The one below is called One Red Dot, by David Carter. It’s one of a series of books for kids featuring his fanciful paper sculptures, but I think adults will like it too. In spite of the fact that I love my iPad and do most of my recreational reading on it now, there’s something magical about opening a book and having a 3 dimensional creature or landscape pop up.

He also wrote another great book I got a while ago called The Elements of Popup which shows you how various popup mechanisms work. It’s awesome. You can even download the popup patterns from his website.

The other book that came in the mail is Trail by David Pelham which is lovely and delicate…but not really for kids.

The all white landscapes in this one remind me of an inspiring video I recently saw called The Ice Book – a miniature theatre performance projected behind a pop-up-book stage set.

Lastly, did you know that most popup books are still assembled by hand? (usually in China) It’s true…they are labor intensive and apparently too intricate for machines to deal with.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

A dad and his son attached a video camera to a balloon, sent it up into space, and made this recording of the earth’s outer reaches.

Look what can be done with some paper, an xacto knife, and glue! By Helen Musselwhite

This site even has stencils so you can make your own! I think it’s time for a TR pumpkin carving party! :-)

Apparently Facebook users like them some music.

Link to iLike Application on Facebook

Each tshirt project is illustrated with clear instructions – most don’t require anything but a pair of scissors, a pen, and a ruler…and most take between 5-15 minutes. The design on the left is especially good for all those tshirts with annoying logos on the back!

As Turing himself was famously gay, there are now relatively few inclusiveness milestones for the prestigious gong to pass.

An annoying property of these types of news stories is their bland and tasteless descriptions of a person’s important contributions to an academic field, to wit:

Her pioneering compiler work culminated in algorithms and technologies that are the basis for the theory of program optimization today and are widely used throughout the industry.

And that’s the detailed version, taken from Allen’s bio page.

Don’t hold back guys … where are the papers? I love seeing old scientific papers, thinking back to a time when techniques that are printed in thousands of textbooks we love to hate were just being invented.

I wish I could tell you what Allen did, but our stupid society keeps that information locked up. After over an hour of search, I found an early Allen paper called Control flow analysis … a hearty fuck you to the ACM (of which I used to be a member) for keeping this and all the rest of the Computer Science corpus locked up behind a password protected for-pay-only website. Scientific knowledge belongs to all of us.

Control flow analysis is my favorite topic from my favorite CS class, Compiling Techniques. Control flow is used by compilers to make my crappy code run faster. The idea is to build graph of the various execution paths that are possible in a given piece of code and then using graph traversal techniques to remove redundant code paths or introduce new paths that exploit hardware features. I also like it because debugging control flow (when you are making a compiler) involves making pretty pictures as in this comparison of three different control flow algorithms.

In Figure 5.5 the three approaches are compared using a method of medium size. The start block is marked dark gray, loop headers are red, blocks with loop depth greater than zero are orange and blocks without successors are drawn green. All other blocks are painted yellow. This way one can easily see the differences between the three algorithms.

Link to Frances Allen Turing Award on CNN