Category Archives: eye-candy

the greatest thing ever!

Forgive my waxing hyperbolic . . . This is a tiling of the hyperbolic plane by triangles whose angles are π/2, π/3, π/7 – the smallest possible tile. I present it in a conformal mapping analogous to the Mercator projection, which I’ve … Continue reading

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LiveLand

Here’s a pretty thing: an animated fractal mountain generator (Java). The text unfortunately doesn’t explain anything about the algorithm, but it’s evidently the familiar triangle-subdivision mountain – with the offsets oscillating, so you see the land rising and tilting and … Continue reading

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just don’t throw it indoors

Vladimir Bulatov makes and sells pretty things in metal, wood and stained glass. I haven’t bought any of them — yet!

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16 million colors

Nearly eight hours in the making, here it is: all the 24-bit colors in a tasteful, tilable fractal arrangement — 16million.png.gz (1 megabyte). And since Mads asked for it, the Python sourcecode: two files. Another way to flatten the color … Continue reading

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four million colors

You may know from The Art of Computer Programming §4.1 (citing W. Penney, 1965) that, just as any positive real number can be represented by a bit string in base 2, any complex number can be represented by a bit … Continue reading

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long-awaited

Jamie Zawinski has ported his gorgeous screensaver collection to MacOS. My favorites are Demon, a colorful cellular automaton; CloudLife, a fuzzy variant of Conway’s Life; Substrate, whose randomly growing arcs suggest the street plan of an old city; Galaxy, a … Continue reading

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umbra Saturni

the view from Saturn’s shadow My latest finding of “dictionary translation”, at a pet store: ONE-STORY CAT CAVE UNE CAVERNE À CHATS D’HISTOIRE I’d make it caverne à chats à une étage. Funny that I missed this three years ago … Continue reading

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