via SEED
Some downright awesome renderings of the “Mandelbulb” or 3D Mandelbrot Set.
As hard as I try to resist my predilection for all things fractal, these are really great and I have to respect the effort to work out the not-so-intuitive math behind them.
and
The original article here.
In a quick foray into product design, I’m helping the people at Copenhagen Wheel with a handle bar mounted case for the iPhone that will provide the controls for the bicycle:
From their website:
The Copenhagen Wheel aims to transform bicycle use in Denmark’s largest city through promoting urban sustainability and building new connections between the city’s cyclists. In this work, bicycles become smart mobile sensing devices that map the real-time flow of people and environmental conditions in Copenhagen. This is achieved through strategically placing small location and environmental sensors on bicycles to gather information as people ride through the city. This data then powers applications of benefit to citizens, city municipalities and researchers interested in understanding more about city dynamics.
The project will be displayed at the 2009 Cop 15 UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.
Wired reports that on this day in 1983, the computer virus was officially born. Huzzah!
Below are some images of a quick project that I just did with Xiaoji Chen for Terry Knight’s class. An umbrella stand, not particularly stable or usable but taking advantage of a glueless snap-in joinery system that appears to be pretty effective.
via kottke, this fractal:
is being explored by Fred Scharmen. It’s so simple, yet so complicated. I’m suspicious that it’s analog to something else but I don’t see what. Hmmmmm.
Below is an applet that I made for Terry Knight’s Inquiry into Computation class. The intent is to, in an AI kind of way, probe into the ability of computers to do what people are naturally really good at. In this case, given a set of lines, the code finds squares and rotates them by 45º. Considering the simplicity of the task and that it is a well defined task, the code was a real pain to write on account of lots of special cases.
Incidentally, everything is done in exact terms with zero margin for floating point errors. This is accomplished by storing points as pairs of elements in a quadratic field, 
with D=2. This allows for 45º rotation while maintaining integer accuracy. (the coefficients are rational, so they have integer accuracy.)
All Java code is in this rar file