A friend at school attached a slinky to a box today for part of a project. The best part was that the box worked as a surprisingly good amplifier. It was fun to see how fundamentally simple amplification actually is…...

Love that Sarah’s D3 scatterplot example shows how easy it is to click to open a relevant URL from within a data visualization. The scatterplot shows some meta data about Van Gogh’s paintings, and if you click on the...

I was super honored to welcome David Jay and Maddy Maxie to SFPC today for a conversation about wearable technology.

Maddy Maxey is CTO at The Crated, a product development studio and consultancy focused on wearable tech, enhanced apparel...

Today I watched a great video of Amanda Cox’s keynote at OpenVis a few years ago. In it she said jokingly that everything looks good with “Explosions in the Sky” music playing in the background, even black and white...

Continuing from where I left off in the Reordering Pixels post, I’ve now added color!

Code is here before I sorted by color and here with sort by Brightness. With a small change, I can sort...

This is cool.

Playing with 3-D in Open Frameworks, and using nodes.

Video

I played with reordering pixels in an image based on their brightness or color. It’s not particularly novel, but I thought it would be fun.

I started with black/white/grey images since ordering on a greyscale is straightforward while ordering...

Just a few of the things from the last few days…

Nathan Teaching Chess

The team getting ready for the Silent Barn event with kids gave me a chance to make a rainbox with LED...

Continuing on the path of Sythesizing images, this time using noise functions to help make it look more organic.

Code snippet:

int val = ofNoise( i / 50.0, j / 50.0)...

It’s been two weeks since I’ve posted. Opps! Last week I was in Paris for InfoVis, including presenting my research on Visualizing Statistical Mix Effects and Simpson’s Paradox. But, more on that later. For now, just want to dive...

Just another normal day at SFPC including Grey Code, Abstract Syntax Tree structures for building programming language interpretors, and some fun with shaders.

Coolest thing about Grey Code is that also form “a Hamiltonian cycle on...

I updated the animation from yesterday so that if I clicked I could add a new set of spinning triangles. To do this I created a spiralObject class, created a vector for the multiple spiralObjects, and added spiralObjects to the...

Amazing how they make a box so cute with the 12 Principles of Life.

In Zach’s Open Frameworks class we’re exploring animation. The first exercises are around using functions and elapsed time to describe position. Here are two little experiments I made.

Animation in black and white.

Animation with color.

I made...

Had a pretty amazing day watching the marathon, cheering for a good friend from childhood in her last marathon race, and enjoying a run myself and the largest donut I’ve ever had. On the way home, I found myself wandering...

Sarah told me today that instead of defining attributes in D3 like this:

var k = svg.selectAll(“.squares”) .data(setUpRandData()) .enter() .append(‘rect’)

k.attr(“x”, function(d) { return d.x * sideLength; }) .attr(“height”, sideLength) .attr(“y”, function(d) { return d.y * sideLength; }) .attr(“width”,...

Found out today that the “option” symbol ⌥ is a symbol for an electronic switch, specifically a “changeover switch” or “single pole, double throw.” In other words, a “2-way changeover switch directs the flow of current to one of two...

Inspired by Zach’s talk on animation, I created a fun little “jittery line” website in D3/Javascript.

Best sign that it’s fun is when friends start sending images & gifs that they made :). Thanks Robbie & Paul!

“Cool”

I am very excited to start learning Open Frameworks!

I like the idea of using drawings and images as a form of input. I decided to play around with using another photo to color a line drawing.

Once I...

Sometimes things don’t come out the way you intended, but are sort of fun anyway :)

Last Thursday I derived how to make a half adder out of 4 NANDs and a transitor, plus some switches, wire, and resistors on a breadboard. A “half adder” is able to add 0 plus 0, 0 plus 1, 1...

You’d think writing a blog post almost every day would mean that I would cover lots of the material. But, there is so much that I haven’t yet written. To catch up, here are a few things of note:

I’m just getting started with Xcode and Open Frameworks (OF). I asked Zach for some tips & tricks for debugging, figuring out what’s going on, and generally navigating xcode in useful ways. These include:

• use “endl” with comments...

Fascinating morning with Zach today. On the first day, Zach told us that if we came away from the 10 weeks with really good questions, then it was a success.

In that vein, the inspiring questions today for creating...

Spacebrew is amazing.

You can turn a light on and off by winking. And, many other things :).

Today I attended Day 1 of the Computation & Journalism Symposium at Columbia’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Highlights included:

• “Many people were exposed to rumor. Many exposed to the correction. Few were exposed to...

Small Tasks that “Scaffold”

Last night in Amit’s class on learning and teaching code, we discussed the role of “small tasks” or “puzzles” as an early stage of learning to code.

Martin’s Challenges

Last year when I...

This week’s homework for Ramsey’s class is to take a “language” that doesn’t work and add grammer statements until it does. Examples are given with the desired output, and our job is to set up a grammer such that...

In talking about animation, Zach introduced some work by Masahiko Sato that reveals the physics and math in everyday experiences.

Still from the video showing the path of the tail end of a thrown mallet:

Homework was to use circuits to construct the 5 fundamental logic gates: NOT, AND, OR, NOR (Not Or), NAND (Not And). I also added the trivial Buffer case as well. Yay electricity! And logic! And physics!

Lesson learned: if nothing...

Helping someone start to love math again == A good day.

For Ramsey’s class on programming languages, we were asked to play around with the language Brainfuck. As described on Wikipedia, Brainfuck has only 8 commands which are represented with simple symbols. There is a concept of loops, but...

Ramsey has built a nice, simple program for HTML presentations. It’s based on Markdown, and embeds websites, videos, images, or shows text simply.

I wanted to use it to create a slideshow of the websites we’re referencing during the...

This weekend I visited the Robotic Church, Brooklyn Museum, and Pioneer Works during their Open Studio event.

Robotic Church with Robots

The Robotic Church was quite fantastic. Over 40 robots are animated...

There are a number of themes that have been on my mind over the last few months or years. I’ll probably spell these out later in the future, but thought it worth writing them down to document them.

Data...

Future of Programming

Bret Victor gave this amazing talk in 2013 called The Future of Programming. He pretended to be giving a talk in 1973 about where programming will be in 30 years based on existing technologies and...

Had a great conversation today with Nathan, a professional sound designer, about sound.

One highlight was contrasting the sound of a bike falling on the hardwood floor, which happened while we were talking, and the sound of rubbing your...

On Monday Ramsey asked us to go to Great Art Twitter bot, choose an image, and describe in text how you might recreate it.

I liked this image because I thought it looked like rain.

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I’ve long felt that the ideal school is one in which everyone takes on the role of both learning and teacher.

For students, it is incredibly empowering to be able to give to others. I’ve seen students grow so...

My Mom Was Right: Eniac was Pretty Awesome

When I was in third grade we chose an inventor and gave a report on the person and invention to the class. I really wanted to do the Wright Brothers, but...

Highlights of Day 2 included:

• Saving an image from Photoshop in raw format and opening it in Audacity as sound

• Transforming a gray scale images stored with 8 bits per pixel into 8 black and...

October 1st is day 1 of SFPC. I’ll be spending the next 10 weeks in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to learn and create with 15 other amazing students and a number of teachers.

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