Twoville at Bridges Math Art 2021
Following are the notes from a talk I gave at Brides Math Art 2021. My paper was a short paper, which means I had ten minutes to speak. For the next ten minutes, I will tell some stories about a piece of software that I’ve been writing for making two-dimensional shapes using mathematics and computer […]
Fabrication Summer Camp: Day 5
Welcome to the fifth day of our summer camp! Today is different than the others. It’s Laser-Cutter Day. You challenge is to spend the morning making a design that you want to last. In the afternoon we will take your designs to the Fabrication Lab and cut them out of acrylic. There are a few […]
Fabrication Summer Camp: Day 4
Welcome to the fourth day of our summer camp! Laser and vinyl cutters create flat objects. Today we break out of the flat plane into the third dimension. In order to cut these objects with our tools, they must start out flat. But the objects can be folded and assembled into solid shapes. Solid objects […]
Fabrication Summer Camp: Day 3
Welcome to the third day of our summer camp! All the shapes we’ve made up till now been solid objects. But some objects have holes, like buttons, donuts, and things with eyes and mouths. Additionally, our only means of adding curved edges has been to superimpose circles onto other objects. This superimposing is not a […]
Fabrication Summer Camp: Day 2
Welcome to the second day of our summer camp! Today we will explore two big ideas: loops and turtle geometry. Like yesterday, we will be drawing, coding, and making. Caterpillar Code is like a caterpillar. It is on its way to being something beautiful that will bring people delight. But it’s trapped in a body […]
Fabrication Summer Camp: Day 1
Welcome to summer camp! My name is Chris. Scattered throughout the room are some of my friends that you will meet soon. For the next week, all of us will be making things with technology. The tools we’ll be using to make things include computers, a vinyl cutter, a laser cutter, and a pen plotter. […]
Perseverence Logo
NASA landed a rover on Mars this week. When I saw the logo for Perseverence, I felt an irresistible urge to recreate it in Twoville. And so I did: It’s not an exact match. NASA’s landings are better than my own.
Dittos in Array Literals
Color is often represented in computers in triplets of red, green, and blue intensities. Expressing a color is a matter of finding the right mix of these intensities. For example, here are the triplets for six of the most famous colors: red = [1, 0, 0] green = [0, 1, 0] blue = [0, 0, […]
Twoville Limerick
In October, a collaborator and I presented a poster on our 2D vector graphics languages at FabLearn 2020. The session started with everyone in the main Zoom room. Each presenter had 30 seconds to introduce their project, and then the crowd dispersed to individual breakout rooms. Ever since I saw someone preview their paper with […]
Tricube
A month ago one of my sons’ toys inspired me to try and model it in Madeup. Here is the original set of magnetic blocks: And here is my first attempt at modeling them using Madeup’s dowel command with rounded bends: Notice the hole in the middle. Given how the rounding is implemented, I was […]