Jeff Thompson | Blog

Via: The Office, season 6, episode 20, 12’38″

Animated GIF by Johnny Kelly and Matt Cooper

Via: the fantastic site I Am Not An Artist.

Spending (some) of the afternoon looking at animated GIFs.

Fantastically-interesting project detailed at Physics World – Martin Wegener, Nicolas Stenger, and Manfred Wilhelm of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany built the device above which can cloak objects from sound waves.  The rings around the center are filled with soft plastic and an object to be cloaked is placed in the center hole.  Because of the design of the rings, sound waves approaching the object are bent and re-emerge on the other side exactly as they came in.  There are no acoustic reflections off the object whatsoever.

Via: Physics World (thanks Stephen Shingler)

A video still created programmatically; thousands of these can be combined into video using the ffmpeg library – faster and cleaner than a clunky Final Cut project

Well, it might not be Lion (doing live musical performance with my laptop makes me leary of new operating systems) but after finding little recent info on installing ffmpeg on a Mac, I’ve put together this basic outline.  For someone who isn’t great at installing libraries using Terminal, it wasn’t completely straightforward, but it works!  You will need the Apple Developer Tools to make this work (so far as I can tell).

This tutorial is based on the tutorial by Stephen Jungels, with some explanation and consolidation targeted at noobs (like myself).  Definite hat tip, Stephen!

The basic steps are as follows, full details after the break:

1. Install Git
2. Download LAME
3. Download ffmpeg
4. Find or create folder to install to
5. Install LAME
6. Install ffmpeg
7. Test

Read the rest of this entry »

While printing some MakerBot sculptures, the topic of rabbits (specifically rabbit holes) came up.  A Wikipedia search for “rabbit” turned up this image – male and female European rabbits from “A History of British Mammals“, a book by Gerald Edwin Hamilton Barrett-Hamilton and photographed by G. D. Croker.

Via: Wikipedia contributor Mariomassone

Following yesterday’s experiments with the Random Pi Walk (hat tip Alex Bellos), I’ve upped the ante.  The above image is the decimal expansion of the square root of two, following the first one million digits.  The data is thanks to Stan Kerr via Project Gutenberg.  Each decimal digit 0-9 results in a change of direction of 36 degrees and, in this case, travels 3 pixels in that direction.

The resulting image is MUCH larger than the previous visualizations – click here for the full resolution version.

Can’t say I really understand what they mean, but found these “ideal circular membranes” for tuned drums.  The black number is the ideal value, plus kettle drum (red) and tabla (blue).

Via: +plus Magazine

Random walk based on the decimal expansion of pi (from the previous post), but this time in 3d space. Created using Processing and OpenGL.

Click on images for full-size.

While John Venn is best-known for the Venn Diagram, Alex Bellos mentions Venn’s other invention in his quite-good book “Here’s Looking at Euclid” (page 231).  Venn was the first to create a “random walk” or “drunk walk”.  Using the decimal expansion of pi, each digit is seen as a cardinal direction.  I’ve updated Venn’s experiment slightly (his ignored the numbers 8 and 9) – each number from 0-9 rotates the direction of movement by a factor of 36º and takes a step 20 pixels forward.

The above image is the first 1120 decimal places of pi, starting at the gray dot.  Created using Processing.