Wired is one of many magazines that has been noticeably suffering from the downturn in the publishing industry, and I had allowed my subscription to lapse a few months ago. This issue, which was guest-edited by J. J. Abrahms, is full of fun little puzzles, and articles about mysterious things, such as the Georgia Guidestones. Even the logo font on the cover has been improved for this issue (I wish they’d keep it!).

Apparently, the puzzles in this issue go a little deeper than they appear on the surface. I imagine the puzzle solvers who visit this website (even those who are not regular Wired readers) will enjoy this issue as well. Check it out!

On a related note, I recently picked up 23 volumes of the Time-Life series, Mysteries of the Unknown, on Ebay, for a song (about a dollar a book). The production values in those old Time-Life books was remarkable, especially when contrasted with the shape the publishing industry is in today.

I found this old video of mine while looking at some old backup CDs. Back in the early 90s, while playing with Gryphon Software’s “Morph” software, I accidentally stumbled upon a technique for making a still photograph or painting look like a hologram. The basic idea is that you make a mirror image of the photo, by flopping it horizontally in Photoshop. Then you morph from the original to the mirror image, using still-image morphing software, matching the left-eye to the flopped right-eye (which now looks like a left-eye), and so-on. The result is that the image in the photo looks like it is turning it’s head slightly, as you can see. There’s a point in the middle of the sequence where the face is completely symmetrical. One of my earliest tests of this method was done with an image of the Mona Lisa. It also works nicely with the portraits on currency.

In a few hours (6:31:30PM ET) it is expected to reach the magic number of 1234567890

( Update: You missed it! – reset your computer clock to reexperience it! )

You are advised to celebrate exuberantly, which will provide stimulus to the global economy.

Here’s a link to a full-screen version. Enjoy!

Update: Festivities are over. Here’s what happened at 6:31 eastern time at the location above. Not visible in the picture are a number of us behind the camera quaffing beer.

I will personally vouch for us: Among all the Crunchie nominees, Topspin is indeed the best new startup of 2008! Okay, seriously, I don’t know a heck of a lot about the other nominees, who I imagine are very fine startups indeed. I do know that Topspin is an amazing company, and that all Topspin employees are crazy-brilliant people, like me, and that we are going to rock your world in 2009.

Want to learn more about Topspin? You can start by reading CEO Ian Rogers’ inspiring keynote address from the Grammy Music Tech Summit a few weeks ago:

And if you feel compelled, please come vote for us here:

http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/

Thanks for your vote!

Now, enjoy this lovely video:

link

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.

The article amounts to a FAQ, or IAQ (infrequently asked questions) for the puzzle section. There is a little technical information at the end of the article for those attempting to write their own puzzle software.

Puzzle Building and the Creative Mind

…If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB?

The books, which reimagine the Napoleonic wars with an airforce of dragons and their aviators, are best described as “Patrick O’Brian plus Dragons.” Novik is clearly a fan of O’Brian, and there is no better role model for an author writing about this period. Imagine taking the characters of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin from the Master and Commander series, and then replacing both Dr. Maturin and the H.M.S. Surprise with a very intelligent yet naive dragon, and you have the basic gist.

The success of the books (currently up to three: His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War, lies in Novik’s strict adherence to historic realism, with one rather large exception: The Airforce. Thus, the reader avoids a lot of nonsense about elves, dwarves, and an annoying lexicon of made up gibberish which tends to plague the novels in this genre.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has bought the rights to these books for movies, and it is easy to see why. The battle scenes, involving 100 gun ships of the line and squadrons of dragons are exciting and highly visual. At the same time, like O’Brian, the more intimate scenes involving the social mores of this time evoke Jane Austen.

The data contains search records for about 658 million users collected over a three month period from March to May 2006. According to AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein, this represents 0.33% of the search traffic conducted through AOL over that period. My own informal test indicates the actual fraction may be higher. The leaked data shows 30 visits to Krazydad over that period, and I actually had about about 480 visits from AOL search engines according to my web logs. Assuming that my web logs only account for half the traffic, this would still indicate that the leaked AOL data represents 3.0% of all AOL search traffic during that period.

Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on Google: 17%

Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on Yahoo: 18%

This is interesting because the number of users who actually searched for Google is about 3 times higher than Yahoo (you can see a list of the top 500 search terms here). A lot of folks are landing on Yahoo hosted sites without actually searching for Yahoo.

Percentage of users who searched for, or landed on AOL: 13%, Myspace: 11%, EBay: 10%, Amazon: 8.2%, Flickr: 1.2%, YouTube: 0.7%.

Percentage of users who did at least one search for porn, or visited a porn site: 20%.

This real number for this last figure may be a bit higher, since it’s difficult to suss out all the creative ways that users search for porn. I used a Bayesian filtering technique to come up with a list of likely keywords and sites, and then searched on users who searched for at least one of the candidate keywords or visited one of the candidate sites. Interestingly, the site most indicative that a user didn’t search for porn was a savings and loan.

Percentage of users who searched for “cream pie”: 0.2%

Percentage of users who searched for “cream pie” and actually wanted a recipe: 0.1%