randform

today György Ligeti died.
an exceptional composer, pioneering micropolyphony, fluid in many languages, and unasked filmscore writer

some samples from his work can be found here (audio) and here (score). However, the sound examples can give only a faint idea of the experience a live performance of his work can be.

This latin sentence (the sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort) is more than a palindrome (a sentence that can be read in both directions). In fact it can be read in all four directions of the square exposing even more symmetry. You can mirror it along its diagonals, but not all the symmetries of a square are present: a rotation by 90 degrees does not map the letters to themselves (pong).

assume the world was a simple one (more…)

a google mirror, that is a mirror image of googles page in some sense… (more…)

I know: this link is not very fresh, but still it is worth a post. And it is indeed fresher than the link to its predecessor.
Both are Flash adventure games. The latter featuring an …um someone… inhabitant of an overcrowded planet facing an intergalactic crash. The former even an alien hijacking of a lovely dog…lots of creatures…
or: both are very poetic little treasures with a dreamlike setting and a very good meditative sound track.
Not your cup of tea, these themes? Well better decide for yourself what these games are about…
Created by the Czech studio Amanita Design the games are full of reminiscences to old eastern european illustrations and style. sweet.

Last week the Berlin Air Show ILA closed and we were happy that no plane crashed down on us. The question of why they do this show in such a densely populated spot is apparently not going together with our sense for rational reasoning.

However for the next ILA it seems batman or buckbeak the hippogriff may land in our backyard – as can be learned from the press release I and press release II of the bavarian company ESG or in the article in the daily mail.

From the article in the daily mirror I would say that the thing which apparently flies already around looks more like batman, however from ESG´s press release it seems that they want to call this thing “Gryphon”. However one thing is clear – this thing is not even a WOLPERTINGER!!

As some readers may know, we like the game pong and awkward versions of it. (see also pong.mythos.) Apparently other people share this passion …as e.g. viennese computer science students (called emcgames), who did this great pink pingk pong.
Unfortunately it seems the game is for windows only.
kotaku called pingK an Electric Kool-Aid Acid pong, however this is a strange kind of acid sound in the video … or lets say the truth: i think it is better to switch the sound off.
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We finally managed to put an excerpt of our video documentation of seidesein on the daytar website.

seidesein is an interactive environment, which investigates communication in virtual 3D space.

seidesein can be experienced on a home computer as well as in bigger setups like a virtual reality theatre. This is due to the platform independency of the underlying software called jReality. (see also links above :-))

I had the pleasure to give a talk at the Days “Data processing and Geometry” (this is what google makes from the title) at Lyon the first two days of june.
It is quite an experience to attend a scientific meeting when having only a faint idea of the language (the spoken one, not the scientific) :-). While lasting only two days the conference covered quite a widespread range of topics. Especially interesting to me was some introduction into the design of the CGAL library — a collection of robust and efficient algorithms for geometry presented by Sylvain Pion and Raphaelle Chaine. An other interesting talk was from Alain Daurat on discrete tomography of convex sets. The question here is about algorithms that allow the reconstruction of the shape given the sample values along some finite number of directions (and what are the conditions on the choice of directions to ensure a reconstruction is possible). The complete reconstruction of any set given sample data along any discrete straight line was turned into a game by us recently. Many of the talks dealt with (re)construction of shapes: like arithmetic definition for Bresenham circles (Jean-Luc Toutant), a modeler based on the topology of discrete objects (Alain Daurat), or an algorithm for implicit surfaces (Christophe Raffalli)
I myself tried to draw the attention to the Berlin grown software jReality and oorange.