At our company Christmas party, I helped set up two monitors to display an endless stream of amusing short videos, including cartoons, psychadelic eye candy, and various shorts of guys in Santa Claus suits doing extreme sports and other interesting things. The videos were chosen so they could be watched silently, while loud party music […]

Hey kids, remember that 2007 GEL conference talk I posted on YouTube a few months back? Well, GEL impressario Mark Hurst has posted my talk, along with a collection of other equally (if not more) fascinating GEL talks (each precisely 20 minutes long), for your amusement and enlightenment. Hopefully, these videos will inspire you to […]

Greg Erickson wrote me about these nice handmade wooden Sudoku boards he is selling. Looks like a nice Christmas gift!

A sampling of election night Twitter traffic that I was able to geocode. These are tweets that include the word “Obama”. The arcs are tweets that were directed at another person. The blue circle is the source, and the green circle is the target. Purple dots are tweets that were directed to the world at […]

I’m temporarily turning off a lot of the ads on the site, since Google’s competitive ad-filter is not fast enough to get rid of these abhorrent “Yes on Prop 8” ads that have infected the site today. For the record, I am very, very against California Prop 8, which I find intolerant and hateful. NO […]

I got this idea from Daniel Drucker, who implemented it back when Flickr first started supporting geotagging. Th dots in the above illustration indicate the positions of about 1.2 million photos on Flickr tagged with the names of the lower 48 states: "Alabama", "Arizona", etc. It took about 15 hours for my computer to collect […]

I prepared these images by downloading about 42,000 thumbnail images from Flickr, and rendering them on these maps. Each image is displayed in the area where the photograph was taken. Bright spots correspond to metropolitan areas that accumulate a lot of photos. If you pay close attention to the differences between the two photos, particularly […]

A few of my friends occasionally run into problems caused by invalid file types. This can happen when someone accidentally types the wrong file extension on a file when saving it. For example, my friend Beatrice, who does transcriptions, often receives audio files that are named “something.mp3”, but the files are not actually in the […]

A new product, Reaktor Animated Circuits from Native Instruments has an interesting sequencer called Spiral (shown above) which was inspired by my Whitney Music Box. I’ve been playing with a version that Native Instruments sent me, and it’s pretty cool! If you’re interested in getting Animated Circuits, you’ll also need the latest version of Reaktor […]

A few readers have written to me in the last few months, requesting Killer Sudoku puzzles, so I’ve been feverishly working weekends to get some ready for the website. They are just about ready to go, and I’m ready to pass out samples. Killer Sudokus are an interesting hybrid between the Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles […]