would be interested to hear counterpoints.

jerf 9mo ago

The golden ratio is very mathematically interesting and shows up in many places. Not as prolific as pi or e, but it gets around. I find the aesthetic arguments for it very overrated, though. A clear case of a guy says a thing, and some other people say it too, and before you know it it's "received wisdom" even though it really isn't particularly true. Many examples of how important the "golden ratio" are are often simply wrong; it's not actually a golden ratio when actually measured, or it's nowhere near as important as presented. You can also squeeze more things into being a "golden ratio" if you are willing to let it be off by, say, 15%. That creates an awfully wide band. Personally I think it's more a matter of, there is a range of useful and aesthetic ratios, and the "golden ratio" happens to fall in that range, but whether it's the "optimum" just because it's the golden ratio is often more an imposition on the data than something that comes from it. It definitely does show up in nature, though. There are solid mathematical and engineering reasons why it is the optimal angle for growing leafs and other patterns, for instance. But there are other cases where people "find" it in nature where it clearly isn't there... one of my favorites is the sheer number of diagrams of the Nautilus shell, which allegedly is following the "golden ratio", where the diagram itself disproves the claim by clearly being nowhere near an optimal fit to the shell.

pvab3 9mo ago
This video helped me solidify my opinion that the Golden Ratio is no more attractive or appealing than any other fraction or ratio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AofrZFwxt2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AofrZFwxt2Y
- jerf 9mo ago
  I've never seen that one, but yeah, that is very definitely what I was getting at. Very in line with my thinking. Thank you for the expansion.

ColinWright 9mo ago

Yes. We used it for the structures underlying the digital fade algorithm for marine radar images. It's probably no longer "Commercial In Confidence" ... I should probably write it up sometime.

srean 9mo ago
Could you elaborate please.
- ColinWright 9mo ago
  Hmm. This was a long time ago, so we didn't have GPUs or fancy rendering h/ware. We addressed every pixel individually. So a radar image was painted to the screen, and then the next update was painted on top of that. But that just gives the live radar image ... we wanted moving objects to leave "snail trails". So what you do for each update is: * Decrement the existing pixel; * Update the pixel with the max of the incoming value and the decremented value. This then leaves stationary targets in place, and anything that's moving leaves a trail behind it so when you look at the screen it's instantly obvious where everything is, and how fast they're moving. Ideally you'd want to decrement every pixel by one every tenth of a second or so, but that wasn't possible with the h/ware speed we had. So instead we decremented every Nth pixel by D and cycled through the pixels. But that created stripes, so we needed to access the pixels in a pseudo-random fashion without leaving stripes. The area we were painting was 1024x1024, so what we did was start at the zeroth pixel and step by a prime number size, wrapping around. But what prime number? We chose a prime close to (2^20)/phi. (Actually we didn't, but that was the starting point for a more complex calculation) Since phi has no good rational approximation, this didn't leave stripes. It created an evenly spread speckle pattern. The rate of fade was controlled by changing D, and it was very effective. Worked a treat on our limited hardware (ARM7 on a RiscPC) and easy enough to program directly in ARM assembler.
  - srean 9mo ago
    Thanks for the story. What's decrementing a pixel ? I(x,y,t+1) = I(x,y,t) - c ?

WillAdams 9mo ago

When I'm working out where to place hardware or otherwise proportion a woodworking project, if there isn't an obvious mechanical/physical aspect driving the placement, then I always turn to the Golden Ratio --- annoyingly, I don't get to hear the music or bell ring from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BqnN72OlqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BqnN72OlqA or the older black-and-white film which I was shown in school when I was young.

boothby 9mo ago

Fibonacci heaps are nice. They aren't state of the art, but it's a pretty data structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_heap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_heap