Blog
-
I’m currently working on a new online edition of an undergraduate course I first developed in 2014. The course is the second in a sequence of two introductory programming courses for non-majors. Our emphasis is on programming as a creative medium for art and design, so it’s only natural that we initially used Processing as…
-
Now that I’ve written up posts about some of the smaller projects that have occupied my time over the past 18 months or so, it’s time to talk about the Big One, the real reason I came back to this blog in the first place. I don’t want to re-tell the whole (long) story, and…
-
I’ve always loved the Ishihara tests (pages printed with patterns of coloured dots, used to diagnose different forms of colour vision deficiency, or CVD). They’re beautiful works of graphic design. Years ago I bought a used copy of a complete set of tests, and framed some of them to hang in my house. Reflecting on…
-
Earlier this year I created a web-based mobile puzzle game called “Slide to Unlock“. The premise is very simple, and probably easier to understand by trying it rather than reading about it. To clear a level, you must slide disks along their tracks, gradually removing those tracks until nothing is left. The sliding must be…
-
Procedurally generated Zellij compositions. Click on the drawing and press the space bar to generate a new composition. Press the ‘s’ key to download an SVG file. Yes, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that a couple of years ago, I experimented with NFTs. Look: I was younger then, and I didn’t always make the…
-
I haven’t written anything on this site for a long time. That seems particularly unconscionable after a such a consequential year. And while the medium of blogging continues to decline in popularity, it still seems to hold some value for me as a means of disseminating ideas (just this morning I approved an enthusiastic comment…
-
This is the second of two posts about papers that will appear at the Bridges 2021 conference. This paper is related to Islamic geometric patterns, and was co-authored with John Berglund. In this case I played a supporting role. The core ideas are very much due to John; I contributed a few bits here and…
-
Tilings like these, based on alternating arrangements of squares and rhombs, are ancient. And in the twentieth century, a few people experimented with this hinged motion. I particularly like the essay by Duncan Stuart, then a student at the UNC School of Design, though the most famous use of this mechanism was probably Buckminster Fuller’s…
-
After a few years of not writing about the subject here, I’m happy to offer an update on Heesch numbers! If you want to save time, you can skip right to the paper I wrote, or experiment with the associated dataset. Back in 2017, I wrote a series of four posts about Heesch numbers. If…
-
In addition to custom socks, which I wrote about previously, I also created a new 3D printed object as a holiday gift, the first 3D printing I’ve done in a while. In the late autumn, we reach the time of year when it’s dark outside as we sit down to dinner. During those months, we…
-
Let’s face it, socks have an undeserved bad reputation as holiday presents. In my family, we all enjoy giving and receiving socks around Christmas. Our collective attitude is well expressed by this old tweet (if you like, you can replace Calendar Age with Level of Sock Enlightenment): For a few years now I’ve been a…
-
Early in November, Daniel Piker (aka @KangarooPhysics) suggested that a group of people could get together online, and each create a short segment of animation, arranged so that all the start and end frames are identical. We could then assemble all the segments into one long loop and enjoy each others’ work. The idea was…