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 […]

I’ve been examining the visual patterns produced by the Whitney Music Box (see previous post). If you watch the animation for any length of time, you’ll notice that the dots form spoked or starfish-like patterns periodically. These patterns often cause chords to be played by the music box. I was curious to understand the sequence […]

This weekend I’ve been playing, once again, with the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, using both graphics and audio. While Whitney was interested in turning musical ideas into motion graphics, I’m doing the inverse — turning one of his key animation ideas back into music. Whitney made a number of films based around […]

One of the following five foods is different than the others. A) Grape Nuts B) Egg Salad C) Eggplant D) Egg Cream E) Eggroll Which is it? The answer is given below, in the inviso-text. The answer is “any of the above.” Here’s why: A) The only one which does not contain the word egg. […]

I live near one of the coolest public libraries in Los Angeles, Glendale’s Brand Library and Art Center. Here are a 10 good reasons why you should go. 1. The library sits at the the top of Western Ave in a beautiful park overlooking the valley. Excellent for picnic lunches. 2. The library specializes in […]