An indoor autonomous helicopter from MIT. Can the remotely piloted dragonfly from Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy be far behind?

I found these amusing Volkswagen ads on the excellent Laughing Squid:

On this rainy Los Angeles day, I thought I’d post a link to this wonderful letter from actor Stephen Fry, to a depressed fan. Here’s an excerpt: I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather: Here are some obvious things about [...]

I’ve found the IAmA section on Reddit to be an endless source of fascination the past couple of weeks. It’s essentially a 21st century version of “True Confessions” magazine. Some recent entries: I am a male stripper. Ask me anything. My blog is my principal source of income. Ask me anything. I worked at a [...]

Beth Block shot and edited this video excerpt of my piece ‘Kasparov vs. Deep Blue’ at last June’s concert in Eagle Rock. In this piece, a computer-chess engine produces music in real-time as actors recreate a famous chess match on a chess board which is wired to the computer. The music is a very literal [...]

Ever heard a piano talk? This is why I love automatic instruments! Thanks to Patrick Woodward for sending this to me.

Click the image to watch and hear my musical clock made of the stars. To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things. [...]

I thought I’d post a few of my recent Aardvark answers here. Aardvark is a social network in which people ask and answer a variety of questions, using either instant messaging clients or email. Q. If I weigh 225, is purchasing a Vespa still a good idea? Will it hold me? A. This guy looks [...]

The White House posted an interesting Flickr set of 134 photos of the First Family taken with various world leaders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I thought I’d have a little fun with it. Here’s all the photos, in sequence, with the President roughly aligned. It must be tough holding that pose for so [...]

I recently built an experimental Interactive Mosaic Maker on my Coverpop website. It allows you to build Coverpop mosaics, standard photo mosaics, and composite images from Flickr photos. Prolific Flickrer Leo Reynolds has been playing with it and produced some nice work, including this mosaic of cemetery symbols! You can see the latest creations made [...]