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 in nature), according to color.

The posters are being sold at cost (cheap!) and can be ordered here:

www.krazydad.com/posters/

UPDATE: Posters are now shipping!

55 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena by Michael Bach

This is my favorite pocket calculator, the Casio CM-100. I’ve had it since the mid-80s, and unlike countless writing utensils, hats and pairs of sunglasses, I’ve managed not to lose it.

I’m particularly attached to it now, because none of the calculators currently for sale at Staples, Office Depot or Amazon.com are nearly as good. You can buy “Scientific” and “Financial” calculators these days, but they don’t make “Computer Math” calculators any more. I know that when I lose this calculator, I’m going to have a very hard time replacing it – everyone I know who has one loves it and is unwilling to part with it.

Why is this calculator so good? I mainly use calculators for simple math (multiplication and division) and for converting numbers from decimal to hexadecimal and back (“computer math”). Current “scientific” calculators can do this, and much more, but they treat computer math as one feature among many, so it requires more button presses to get to the essential computer math functions I need.

Also, it is solar powered and never runs out of batteries. Maybe that’s why Casio stopped selling them: No planned obsolescence.

In short, I like this calculator because it

a) does what I want, and

b) does not do what I do not want.

This second criterion is very important, and it reminds me of a fundamental problem in mature computer software these days (such as word processors and operating systems made by companies in Redmond).

Software is often compared, feature for feature, in comparative reviews. People sometimes buy software based on lists of such features, even when they don’t need the feature. They worry that they might need the feature some day.

What people forget is that adding features to software usually makes the software more complicated. The more features a piece of software has that you don’t need, the more difficult it is going to be to find and use the features you do need.

And this is why version 2.0 software is often far more pleasurable to use than version 7.0. There is a certain point at which many well known pieces of software stop adding features because they are necessary, but because they are simply trying to stave off competitors. Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop reached this point some years ago.

Perhaps some of these software warhorses need a bit more planned obsolescence?

UPDATE: William David wrote to tell me about a free iPhone app he made that emulates the Casio CM-100. You’ll find it on the Apple app store..

Wiring, a sister project to processing, is a programming environment and electronics i/o board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design and tangible media aspects

Wiring is an open project initiated by Hernando Barragán at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and it is currently developed at the University of Los Andes.

InstantSoup is a related project which uses wiring & flash as the technology behind a set of well-designed tutorials.

Claude Shannon’s Information Theory tells us that any given communications channel has limited capacity or bandwidth. There is a fixed amount of information (measured as entropy or non-repetition) that can be passed thru that channel without introducing errors.

Human perception can be viewed as a communications channel, also posessing limited bandwidth.

When faced with too much new information, humans will stop processing it. The principal symptom is boredom:
erroneously assuming that the new information isn’t actually new and lumping it in with
information that has been received before: it is “all the same”. Paradoxically, this feels very much like
the boredom we experience when receiving no information at all.

The first image, which contains all pixels of one color, contains too little information – it is boring.

The second image, which contains randomly colored pixels, contains too much information – it is also boring.

The third image also contains randomly colored pixels, but there is a high correlation from one pixel to the next.
There means there is less information in the image, and this makes the image more understandable, and (although
still somewhat boring) I believe it less boring than the first two.

Jackson Pollock paintings, in my view, contain too much information, and can also be boring. They can be made
more interesting, by looking at details of them up close, thus reducing the information content.

When designing motion graphics for a screensaver, I try to take this into account. I view an animation
as delivering change (entropy) over time. The amount of new information that can be transmitted over time
must be carefully modulated. If too little information is transmitted, the user gets bored. If too much
information is transmitted, the user also, paradoxically, gets bored. The sensation of change, when
delivered in discrete steps, interleaved with non-change can be very pleasant. Too much change, however,
tires the viewer.

I find some movies, which fill the screen with information, tiring on first viewing. A good example is
“Nightmare before Christmas”. I enjoyed this movie much more on subsequent viewings: having
seen it before, I found it easier to process the new information.

I also have had this experience with some complex music.

The Boundary

My favorite media experiences tend to deliver nearly as much information as I can handle, maybe a little more, maybe
a little less – but very close to the boundary. Sometimes I will need to see the movie (hear the music) a few times before I can reach that point.

One of the reasons that I think some people enjoy animated Mandalas and 2-mirror kaleidoscopes, is that they
combine new (essentially random) information with symmetric copies, which reduce the total amount of information
and make it easier to process. For the people who enjoy them, the information is delivered close to the boundary.

In a personal communication describing kaleidoscope content, Don Doak told me that the best kaleidoscope animations are “beyond the ability of the viewer to understand, but only just” – the viewer feels as if he is on the verge of understanding it,
as if a great truth is about to be revealed.

An expanded version of this essay can be found in the third issue of Mung Being.

Some amazing glass art by Josh Simpson. Here’s what he has to say about it:

I like to pack Planets with more information than the naked eye can possibly see. I’ve always been fascinated by technology. I couldn’t begin to build a micro-chip but some of the spaceships circling my planets probably have as many discrete elements as one. With planets, I incorporate many Venetian glass techniques, such as murrini (mosaic glass, also known as millefiori) and vetro a filigrana (filigree glass, also called latticino). These ancient traditional techniques are just where I start. The cores of Planets are full of bubbles, threads, and kaleidoscopic patterns evoking unseen landscapes and underwater worlds. I know I’ve succeeded when you feel like you have to look closer at one of my little worlds and then lose yourself in its textures and color.

From Boing Boing. My favorite, of these print-and-cut Victorian-style paper toys by Marylin Scott-Waters is this nifty Dream Theater. The marble mice are kinda cool too. Aren’t moving parts great?

SquirclePlex is a new interactive kaleidoscope of mine that uses images from the Squared Circle
group on Flickr. The kaleidoscope uses a recursive rendering method that produces fractal images similar to Marshall Yaeger’s
Kaleidoplex projector, which I discussed in my last post.

This version is currently for Windows only. The installer provides both a standalone version and a screensaver. You can press various keys to control either the screensaver or the standalone version. Press the arrow keys and number keys for different effects. The standalone version can also be controlled by the mouse. See the read-me file for details.

Images are taken from the same set used to produce the Phyllotaxy poster. Image attributions can be found here.

British artist Ian Kirk has created a new app, Kaleidocam, that works with a basic webcam, converting the image into a kaleidoscope. This pattern can also be used as your screensaver.

Kirk’s software is an interesting modern variant of Marshall Yaeger’s Kaleidoplex – a 1970s projector that created a kind of fractal kaleidoscope image using multiple mirror systems feeding into each other.

Yaeger used the kaleidoplex as part of the light show he produced for organist Virgil Fox (most famously at New York’s
Filmore East). Images created with a video version of the Kaleidoplex are available from Yaeger on DVD.

While millions tune into ‘A Current Affair’ to watch the latest exclusive video of ‘Bigfoot‘ (i.e. a man in a Wookie costume shot from a long distance), they are missing some interesting video of another creature, which, astonishingly, may actually exist.

In the swamps of Arkansas, seven people, including researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have seen an
Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a magnificent bird thought to have been extinct since the 1940s. There is also some brief but tantalizing video.