When I told my family I wrote an article about tag clouds for O’Reilly, they went “Huh? What’s that?” But then again, these are the same folks that thought I was writing an article for this guy, instead of these guys. Anyway, this is a tag cloud: 2d algorithmic ALSA audio automatic bison blog book […]

Martin Wattenberg’s The Shape of Song provides a series of graphic analyses of MIDI files. The arches link musical phrases that are repetitions of each other, and provide a striking guide to the structure of the music. The above image is Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” The site contains images of varying styles of music ranging […]

A PicoCricket is a tiny computer that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, sensors, and other devices into a PicoCricket, then program them to react, interact, and communicate. For example, you can make a cat and program it to purr when someone pets it. Or you can […]

I’m testing out Google’s new “Gmail for your domain” service with my domain heaven.com. Here’s a screen snapshot. It’s pretty cool – all the goodness I’ve come to expect from GMail, with a much cooler domain name. god@heaven.com currently gets about 30 to 50 prayers a day, and a very large amount of spam. He […]

Stranger from the Depths, by Gerry Turner, 1967. Abridged version 1970. This was my favorite book for much of my childhood (until about 8th grade). I read the Scholastic abridged version a kajillion times. At least a couple dozen. One of the only science fiction books of my youth whose cover & blurb truthfully advertised […]

Welcome, visitors from digg. Here are some recent music-related posts from KrazyDad: About the Whitney Music Box A φ fractal Organum Mathematicum Text to Song More fun stuff in the links on the upper right… Enjoy! UPDATE: Welcome also, visitors from flabber.nl. My favorite comment on your site was this one, which needs no translation: […]

The QFold puzzle website contains puzzles that are meant to be printed and solved with a pencil. The puzzles are beautiful symmetrical designs that contain 20 hidden asymmetrical elements. To solve the puzzle, you identify these 20 elements of the puzzle and count the number of instances of each class of asymmetry (this is explained […]

Today I emailed this photo to Flickr. I had taken it with my cellphone last month while traveling on business. Within minutes, Jogales added a comment which revealed the make of the plane, the airline, and pointed me to a far more interesting picture of this very same plane colliding with another plane, on the […]

Here’s a new coverpop featuring the works of my favorite sf author of his generation, Philip K. Dick. The covers were provided by the Philip K. Dick cover gallery, courtesy of Jason Koornick.

Ed Pegg Jr, of the excellent MathPuzzle.com, has put up a complete set of scans of a profusely illustrated classic from 1914 containing 5000 unique puzzles. Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles. If the name Sam Loyd isn’t familiar to you, perhaps it should be. Loyd was the inventor of the sliding 15-tile puzzle. Here’s my […]