George Pendel’s Strange Angel is about pioneering Rocket Scientist Jack Parsons, who played a pivotal role in the creation of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). A self-taught explosives expert, Parsons also led a double life: He was fascinated with the occult, and was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead the local chapter of the Ordo […]

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the creators of the original Macintosh computer, recently published a book, Revolution in the Valley, about his experiences at Apple in the late 70s and early 80s. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes and valuable lessons about software management, many of which seem awfully familiar to me. Andy’s love of […]

Meet Fubuki (Ty Siscoe), one of the most prolific and talented photographers on Flickr, the photo-sharing service. I constructed Fubuki’s portrait out of thumbnails from his large collection of excellent photos, using the Flickr API. My software is written in Perl, using the ImageMagick library. For more of my mosaics, check out my flickr stream.

Currently my sudoku software does a very crude job of estimating puzzle difficulty. There’s an especially wide range of difficulty levels in my “super tough” puzzles – some of them are pretty easy, others are genuinely “super tough.” My experience shows that most other computer programs do a pretty poor job at this too. The […]

If you don’t already use bookmarklets, del.icio.us or an RSS reader, then the last few paragraphs of this post will be difficult to decipher, so I’ll start with some background: del.icio.us is a tagged bookmarking service (with a clever, hard-to-spell, and now much mimicked URL) that makes it easy to share bookmarks among multiple computers, […]

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