Author: Mike Garrity

November 9, 2009

SPDE Starlings

OK, I think I’ve got SPDE generating applets now. Let’s see how this works. Leave me a comment if you have trouble running this one. This is a variant of the Bees sketch I...

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November 5, 2009

Brother Blue

A local icon died this week. If you’re from the Boston area, you’re familiar with Brother Blue and his stories. He was one of the people who made Harvard Square special. If you’re not...

programming

November 4, 2009

J. C. R. Licklider as the Antichrist

David Byrne had a post on his blog the other day in which he laments the fact that so many of the physical objects which we have valued for decades or centuries will disappear...

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November 3, 2009

Ayn Rand

Two biographies of Ayn Rand (Goddess of the Market and Ayn Rand and the World She Made) came out recently. That’s been the occasion for a number of book reviews which attempt to puzzle...

programming

October 29, 2009

Quines

A quine is a computer program which prints out a copy of its own source code when it is run. The name comes from Quine’s paradox: “Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields...

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October 28, 2009

Here’s another Processing applet. It’s a variant of Bees, but it uses a Mexican Hat function for computing the force. Basically that means that they’ll try to stay a specific distance (in this case...

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October 24, 2009

Organism

We just found out that UbuWeb has several of Hilary Harris’ films on line. I hadn’t seen Organism in years, and the kids had never seen it. If you haven’t seen it, or have...

programming

October 23, 2009

The Public Option in 2D

We had a meeting at work yesterday about naming some classes. We’ve had the same meeting over and over for months (years?) now. Again and again, we’ll get everyone to agree on a naming...

programming

October 22, 2009

Using SPDE with IntelliJ

This is mostly a note to myself, but I figured out how to get SPDE to work in IntelliJ IDEA. SPDE is a port of Processing to the Scala programming language written by Nathan...

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October 21, 2009

The Reign of King Edward III

Finding a lost play by Shakespeare is the stuff of legend, but Brian Vickers is claiming he did it. Well, there have been suggestions that the play in question was Shakespeare’s since about 1760,...