Here’s the short version: If you calculate data in almost any programming language, very large and very small numbers will be printed using a near-universal standard called scientific notation. If you read this data into Mathematica, a system designed for scientific and engineering mathematics, it quietly replaces each one of those numbers with a different, essentially random value. Thus everything you do with your data from that point is untrustworthy. This is an inexcusable and potentially dangerous situation. Continue reading →

A friend has been egging me on to buy a gadget called the Silhouette Cameo. You can think of it as a printer, but instead of a print head it has a little blade that can cut through paper, up to pretty thick cardstock. It comes with a surprisingly powerful editor, like a baby version of Adobe Illustrator. It’s surprisingly easy to use. This is my First Thing Ever, cut from a single piece of paper. I think this is going to be a lot of fun! The inspiration for this design came from Paul Jackson’s wonderful The Pop-Up Book.

At SIGGRAPH 2013 I gave an invited course titled “Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics.” The good folks at SIGGRAPH recorded the course and have now made it available for free on the SIGGRAPH website. It runs just under 3 hours, but unlike the attendees at the convention center, you can stop and start it whenever you like! The link to the video is:  http://siggraphmediablog.blogspot.com/2014/01/siggraph-launches-free-program-offering.html  Thanks to Eric Haines for alerting me that this was now available.

Recently I had my piano tuned (it’s a gorgeous Steinway Model B originally built in 1887, and still going strong! The picture is of a similar, but newer, instrument). After playing it for a while I found that one note was consistently standing out and distracting me each time it sounded. I emailed my tuner, and we corresponded a bit over the nature of the sound. I found myself straining to find words to describe what I was hearing, and I realized that in everyday language, our different senses have very different sizes of vocabularies.

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Inksplats! I described how to make these fun little drawings in the previous post. Here are some of the splats I’ve drawn. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope these drawings will help inspire you to make some of your own! To run the interactive Inksplat viewer, just click here: http://www.imaginary-institute.com/support/splats/splatViewer.html.

Inksplats are a huge amount of fun. They’re easy to make and you probably have almost all of the materials already. In this post I’ll go over the materials you need, and the step-by-step process for using them to inspire your own creative drawings. To see some of my results, check out the blog post Inksplats Collection 1. Continue reading →

A few more random drawings from my sketchbook. Most of these are in pencil or ballpoint pen, but there’s also one pair in pigment markers, and my first experiment with watercolor. The weird radial streaking on the watercolor background is an artifact of my scanner. Continue reading →

I’ve been doing a lot of drawing recently, and thought I might post a few new pictures. Then I realized that I haven’t posted any drawings of my own here at all. So here are some pictures from my old blog.

These are just random scans from my sketchbook. They’re a mix of pencil, ballpoint pen, and pigment marker. Continue reading →

I’m playing Grand Theft Auto V right now on my Xbox 360. Sure, it’s a violent and sexist story about some bad people and their criminal activities. I’m fine with that – it’s a fantasy for adults, and I take it the same way I take Scarface, Boardwalk Empire, or even The Sopranos. It’s an exaggerated world to visit, not a realistic guide for how to live life.

OK, with that out of the way, here are some ways I’ve found to quickly level up each character to 100% in all skills.

Warming: SPOILERS AHEAD! I’m not giving away anything about the story or the plot – heck, I’m only a short way into it myself. But I like to get “ahead” of games, in the sense that if gathering up skills will help me play, then I want those skills right away. Then I never have to stop the flow of the game just to go work on those skills. So my goal was to get all my characters up to 100% on all their skills as fast as I could. There are lots of online guides for leveling up, so I’ll focus on the ones that gave me the most trouble. Continue reading →

I finished up a project the other day, so I gave myself a few minutes to make something just for fun. Here’s a grid of hexagonal tiles with little bits of graphics in them. Over time, random tiles rotate to create a new pattern (in this screenshot, you can see 5 tiles in mid-rotation). I played around with a whole bunch of different coloring schemes, and found that this combination of light and dark warm browns had just the right kind of feeling for me. Although it may look like the tiles are circular (a sensation that’s even stronger when you watch them rotate), they really are all hexagons. Read on for how I did this and the program itself.

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