Archive for February, 2009
No Money, No Honey
For Animals, People, and Those in Between, I worked with Ozge and Anderson to create a world where our characters might coexist. The Dictator Bee, Sunbear, and Ole came to this project with very strong, developed characters, so figuring out the ways in which they would interact provided a few challenges. Here’s a comic strip [...]
Markov’s Menagerie
This week’s assignment for Programming A to Z was to modify or augment our in-class example of a Markov chain. Somehow during class I got the idea to make a program that would create imaginary creatures by analyzing n-grams from a list of animals. I created a list of creatures from a medieval bestiary, and [...]
Succinct Scrivener
Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to, said he. I would prefer not to, he said, [...]
Interview with a Green Consumer
Our assignment for If Products Could Speak this week was to interview someone with “green” consumption habits. In class we’ve discussed at length the ways in which the term “green” lacks any real meaning, but right now it’s the easiest term we have to work with. My friend, Sam, gets most of the things she [...]
Life Cycle Thinking
This week in If Products Could Speak… we looked at Life Cycle Assessment as a tool for considering the impact of products. After spending some time digging through web sites and article databases, I found an LCA for a wind turbine. I was surprised by how readable the article was, although I don’t have a [...]
Jabberwookie
For Programming A to Z this week we were asked to use Java to create a text: Create a program (using, e.g., the tools presented in class) that behaves like a UNIX text processing program (such as cat, grep, tr, etc.). Your program should take text as input (any text, or a particular text of [...]
Character Study: Ole, Great Horned Owl
For Animals, People, and Those In Between this week we were asked to create a character study for the animal we sketched last week. I’m happier with the idea of Ole as a silhouette, but trying out the Wacom tablet and creating a few line drawings in Illustrator was a fun challenge. Here are a [...]