I must admit to a certain fascination with low-tech housing solutions, so it was interesting to read this article on Boing Boing and the associated links. Architects Nader Khalili and Iliona Outram won the Aga Khan award for their method of using sandbags and barbwire to construct buildings based upon circular courses which are corbelled together to make domes.
Interesting stuff.
Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics | Publications | 2004 | Abstract of preprint 2004.3
This paper explains how one can crochet the Lorenz manifold, the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system.
My grandmother taught me to crochet when I was only five or six. I wonder how long it would take me to bat one of these out. I further wonder what could posess me to try…
The classic It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, but starring bunnies, and taking only 30 seconds.
Caution: Didn’t work for me in Firefox.
This website is brilliant. Really brilliant. In case you didn’t know, there are 170 feet of noodles in a packet of ramen. But while you are at cockeyed.com, surf around. Lots of stuff that’s good. Photos of laser tatoo removal. Satan, made from Paper Mache. Costumes. Wow.
Like the pixel art on eboy? Here is The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art, a nifty guide to spelling out how it’s done. Very retro.
Need an inexpensive hobby? Try Rock Balancing. Bill Dan appears to be rather good at it.
Brilliant! Link courtesy of Dan Lyke at Flutterby!.
Wow, Metafilter kindly pointed me to another Pixarian who blogs: Ronnie del Carmen, and damn. Lots of really nice artwork. Sometimes working at Pixar can give you a feeling of intense inadequacy.
Joshua Talley has written a nice little piece on how he achieved artistic insight (and may have gotten laid) by going to the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco. It made me and my wife chuckle.
Both of us do enjoy the museum incidentally, since we are members. You’ll have to judge any side effects of membership yourself.
I can’t help but marvel at some people’s cleverness in inventing random acts of beautification.
Over the weekend, Julian Gomez informed me of a project that he thought (correctly) that I might be interested in: The L Prize. What is that, you say? Best answer from their website:
The L PRIZE is a new and exciting open competition that will be officially launched fall 2004 by an independent team led by Tim Courtney. The purpose of the L PRIZE is to reach both the established LDraw community and the broader 3D software developer and user communities, and to draw on this greatly expanded pool of resources to build a unique convergence of interests and abilities that will result in significant advances to LEGO CAD technologies.
Contestants will apply their knowledge and skills with the goal of furthering the State-of-the-Art of LEGO CAD software and support tools. Casual Users, Hobbyists, Educators, and Students will all reap the benefits of these advances. The open competition model of the L PRIZE will also encourage grass-roots level innovations in 3D software technologies and software interfaces that may benefit the software industry at large.
A couple of years back I worked on some simple filters to convert ldraw models into a format palateable to my toy raytracer, and generated the somewhat disappointing picture at the right. Still, fun stuff.
If you are interested, you should get in touch with these guys.
Addendum: Hey Julian, I know you’ve worked a bit on this stuff before, why not try and extract some of their money in your copious spare time?
Ever wonder what happens if you play Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz? Wonder no further.
The Big Picture has an interesting list of post-election maps which seek to demonstrate the oddities of how people voted in the Presidential election. I find this one to be rather interesting, which showed that of the 32 states that receive more in federal tax money than they collect in taxes, 76% ended up voting for George W. For all their preaching about self reliance, it appears that these predominantly Republican states drink heavily from the fountain that is federal taxation.