Parabola focus animation

Parabola is well-known by its property of focusing light in one point called focus.
I've just created interactive demo showing this parabola property.

Of course, I created the demo using processing.org


Demo simulates light photons physics assuming photons to be rigid particles. The particles bounce off parabola. When you move mouse, you change parabola focus.

Demo is located here.

Rolling billiard balls in a palm

I've got a strange hobby - to roll billiard balls in a palm.

Like these ones:

About 10 years ago a colleague of mine taught me how to roll 2 small metal balls in a palm. This trick interested me so I found some balls from big ball bearing and started my trainings.

Some time later I found myself not satisfied with these small metal ball. I found slightly bigger stone balls and started trainings with them.

At the moment I stuck on billiard balls. They're big enough and pretty easy to find at stores. They also much more robust than stone ones.

Since I wanted to advance in this strange hobby, I started to roll 3 balls at once. I even try to roll 4 of them.



There're some things I'm interested to know -
Where this hobby come from?
What is the history of this skill?
Does it help to my health or whatever else?

love (with processing)

I'm publishing my another experiment with processing.
I called it 'love'
The applet and source code are located here.

How t is done
I wanted my heroes in this sketch to have transparent tails. It is not a problem on solid background. To make tails transparent with bitmap background I used following technique.

1. I render my 'souls' to color layer

a 'man' soul:
a 'woman' soul:

2. I render souls as white spots to other layer. I fade that layer to black before rendering.

3. I add my second layer to the first one as alpha channel 4. I render my background which is a bitmap with some simple animation on it

5. Last step is to render image with 'souls' on top of the background. And then I render some effects 'pink hearts' near pairs which are in love.

bubble bath with processing

I played with processing last several days. It is very interesting and easy-to-use environment built on Java.
As a result, look at my first toy - bubble bath



Here is online applet with the source: My google pages

A periodic table of visualization methods

There is great a table available at www.visual-literacy.org

The table orders methods by different categories:

• Data visualzation
• Information visualization
• Concept visualization
• Strategy visalization
• Metaphor visualization
• Compound visualization

and:

• Process/Structure

and:

• Overview/Detail/both

and:

• divergent/convergent thinking

This table is very useful for those who make presentations often.

Low-cost sensing and communication with an LED

Few days ago I found an interesting site - hackaday.com
It is a news site for computer/electronic geeks.

One post interest me more than others.
It describe how one can make led matrix to input user's multiple touches.
If you'll follow this link, you'll find a charming video how this device works.

Representation of knowledge

I recently was surfing blogs and wandered into wikipedia's concept map and mind maps.

I already tried mind mapping technique before. I agree that this type of knowledge/ideas representation is much more creative and natural than all these lists and tables.

But concept maps become an invention for me. Now I see that concept maps are great way to represent knowledge, thoughts and.. concepts! They also help to organize your ideas and advance them.

I evaluate CmapTools for creating concept maps. It is easy to learn, and it is free!
Mind Manager is good for mind mapping. But it is still commercial :-(