brainwagon

As part of Pixar’s exhibition at the NYC MoMa, we created a rather large zoetrope of some of our Toy Story characters. You can see a movie of the thing in action here. It’s really very cool and nifty. Don’t know what a Zoetrope is? Wikipedia does, and is happy to tell you.. The figurines […]

Recursivity: The Prime Game Ask a friend to write down a prime number. Bet them that you can always strike out 0 or more digits to get one of the following 26 primes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 19, 41, 61, 89, 409, 449, 499, 881, 991, 6469, 6949, 9001, 9049, 9649, 9949, 60649, 666649, […]

MIT Technology Expert in Coma in Vietnam – New York Times Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus Seymour Papert, 78, was among more than 100 international experts from 30 countries who had gathered in Hanoi this week for conference on teaching mathematics with digital technology. He was struck by a motorbike while crossing a busy […]

This article about a teacher is really, really terrible, and sent Good Math, Bad Math blogger Mark Chu-Carroll into quite a tizzy. It is quite absurd, for basically all the reasons he mentioned, but the thing which I found most disturbing was how illiterate (innumerate?) the comments to this story were on the BBC blog. […]

I found out about the SIGGRAPH site while trying to jog my memory about a paper I remembered reading, but couldn’t remember the title. It’s from the 2006 conference though, so it doesn’t have the presentation online yet, but I did finally remember which paper it was, and thought I’d use my blog to keep […]

SIGGRAPH has a nifty website that allows you to watch lots of presentations from the 2004 and 2005 conference, including paper presentations and sketches. Lots of good stuff. SIGGRAPH Encore [tags]SIGGRAPH,Computer Graphics[/tags]

If you’re like me, sometimes the pressure of the holidays gets to you, and you end up feeling a bit grumpy. It’s hard to take it easy when somebody elbows you, or uses a coupon to buy one apple at the grocery store, or just is a dick on the highway. You now what helps? […]

Well, it’s the holiday season, and that means it is time to decorate the blog for the holidays. More holiday cheer to follow. Just be glad I’m not using the <BLINK> tag or playing music by default… [tags]Christmas,Holiday[/tags]

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a link to a nifty video taken from an video camera attached to a fisheye camera. Here is a link to a technical paper describing the system. Total cost was about $3500, including the capture card and computer. Seems like a nifty “possible amateur” project. [tags]Astronomy[/tags]

If you look carefully in this image of the Guysev crater taken from the Spirit Rover, you can see what appears to be a skull! Here is an expanded crop of the linked image: Okay, okay. It’s a rock. Everybody knows it’s just a rock. Well, maybe not absolutely everyone. [tags]Mars,NASA,Spirit Rover[/tags]

Awesome stop motion animation: Tony vs. Paul

What more needs to be said, other than to simply say “Awesome!”? Nutcracker Suite Played Exclusively on Bicycle Parts [tags]Christmas Music[/tags]

One of the slightly annoying things about the video camera I mentioned is that it doesn’t actually have a “just return me a single frame of what the camera sees” mode. Well, someone else figured out how to do this with mplayer, and it appears to work. I’ll code up a simple demo here pretty […]

In a previous posting, I mentioned that I bought a Linksys WVC54GC wireless webcam. I can’t say that I really think it’s a good camera, but I didn’t hate it so much that I returned it. It does have a kind of cool feature that it detects motion and can email you a small five […]

I’ve been fascinated by functional programming languages for at least twenty years, but I must admit, despite my rather academic interest, I’ve simply not found them to be very pleasant or useful. Nevertheless, I keep thinking that I haven’t really dedicated myself to resolving this issue fully, and I keep thinking that someday I should […]