Kōan

A kōan (公案)/ˈkoʊ.ɑːn/; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Korean: 공안 (kong'an); Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and test a student's progress in Zen practice.

Etymology

The Japanese term kōan is the Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese word gong'an (Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Wade–Giles: kung-an; literally: "public case"). The term is a compound word, consisting of the characters 公 "public; official; governmental; common; collective; fair; equitable" and 案 "table; desk; (law) case; record; file; plan; proposal."

According to the Yuan Dynasty Zen master Zhongfeng Mingben (中峰明本 1263–1323), gōng'àn originated as an abbreviation of gōngfǔ zhī àndú (公府之案牘, Japanese kōfu no antoku—literally the andu "official correspondence; documents; files" of a gongfu "government post"), which referred to a "public record" or the "case records of a public law court" in Tang-dynasty China.Kōan/gong'an thus serves as a metaphor for principles of reality beyond the private opinion of one person, and a teacher may test the student's ability to recognize and understand that principle.

Koan (program)

Koan is a generative music engine that was created by a company called SSEYO, a company founded by Pete Cole and Tim Cole. It was founded specifically to create and market Koan. The technology is now owned by a company called Intermorphic Limited, which was co-founded by the Cole brothers in 2007.

Koan was actually an architecture named the SSEYO Koan Interactive Audio Platform (SKIAP). This consisted of the core Koan generative music engine (the SSEYO Koan Generative Music Engine (SKME), a set of authoring tools (SSEYO Koan Pro and SSEYO Koan X), a set of stand-alone Koan Music player (SSEYO Koan Plus, SSEYO Koan File Player and SSEYO Koan Album Player) and a plug-in for internet browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape.

The Koan generative music engine was very deep; this is partially because of the long history of the product. Development of the Koan engine started in 1990, when SSEYO was founded. By 1992, the first version went into beta testing. The first Koan software was publicly released in 1994 and distributed by Koch Media. The first Koan Pro authoring tool was released in 1995. The same year, SSEYO managed to bring Koan to the attention of Brian Eno, and it turned out that he was interested in using Koan. He started creating pieces with Koan Pro that, in April 1996, lead to the publication of his seminal title Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan software. This was a boxed product containing a floppy disk, on which was the SSEYO Koan Plus player and a set of 12 Koan generative-music pieces that he authored. Eno's early relationship with Koan was captured in his 1996 diary A Year with Swollen Appendices.

Kōan (Kamakura period)

Kōan (弘安) was a Japanese era name (年号,, nengō,, lit. "year name") after Kenji and before Shōō. This period spanned the years from February 1278 through April 1288. The reigning emperors were Go-Uda-tennō (後宇多天皇) and Fushimi-tennō (伏見天皇).

Change of era

Events of the Kōan era

Notes

References

Fractal

A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale. It is also known as expanding symmetry or evolving symmetry. If the replication is exactly the same at every scale, it is called a self-similar pattern. An example of this is the Menger Sponge. Fractals can also be nearly the same at different levels. This latter pattern is illustrated in the magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. Fractals also include the idea of a detailed pattern that repeats itself.

Fractals are different from other geometric figures because of the way in which they scale. Doubling the edge lengths of a polygon multiplies its area by four, which is two (the ratio of the new to the old side length) raised to the power of two (the dimension of the space the polygon resides in). Likewise, if the radius of a sphere is doubled, its volume scales by eight, which is two (the ratio of the new to the old radius) to the power of three (the dimension that the sphere resides in). But if a fractal's one-dimensional lengths are all doubled, the spatial content of the fractal scales by a power that is not necessarily an integer. This power is called the fractal dimension of the fractal, and it usually exceeds the fractal's topological dimension.

Fractal (EP)

Fractal is a digital-only EP by Swedish metal band Skyfire. It was made available for digital download on 6 July 2009. The EP contains four songs, which were recorded between the release of Spectral in 2004 and their album Esoteric released in September 2009. The EP features the debut of two new members: guitarist Johan Reinholdz and Joakim Karlsson. It contains three tracks independent of the full-length and the self-titled track from their album. This track was previewed on their official MySpace page and was made available for download.

Track listing

Personnel

Band members

Production

Fractal (disambiguation)

A fractal is a mathematical set that has a fractal dimension that usually exceeds its topological dimension and may fall between the integers. There is also a fractal derivative, defined in fractal spacetime.

Fractal or Fractals may also refer to: