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Emergent Orange and Playboy Centerfolds

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016

(Spoiler alert, despite the title, this post contains no obviously nude images. Sorry!) This week I revisted a mystery that has been bugging me for several years. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you are probably familiar with my study emergent orange, a color that is produced when you make amalgam images by […]

The color of us

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I’ve been doing some new research on the “MOB Brown” or “Orange Shift” phenomenon I first blogged about back in 2006. As part of that research, I’ve produced a number of intriguing composite images, which I thought I would share here. Before I proceed, I should acknowledge that some of this art resembles the work […]

Mirror Morphs

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

I found this old video of mine while looking at some old backup CDs. Back in the early 90s, while playing with Gryphon Software’s “Morph” software, I accidentally stumbled upon a technique for making a still photograph or painting look like a hologram. The basic idea is that you make a mirror image of the […]

Google Trends: a bigger picture

Friday, August 8th, 2008

I made this graph by aggregating data from Google Trends for about 150 domains, including the Alexa Top 100. The lines are colored according to the slope – red when going up, and blue when going down. The graph is logarithmic, so that low traffic websites can be shown together with high traffic ones. The […]

Want to make code art? Here’s your book.

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

I am sometimes asked by my art college students for a good book to introduce them to programming, that explains the basic concepts (such as functions and variables) and that is written for creative people, rather than computer science majors. Unfortunately, the book that worked so well for me is no longer available, nor relevant, […]

A year of sunsets

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

Flickr has a lot of sunset photographs. Too many, some would say. To build this graph I collected just a few of them, by searching for photos that have been tagged “Sunset”. I collected only 100 photos from the hundreds posted each day of the preceding 365 days, so that the photos are evenly distributed […]

Virgin Territory

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

While on a morning coffee run with a coworker, we chanced on the subject of religious experience, and I mentioned that exploring mathematics is the closest I’ve come to a religious epiphany. Although this notion is probably familiar to folks versed in the physical sciences, my friend was surprised to hear it. I brought up […]