brainwagon

Well, the other day I was scanning the logs of what people had accessed off my site, and found that someone had apparently found my website while looking Thad Walker’s paper Holography without Photography. Walker wrote on how you could write a simple C program (a dubious example was included in the paper) and use […]

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day: a day where a simple hole and the wave nature of light conspire to create art. I was meaning to construct a simple pinhole camera, but didn’t quite get around to it, and today might be too late, but if you are interested, try checking out the forums on […]

I hadn’t heard of inline holography before, but apparently it was proposed decades ago by a short article in Nature by Gabor. Basically it is a technique by which interference patterns between an object and a reference wavefront is recorded, and then reconstructed in using clever math and the FFT.  Very neat.  Laser Pointer Holography […]

It’s been a busy week for me, wading through piles of SIGGRAPH sketch reviews, so I haven’t had too much inclination to spend more time in front of a computer.   But I did find this article linked on the make blog: little tips about making rc micro_helicopter.  A very cool micro helicopter, which used a […]

Apparently Bruce Shapiro was showing his “eggbot” at the Maker’s Faire, but I didn’t get a chance to see it.  But his instructions online give many details of how you might actually do something like that, and it all seems very clear and straightforward.   Interesting. [tags]Robots,Maker’s Faire,Eggbot[/tags]

Engadget mentioned me in their Maker’s Faire writeup! Yes! Front row! I hope my poor little server can handle the strain! [tags]Maker’s Faire,Atari,Atari 2600,Enigma[/tags] Addendum: For those of you who didn’t get to see this or talk to me, here is a brief writeup. Check the bottom of that page for a link to the […]

What kind of blunt force trauma made someone stupid enough to actually publish this? Math Proves Christ’s Resurrection? [Via Good Math, Bad Math.]

Well, I spent all day yesterday demoing my Enigma 2600 project in Hall A at the Maker’s Faire. I printed out sixty little info sheets and some business cards that described the project, and somehow got it exactly right: I gave away my last one just minutes before the end of the show. My voice […]

David Cortesi has a nice page on scoring baseball games.  I haven’t done this myself, but I think it might be a cool way to record games that you enjoy and keep you focussed on the action around you.  David uses the Project Scoresheet way, which records more information than traditional scoresheets do, and are […]

I’ll be showing off my Enigma 2600 at the Maker’s Faire this Saturday in San Mateo. Click on the link to read more about the project: I hope to see some of my readers there. Addendum: I’ll shoot some more pictures tonight for the page.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The best online resource is the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, which has over 17,000 photographs collected and available online. [tags]Earthquake,San Franscisco[/tags]

I found the following chart of post office branches that will remain open late useful.   Unfortunately.

My recent purchase of the book Baseball Hacks has made me dust off some my (I must admit impossibly rudimentary) knowledge of statistics and probability and think about baseball in that context. I think it was several years ago while reading Lewis’ Moneyball that I first became aware of Bill James’ Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball. […]

One of the most famous games in all of baseball history must be Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which pitted the Mets against the Red Sox. The Red Sox entered the game leading three games to two, and after nine innings, the game was tied 3-3. The Red Sox scored twice in the […]

Via hack-a-day, here is a link on creating your own ferrofluids. My first exposure to these was as part of the SIGGRAPH art show a few years back, check them out on Google video. [tags]Ferrofluid,Science[/tags]