Daily Archives: 12/16/2005

Floam, Floam on the Range

Actually, you don’t need a range.

This recipe has shown up in my inbox twice today, so I guess I have to blog about it. Ellen Spertus has a nice recipe for making your own Floam on her website. What is Floam you ask? (I apologize in advance to linking to the annoying Flash infomercial). Well, it’s kind of like clay, except that it is colorful and full of tiny beads, so it is pretty lightweight.

Ellen’s recipe basically calls for a mixture of homemade slime with expanded polystyrene beads. The slime is basically a mix of glue and a solution of borax, so it’s not like this would be expensive. I made a cup full of the stuff awhile ago as an experiment, and it was oh so fun to play with.

Golly Game of Life

I remember playing around with xlife and thinking it was a pretty good implementation of Conway’s cellular automata, but it’s got absolutely nothing on Golly, a stupendously fast version. Using hashing, it can run patterns for 1060 steps in just a few seconds. Amazing.