Ben’s Projects &
Stuff
Well,
you’ve reached another leaf in the vast, largely apocryphal, and endlessly
informative web. This particular corner exists mainly to exhibit some of the
frequently fruitless, often obscure, and generally geeky projects that my
friends and I tend to squander massive quantities of time and energy on. We
usually start out by surfing around looking for anyone who’s already done the
work for us, but we rarely find anything – that might say something about the
worth of what we’re doing, but fortunately we’re not listening. Anyway, writing
up the results is fun and, in the words of my thesis
advisor Duane Bailey,
“An hour spent writing is an hour spent considering a problem instead
of, say, grappling with a computer.”
Geeky Projects
-
No-Three-In-Line – a fun combinatorial
problem: how many points can you place on an NxN grid so that no three of them
are in a straight line?
-
Paterson’s Worms – A tiny number of simple
rules for walking around a hexagonal grid can produce some surprisingly complex
and beautiful behavior.
-
Making movies out of individual frames – this is not
as easy as it sounds. Here’s my method, and links to the tools I found.
-
My
ancient senior thesis on aperiodic tiling.
Word and Language Resources
I love
words. Like, a lot. Here are some of the useful spots for linguaphiles I’ve
found:
-
Wordsmith’s word of the day:
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This is also the home of the Internet Anagram Server and
the A.Word.A.Day mailing list.
-
The Dict Development Group: this is my
favorite online dictionary because it allows regular expression searches. Its
main resource is the Webster’s Revised Unabridged 1913 dictionary, but it also
contains a number of other smaller databases.
-
Merriam Webster Online: your basic dictionary
and thesaurus. Unfortunately you have to pay to get the unabridged version.
-
Rhymezone rhyming dictionary: essential for
email flirtation when wrestling with a would-be-clever turn of phrase.
Other Cool Stuff
-
If
you’re ever in up near Manchester (UK), check out the Red Barn. It’s extra cool.
You can
find me at chaffin@gmail.com.
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