One of the Human Computer Interaction's fathers has just left two days ago at 61. Fortunately he left to us many articles and researches to keep his pioneeristic spirit alive. Rest in peace big man!

Work in progress: using genetic algorithms to evolve compositions (right) that match a target picture (left). I’ve yet to put real competition into the system, and it needs more than just line segments….

That what I was afraid of has happened. I’ve just watched the trailer for the upcoming The Hichhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie and now I’m … disappointed? shocked? disgusted? Did I read a different story? Where is all that action coming from? Where is the spirit of Douglas Adams? The humor? The sarkasm? The wit? If they made the whole movie like this trailer I can imagine why it was never made as long as Douglas Adams was alive.

At least I hope that the popularity of the movie will help to spread some other Douglas Adams’ ideas especially in god’s own country.

Just added a recreational after-work experiment to the Incubator. It’s the animated version of a Photoshop Plugin I wrote many years ago: Cassini

THRIFTDELUXE — “THRIFTDELUXE is a non-commercial contemporary DIY zine which provides easy, inexpensive yet damn cool projects that anyone can make by following our simple instructions.” The Coca Cola vase is cool, and ridiculously simple. See also ReadyMade Magazine and…

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a collection of great essays by Chuck Klosterman. Each article mixes sociology and media criticism with heavy doses of pop culture and observational humor, a style the will likely come to define Generation X…

Wolfram’s MathWorld has an entry on the Beast Number, 666. I was expecting numerology, but the beast number actually has some very clear relationships. The beast number is the sum of the first 7 primes squared:     666 = 2² +…

Having started to use public transportation I'm reading many books at the moment but I think one of them is a master piece. In fact John Maeda late 2004 published a kind of reference about Aesthetics and Computation. It seems a little bit too near to M.I.T. and J.M. friends but it is anyway a very cool reference for the one that thinks that code is something behind not just a boring display.

This is a project of a very simple 3D object building and animating environment. It's really impressing how could be faster build and animate pixelate 3D objects.

Reading a wonderful essay, Christopher Alexander’s A city is not a tree. Alexander illustrates how natural (developed over time) and artificial (developed according to a plan) cities are organized as networks and trees, respectively. Further, he shows how the human…

New applet: Valentine2005 Written to make images for my Valentine’s Day card this year. Words circle my heart, and then unfold to reveal our song: the wonderfully sugary “Such Great Heights” by the Postal Service (Iron and Wine cover). Happy…

I’m not sure if my obsession to find the perfect antialiasing is becoming pathologic, but I must confess that I spend half this day with programming my own line drawing function. I’m not that mental yet to start completely from scratch, no, I found some solid groundwork in Hugo Elias’ adaption of Xiaolin Wu’s Algorithm.

What caused me to do this was that the lines that Processing draws with its own method simply didn’t cut it when I needed them antialiased and almost transparent - the result always reminded me of a very refined version of potato print.

So in the end I managed to write a very ugly looking method that creates pretty pretty antialiased semi-transparent lines and is even faster than the native version. Something that I probably could have found in zillions of places as a free download - had I only searched a little bit longer.

Well whatever - the reason for this entry was not line algorithm but to invite you to check out my lastest work in the Incubator: Plankton.