The Spinning Oracle is a magic trick derived from my Wheel of Lunch project that wlil give you about 60 seconds of amusement.

The effectiveness of magic is greatly reduced when tricks are performed more than once — so try to resist the temptation to view the trick twice. Instead, share it with a friend!

You may notice in the blog articles below, a little “W” icon next to some of the Wikipedia links, and a little film-strip icon next to some YouTube links. Those are placed by Apture, a blog-annotation service I’m beta-testing that allows you to preview that content without leaving the blog.

I kind of like it, but I’m still not sure if I like it enough to keep it. I like making the Wikipedia references more convenient to see, but I absolutely despise the “walled garden” approach to viewer retention, and I worry that this veers a little too far in that direction, so I may dismantle it in a few days or weeks.

If you have an opinion, or if it horribly breaks for you, let me know in the comments accompanying this post.

In the meantime, enjoy this movie of the Battle of Kruger and this unrelated article on hedgehogs.

The Computer History Museum in San Francisco has some very cool video of a pristine reproduction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 in operation, which you can see on their website.

Although Babbage never completed one of these machines, former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold has had one built for his private collection, and it goes on display at the San Francisco museum (on loan from London’s Science Museum, which has built two of them) on May 10.

You see, this is what happens when giant nerds make a lot of money. I want one!

Here’s a transcript of an interesting lecture by London Curator Doron Swade that has a lot of inside information about the project. Interestingly, Doron disagrees with the commonly repeated notion that Babbage failed to build the Difference Engines because of technological limitations of Victorian tool technology. Instead Doron blames an intricate web of non-technological issues, including personal politics and expense.

Grand Theft Auto IV, released today, is being advertised with an interesting campaign that seems to be using mostly very large surfaces, such as the sides of buildings and the backgrounds of popular websites.

I couldn’t help but notice the huge image they used to take over the background on the Myspace home page. There is an even larger one over at gamespot.com. These graphics exploit the fact that these sites use a conventional (and soon-to-be antiquated) 800 pixel wide design (a hold over from the days of 16 inch monitors), but that most modern computers, especially those used by gamers, use much higher resolutions.

I wonder how much a 1280 x 800 banner ad on the Myspace home page costs these days?

Here are links to the original graphics. If you spot any more, let me know, and I’ll include them here.

MySpace Background

Gamespot Background

Bebe Barron is no longer with us. “Bebe was the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music. She was a close friend, an enthusiastic colleague, and a most gracious lady. ” writes composer and teacher Barry Schrader, to his mailing list of electro-acoustic music fans.

You can learn more about Bebe and her composing partner Louis Barron, and the ground-breaking work they did to create the music and sound effects for the film “Forbidden Planet,” over at NPR, which still carries a radio piece they ran a few years ago.

Here are some clips from the film, with their music.

“Bebe created a firm legacy in her music. If the importance of one’s work is to be judged in any regard by it’s influence, acceptance, longevity, and innovative qualities, then the score for Forbidden Planet is an enormous success. It remains the most widely known electro-acoustic music work on this planet. For me, Bebe Barron will always be the First Lady of electronic music.” — Barry Schrader

I make these things all the time, but don’t know what to do with them….

Click here… put on some headphones, and press the ‘full screen’ button for a little trance…

I’m working on a set of Slitherlink puzzles based on the Islamic-inspired tiling shown here, from Ensor Holiday’s book “Altair Design”. The pattern contains tiles with 4,5,6,7 and 8 sides, which makes the puzzle a little more interesting than my previous Slitherlinks, which only use tiles with 4 sides.

You can preview some sample puzzles by downloading this PDF file and printing it.

Thanks to Craig Kaplan for suggesting the use of the Altair tiling.

UPDATE: Here are 100 booklets of these new puzzles. Enjoy!

I am sometimes asked by my art college students for a good book to introduce them to programming, that explains the basic concepts (such as functions and variables) and that is written for creative people, rather than computer science majors.

Unfortunately, the book that worked so well for me is no longer available, nor relevant, since it was the booklet that came with the Timex Sinclair computer (that booklet was remarkably well written!).

Until recently, I had a hard time identifying such a book for my students, but I was recently given a copy of Processing: Creative Coding and Computer Art by Ira Greenberg, and I’m pretty sure this is the book those students are looking for. It’s a book I would have been proud to have written myself.

When painter-turned-pixel-wizard Greenberg describes his experiences, they very much mirror my own, and he spends a lot of time talking about the whys of “code art” as he calls this thing we do, before diving into the hows.

Those of us who delight in making beautiful things with code are in a strange place, and can find it hard to find good reference material and classes. The art colleges consider what we do too technical, and the technical colleges consider what we do too arty. Many of us have fallen into this pursuit of making beautiful algorithms quite accidentally.

For people such as us, the Processing language, covered in this book, is an excellent first choice. It is free, it has a very simple all-in-one programming and execution environment, and it saves all your projects in a kind of sketchbook. The best way to learn this stuff is to make a series of little sketches, one after another, rather than working on a giant magnum opus. Greenberg talks about noodling around with code, while sitting in front of the TV and eating snacks, making pretty pictures, one after another. I heartily approve of this method.

Greenberg is painfully aware that his audience is likely to be quite math phobic, due to the horrible way that math is taught in schools, but having been math phobic himself (as I was), he delights in the wonders and miracles that are in store for those readers who slowly introduce themselves to graphics programming.

The book includes a nice history of computing and code art, which mentions a few of my heros, including Charles Babbage, Grace Hopper and John and James Whitney. It doesn’t assume the reader already knows how to count in hexadecimal, or (as so many books do) already knows another programming language.

There’s a good section up front on the bizarre nomenclature used by programmerrs, and an appendix in the back which covers some key math concepts that the reader may eventually find peace with.

If the book has a fault, it’s that Greenberg is a little to anxious to share some advanced scripts very early in the game, before doing some more basic tutorials. For example, Greenberg’s love of tree images causes him to share a script that uses recursion really early on, before covering much simpler stuff like drawing a few lines. The reader will be well advised to skip over this stuff at first, and take Greenberg’s advice to read the book non-linearly.

I would also recommend it supplementing it with another book on the same subject, such as the Reas and Fry Processing book, so you can obtain alternate descriptions of the same things. When you are first learning this stuff, one book is never enough.

This is my attempt to make some eye candy roughly in the style of James Whitney’s wonderful 1966 movie, Lapis, which can occasionally be spotted on Youtube. If you’re interested in making stuff like this, just remember, it all starts with π.

If you’re a mathophobe, and even the barest mention of π sends you running for the hills, I offer some hope: I too, was once a mathophobe. Your problem lies not with you, nor with math, but with the way you were taught math. The best way to learn math, in my opinion, is to try to make pretty pictures with the help of a computer. At least, that’s what worked for me. Try it!

Update: I modified the movie to use a technique that is closer to Lapis - using a fixed random dot painting as the underlying element.

If you have a myspace account, you’ll want to check out the app I’ve been working on this week, Y! Music Videos.

This OpenSocial app displays a list of music videos, which are selected based on the information you have put in your myspace profile (specifically, your “favorite music”).

So if you’ve listed Beatles and Bjork, as I have, you’ll get some decent videos. And if you’ve listed something you actually like, you’ll get that…

Eventually, when MySpace finishes their OpenSocial implementation (it’s still pretty bare bones), you’ll be able to do more…