Extra PolynymousThe alphabet used for the English language isn’t great. It generally works, but doesn’t capture the full spread of sounds. Depending on the dialect (and analysis method), there are 38 to 49 phonemes in spoken English. Also, the spelling system is awful. Of course, every problem is approachable with optimization, so I’ll run an analysis […]
I watched a great video about the creation of the NATO phonetic spelling alphabet, and wondered if I could do something similar with optimization. The video showed that the NATO alphabet was designed to make it easier to spell words over radio and telephone channels, which may have bad signal quality. There are a few […]
If we have a bunch of points that are uniformly spaced, we can squeeze them radially so that they yield a halftoned image. For example, if we have points distributed along a phyllotactic spiral, we can squeeze them to get a skull: How does this work? Math math math. As usual, we want to match […]
Let’s say you have lots of points, and you want to visit them rapidly. And you’re too lazy to solve the full TSP. How well do different approximations work? That is, how far would you have to travel to visit each point? Let’s say you have N points that are uniformly randomly distributed in a […]
Let’s scribble! There are other papers that have used scribbling for halftoning images, but I want to add a bit more math. A simple model is to have a circle that travels along a base curve. We can parameterize this as: . To use this for halftoning, we should know the curve length (per period) […]
HalftonePAL is a program written in Processing that lets you make halftoned versions of your images using circles, dots, and lines. You can change the size of the shapes, which pattern to use, switch between black or white paper (and the opposite ink), and more! It can save the output as SVG, JPG, or TXT […]
I’d like to be able to have a region that is densely packed with non-overlapping circles, whose sizes vary spatially in a pre-defined way. There are lots of resources for Poisson-disk sampling, but that doesn’t result in snugly packed circles. Time to do some tinkering! Random search The laziest way to do this: try to […]
While driving through Normandy, I was struck by the wackiness of a lot of the local place names. This is amplified by the large linguistic flow through the area, and local dialects that I’m not familiar with, but still felt very silly. For example: Looking at names like these, I figured that I could make […]
Previously, (1, 2) I’ve chopped one picture into square sections to make a new image. This time, I want to take freeform sections from a larger image to make a smaller one. This is basically like taking scissors to a magazine, then putting together the pieces to make a new picture. Let’s call the magazine […]
I received a comment with a great idea: try to hide images in pairs of lithophanes! Lithophanes are thin sheets of an opaque and translucent material with varying thickness that display an image when held up to light. The image is bright where the material is thin, and dark where the material is thick. Previously, […]