Like seemingly everyone in LA, I have recently been bitten by the Sudoku bug, a craze which swept England last spring. The Los Angeles Times started publishing these puzzles a few weeks ago. Like many geeks, this addiction not only involves solving them with a pencil, but solving and generating them with a computer. I […]

When we say things like: “That picture is too noisy” “The room is too cluttered” “This song is boring” “That script has good pacing” “Put some reverb on that mic” We are unintentionally invoking the spirit of Claude Shannon, who first described Information Theory in the late 1940s, at the dawn of the information age. […]

This is one of a set of four collaborative posters I am printing this month. I made this particular image by writing a collection of Perl scripts which arrange photos from the squared circle group on flickr in a fibonacci spiral (a natural way of tiling circles, seen in sunflowers, pinecones and many other places […]

55 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena by Michael Bach

This is my favorite pocket calculator, the Casio CM-100. I’ve had it since the mid-80s, and unlike countless writing utensils, hats and pairs of sunglasses, I’ve managed not to lose it. I’m particularly attached to it now, because none of the calculators currently for sale at Staples, Office Depot or Amazon.com are nearly as good. […]

Wiring, a sister project to processing, is a programming environment and electronics i/o board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design and tangible […]

Claude Shannon’s Information Theory tells us that any given communications channel has limited capacity or bandwidth. There is a fixed amount of information (measured as entropy or non-repetition) that can be passed thru that channel without introducing errors. Human perception can be viewed as a communications channel, also posessing limited bandwidth. When faced with too […]

Some amazing glass art by Josh Simpson. Here’s what he has to say about it: I like to pack Planets with more information than the naked eye can possibly see. I’ve always been fascinated by technology. I couldn’t begin to build a micro-chip but some of the spaceships circling my planets probably have as many […]

From Boing Boing. My favorite, of these print-and-cut Victorian-style paper toys by Marylin Scott-Waters is this nifty Dream Theater. The marble mice are kinda cool too. Aren’t moving parts great?

SquirclePlex is a new interactive kaleidoscope of mine that uses images from the Squared Circle group on Flickr. The kaleidoscope uses a recursive rendering method that produces fractal images similar to Marshall Yaeger’s Kaleidoplex projector, which I discussed in my last post. This version is currently for Windows only. The installer provides both a standalone […]