Category Archives: Games and Diversions

Xaphoon – The Maui Xaphoon (Bamboo Sax or Bamboo Flute)

Metafilter pointed me at Xaphoon – The Maui Xaphoon (Bamboo Sax or Bamboo Flute), another website with an unusual music instrument. This is cute because it’s a very small, portable instrument with a terrific sound which closely approximates a full saxophone.

They make a $60 injection molded ABS version which is called The Pocket Sax. While searching for a dealer, I found this page which gave interesting background on how they actually designed and manufactured these mass produced instruments. Cool!

Mining Project Gutenberg

While perusing a random copy of Scientific American from June 18, 1887, I ran across an interesting little nugget of mathematical niftiness: Lewis Carroll’s technique for computing the day of the week for any date in your head. Cool! It’s not quite as simple as the Doomsday algorithm, but then we are talking about Lewis Carroll.

Making the Squarpent, a serpent-like instrument

At least one of my occasional readers is interested in homebrew musical instruments. Having listened to the example mp3’s, I’m not sure that these instruments qualify, but here are instructions for building a tuba and other instruments out of plywood. The overall tonal quality makes you pine for the melodic sounds of the bagpipe and the didgeridoo.

The author, Paul Schmidt, also has some other interesting bits, like these plans for a model trebuchet.

For those of you seeking a slightly more melodious instrument, you could always try making a flute from PVC.

Addendum: Check the comments to this posting for additional comments from their creator. He makes the following points:

The instrument is a reed instrument, not a wind instrument, hence my comparing them to a “tuba” is inaccurate.
The mp3’s he did were literally the first sound made by the instruments, and it is unfair to judge them on that basis.
I should avoid glibness when describing other people’s passions. 🙂

More Papercraft — Jun Mitani

Paper Models from Jun Mitani In keeping with the earlier paper model theme, I give you Jun Mitani, who has a paper in this year’s SIGGRAPH conference on turning polygonal meshes into paper models, with some examples shown here on the right. His other papers appear interesting too.

Soda Straw Tensegrity Structures

Tensegrity Sphere Another cool link from the Geometry Junkbox: George Hart’s instructions on building Soda Straw Tensegrity Structures. I can see myself wandering off to the store to buy soda straws, paper clips and rubberbands tonight.

Paper Plates Never Looked So Cool

I like arts and crafts, particularly those with a mathematical bent. Wholemovement – The Work of Bradford Hansen-Smith shows what cool stuff you can do with paper plates. Be sure to read the commentary about the “wholeness of circles” and the like. I’d like some of whatever he’s smoking. Found this while perusing the terrific Geometry Junkyard, which I noticed now has an RSS feed. I’ll be adding it to my list shortly.

Tinkering with Toys

Walking Robot Schematic I recall seeing the plans for a simple walking, balancing robot constructed out of TinkerToys, and while surfing around aimlessly I ran accross it again. I thought I’d go ahead and archive the paper which described it just for fun. It seems like the kind of toy you should just go ahead and build so you can show it off in your cubical. The Cornell Human Power Lab has some videos of this and related projects at their website. Enjoy.

Do it yourself Board Games

I ran across Games and Tools – The Deck of Boards
while reading rec.games.board. The author designed a way to create boards for many interesting boardgames by using a magnetic board and various marbles, washers and easily available pieces. Kind of neat, and a good way to get boards for games like Hex.

Zounds! Sounds!

While browsing through sweetcode’s archives I found an interesting link to Andrew Plotkin’s program boodler. Boodler is a soundscape generation tool written in Python. Basically it allows you to generate sounds by taking sample sounds, modifying them and playing them using independently scheduled agents. It is a pretty nifty little gadget, and comes with examples which replicate some of those “ambience” CDs like thunderstorms, crickets and frogs.
Continue reading →

Awari Solved

The University of Alberta has a very cool group that does research into gameplay. Recently they
solved Awari, a very old game that is still very common and popular in Africa and the West Indies. They did it by brutally enumerating all possible board positions via retrograde analyis on a cluster of 144 PCs in 51 hours. Not bad for a weekend’s worth of work.