If you’re reading this then I’ve emerged from the other side of the tunnel - I transferred the blog from Blogger to my own WordPress site. At times hammering away at the the transfer I felt like John Henry but alas it looks like I’ll survive this one.
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Making Ambigrams
Ambigrams are hot. They’ve been around forever as a curiosity but are catching on in logos and type now because…I don’t know – everything else has been done? Check out this gallery at wired.
A web-search on ambigrams will turn up a bunch of tattoo sites. Something about their symmetry and mystical puzzling quality makes people [...]
Things We Learned on Square Day
Yesterday was squareday - for everybody, but it meant more to me. Yesterday was 4/25/09 – all square numbers. In a given century this’ll happen 135 days out of 36,525 about 1 in 250 days - so not that big of a deal. But for me it marked my 36th birthday – also a square [...]
The Last Great Prog Album
Progressive Rock was dead by 1990. It was a nerd genre that defined my musical palette from ‘83 to ‘93 and it’s pomp and seriousness lead to its self-destructive in these last 2 decades. The 1989 release of Season’s End by Marillion tries really hard to save the genre. It’s a forgotten masterpiece of music [...]
A New Way to Tell Time
Long ago, when I started this blog, I wanted to release some new clock designs. I was motivated by the TokyoFlash approaches, and wanted to come up with some based on epicyclic movement. Why would one bother? Longer ago, I had difficulty reading an ‘analog’ clock. I was a child of the digital age, and [...]
An Oversight in George F. Will’s Corporate Cosmology
There are only a few magazines I read so thoroughly that I run out of articles before the replacement shows up on the newsstand, but Newsweek is one of them. The last page alternately written by Anna Quindlen and George Will is a favorite. While Ms. Quindlen is a superior writer (I’d kill for that [...]
My Dream PC is no more
I’ve been permanently attached to my trusty tablet PC over the last few months, and have grown a bit impatient with its sluggishness. It’s three years old, and I was interested in obtaining something more powerful. Here are my requirements:
WACOM pen compatible
More than 3 gigs of memory
DVD reader/writer
64-bit OS capable
At least 2.2 GHz
Less than $1500
I [...]
Stoichiometric Machines of the Future
A few weeks ago, I finally got around to watching “The Inconvenient Truth.” The next day the Wired magazine showed up with a special on cutting carbon. How could we have been stupid for so long? Well, the following equation is just so damn easy on this planet:
_CnHm + _O2 = _CO2 + _H2O + [...]
Comparing 70’s Jazz-Fusion Supergroups with Operating Systems
Last night I saw Return to Forever in concert. The opening date of their first tour in 25 years. Their nervousness and the crowd’s anticipation nearly stifled their astounding performance. But I must say, it was quite a thrill. Afterwards, I overheard fans fantasizing about seeing reunions of other jazz-fusion supergroups of that same era [...]
Repost: The Toughest Logic Puzzle
This is a repost from two years ago. That post had become inundated with splogger comments, so I’m reposting it. I’ve taken the liberties (or perhaps you view it as an injustice if you are the original author) to rewrite a puzzle I once heard. I can find no reference to it online, so here [...]
