I've seen a couple of references recently to the beautiful mathematical/scientific art of Bathsheba Grossman. Very impressive stuff that is almost entirely enabled by technology. She uses computers, laser etching, 3D printing, and maybe most interestingly, direct-metal printing, which is something I had not been familiar with. It's really nice how she gives detailed explanations of how she makes the pieces.

I just stumbled across this interesting discussion among several typographers about the euro symbol. The discussion is from 10 years ago, when the symbol was just being introduced.

There are interesting points in there covering everything from the name of the symbol itself (some people think it should be the "ecu" instead of the "euro", others vehemently disagree), its placement into unicode and other character sets, complaints about the glyph's general form, political trouble with the guidelines set forth for its use by th

i've been learning more about fonts and how they work. To that end, i've created a simple font that mimics my own handwriting. It's far from perfect, and it doesn't properly handle some of the characters that i'd like it to, but it's a start. If you'd like to see an example of what it currently looks like, you can see Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky (pdf) rendered in the font.

I enjoy the balance that fonts give between artistic/aesthetic decisions, rigorous formal requirements, and arcane technical minutiae. I also find it really amusing to be able to search for text in a pdf reader and have it pick out characters of what looks like my (terrible) handwriting.

Jim Crooks pointed me to an experimental group who have created bizarre things from cornstarch. Their techniques are simple: a basic solution in a drum, oscillated at a specific frequency and amplitude. Then they inject puffs of air, and simple holes are formed in the liquid. But at certain frrequencies and amplitudes, the holes will persist indefinitely. And at certain frequencies, the holes generate creepy, writhing structures that dance across the entire surface of the drum.

The linked site contains a movie (you should watch it all the way through to the end!) and a pdf detailing the specifics of their experimental apparatus and their findings.

Some fun links from yesterday's NYTimes:

• Is Time Travel Possible?
• Reality influenced by others?
• Best of web art

The Bicycle Film Festival is showing this Thursday through Sunday at the Anthology Film Archives. It looks like a lot of fun, actually, as part of the city's Bike Month. Most politically interesting, perhaps, is the "bike parade" scheduled at 1pm on Saturday, starting in Madison Square park. We'll see what happens, i suppose.

Not surprisingly, most of the promotional materials about bike month seem to include critical mass on 27 May (the last friday of the month, as usual).

So Tisch's ITP program is having their spring show this year tomorrow and the next day. I've been to their shows in past years, and they're interesting, if sometimes frivolous displays of geeky tech-art.

Last year (or was it the year before?) there was a model train setup with RFID transmitters so the individual model train stations could each have an report of the ETA for the various trains on the track. There was also a really cool project which was basically a projector focussed on the wall, and a phone number printed just below the projector. you could call the number from your cell phone, and whistle into your phone. the projector would draw different patterns on the wall depending on how you whistled -- so it was like an etch-a-sketch, except controlled acoustically, and reliant on a tremendous technological network.