10 docs tagged with "animation"

This was an early exercise with p5. It stops drawing after 1000 frames. Refresh the browser to see it redraw.

I didn't formally studied computer graphics, so like many other areas of computer science, I get introduced to well-known ideas only when they appear in my line-of-sight. Years ago, when my son mentioned a college CS assignment using Bresenham's line algorithm, I'd never heard of it. I was attracted to the simplicity of the algorithm, and the fact that it addresses one of the earliest ad simplest computer graphics problems.

My animations to date have been written entirely with p5. I've dabbled with d3 and SVG, but haven't invested much time. With increased interest in visualizations at work, I've decided to dig into both technologies, starting with SVG.

clock arithmetic

Most things that we observe vary. We don't pay attention to things that don't change. When we measure those variables, we often use statistics like average or median to summarize. But those statistics don't describe the variability of the distribution. Standard deviation works well if the distribution is a bell curve, aka normally distributed. But many things we observe are not normally distributed. Yet we want a concise summary. One way to summarize is using quantiles, which involves dividing our observations into more-or-less equal size buckets of non-overlapping ranges of values. Common examples of quantiles are quartiles, with four buckets, and deciles, with ten buckets.

This was something we played around with at Cherry Arbor Design, and used it to create wall art, earrings, and when they were still a thing, fidget spinners.

rotating links

it's not Quicksort…

At Cherry Arbor Design, my wife and I created a lot of tilings. Some allow periodic tilings. Others are aperiodic, and can't repeat like wallpaper. Part of the appeal of aperiodic tiles is that on first encounter, it is remarkably difficult to tesselate without hitting a dead end, making them a kind of puzzle. We've made aperiodic Penrose tiles, Fractal Penrose tiles, the Golden B, and Ammann-Beenker tiles.

Many of the things we play around involve geometric symmetry. There are several types. This post is about an unusual symmetry. But first, a quick recap of some more well-known symmetries…