John Cook: Why and How People Use R
R is a strange, deeply flawed language that nevertheless has an enthusiastic and rapidly growing user base. What about R accounts for its popularity in its niche? What can language designers learn from R’s success?
Welcome to Project Sentry Gun, home to the most versatile sentry gun on the web!
This sentry gun autonomously tracks, aims, and shoots at targets, using:An airsoft or paintball gun
A webcam to find targets
A computer to process the video feed and aim the gun
Servo motors to physically aim the gun and squeeze the trigger
A sturdy tripod base
A microcontroller to interface between the computer and the servo motors
Fully open-source code
Lots of camo paintThe end result is a paintball/airsoft spewing robot, that can turn the tides of any match.
Parallel Robots, Hexapods, Stewart platforms – ParalleMIC
Welcome to the most comprehensive on-line resource in the field of parallel robots (hexapods, Gough-Stewart platforms, parallel kinematic machines, motion bases, etc.).
Amber, formerly known as Jtalk, is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier. It allows developers to write client-side heavy web applications in Smalltalk.
Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger.
Amber is written in itself, including the parser and compiler, and compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JS equivalent.
a jQuery plugin that annotates text with Morse Code
William Cook’s Fusings: Enso Introduction
Structures in EnsÅ are a specialized kind of graph, whose nodes are either primitive data or collections of observable properties, whose values are either nodes or collections of nodes. From a programming language viewpoint this may seem an odd choice for data representation. However, it is essentially the Entity-Relationship (ER) model, also known as Information Models, which is widely used in the design of relational databases and is also the basis for Class Diagrams in the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which describe the structure of networks of objects. The key point is that structures in EnsÅ are viewed holistically as graphs, not as individual values or traditional sums-and-products data structures.
Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel
In 1787, Mozart wrote the measures and instructions for a musical composition dice game. The idea is to cut and paste pre-written measures of music together to create a Minuet.
This site is an implementation of such a game. The music and table of rules for this game appear to have been published anonymously in 1787, and interestingly, the table of rules for this Minuet is identical to Mozart’s. However, it is not clear who the composer of these measures is.
There are 176 possible Minuet measures and 96 possible Trio measures to choose from. The result of a dice roll is looked up in a table of rules to determine which measure to play.
Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
Packet Forth (PF) is a scripting language for real-time video processing and graphics generation. PF is now quite stable and usable, but remains a bit of an odd duck in the land of open source video processing tools. I use it mainly as a prototyping tool for C-based signal processing.
PF is a concatenative programming language which takes ideas from Forth, Joy, PostScript, Factor, and Lisp. As opposed to its memetic parents, PF is not intended as a general purpose programming language, but a scripting language that glues together black box processing primitives and relevant open source libraries
RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world.
Internet Memes
A timeline of all major internet memes since the nineties.
Sprog is a graphical tool which anyone can use to build programs by plugging parts together. In Sprog jargon, the parts are known as ‘gears’ and they are assembled to make a ‘machine’.
The types of programs that you can build with Sprog will fit this general model:
1. Get some input data
2. Process the data
3. Output the result
A very entertaining blog about curious cartography.
Maps from historic to completely unreal.
10 Ways to Build a Cult-Like Following
What steps are there for anyone who wants people to want his/her attention and wisdom?
The result are 10 ways to build a cult-like following. Of course each one of them could be a book in itself but here goes.
Are you plagued by Stuck Tune Syndrome? Do you have a tune stuck in your head you just can’t get out?
Take heart friend, for your suffering is over. The Maimograph Machine, through complex analysis and calculation, will find an even catchier tune to counter-act the one you already have.
The Six Most Feared but Least Likely Causes of Death
Americans and their irracional fears. They eat themselves to death while fearing sharks 🙂
l33t is an esoteric language based loosely on BrainF***, and influenced by Beatnik. Like other languages of its ilk, it was designed to be as brain-melting as possible to code in whilst still being Turing complete. The language has some interesting distinguishing features, such as the possibility for self-modifying code and for connectivity – it’s theoretically possible to use it to write viruses and other such antisocial software but the actual logistics of trying to write such a program put it well beyond the cognitive capabilities of the average script kiddie.
Of course it ain’t fully 133t without an l33t interpreter in javascript
