Here’s a new coverpop I just made of 1512 of the most popular (according to various criteria) videos on YouTube™. The videos are arranged horizontally by the date they were uploaded, and vertically by the color of the thumbnail. Mouse over a thumbnail to see more info about the video. Click to play the video […]

After watching seasons one and two of HBO’s excellent series Carnivale on DVD, I wanted to learn more about carnivals and circuses in the early 20th century, so I picked up four different books on the subject. Here is my report. Mark Sloan’s Wild Weird and Wonderful, The American Circus 1901-1927 is my favorite book […]

This weekend, after adding stereo support to my software synthesizer, JSyd, I added three new stereo variations to the Whitney Music Box. These are fun to watch and listen to with headphones. Variation 14 Variation 15 Variation 16

Some useful links I’ve collected recently. Morguefile is a collection of free high quality digital photos. I’ve used them for building mosaics with excellent results. FreeSound is a collection of free sounds, licensed using the Creative Commons License. ccMixter is a related site which collects songs, rather than individual sounds. I’ve been looking for interesting […]

You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much the past few weeks. This is because I’ve been furiously working on a rewrite of my software synthesizer, Syd, originally written nearly 10 years ago. Syd is a digital music program that is designed for teaching basic computer music and synthesis concepts. I used Syd […]

Follow this link for a little more hand-cranked goodness.

David April wrote to recommend another good fractal program. Apophysis (for windows only, sadly). It’s an IFS fractal program capable of some gorgeous organic looking results. I first encountered IFS fractals in Michael Barnsley’s book Fractals Everywhere. Wikipedia says they were first developed by John Hutchison. Apophysis is scriptable, which means it is capable of […]

If you’re new to this blog, you may have missed some of the better posts from months ago. Since I haven’t bothered to collect them elsewhere, I thought I’d post them here. Visual Harmony Three Johns on Randomness Organum Mathematicum Entropy & Motion Graphics SF Cover Explorer Got your own favorite? Let me know, and […]

My favorite Los Angeles art gallery, Machine Project, is hosting a MIDI Scrapyard Challenge this Sunday, and I’ll be participating. Want to convert that old blender into a MIDI instrument? This is the time and place to do it. An all day workshop will be followed by a performance using newly created MIDI instruments, resurrected […]

Jos Leys is an expert user and programmer of the fractal imaging software Ultra Fractal. If you like circles and radial symmetry as much as I do, you will love his mathematical image gallery, which is filled with all kinds of circular goodness.