Make your own comics

I am very happy about Web 2.0 today. It sort of hit a trampoline when I saw kottke post the most elaborate Line Rider track ever. People are crazy! Crazy awesome.

Then I saw Bitstrips on boingboing: “BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make ‘characters’ using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date.” Yarg, this is the perfect distraction from my thesis.

bitstrips screenshot

March 25, 2008. comics, computers/programming. 3 Comments.

Haeckel illustrations

Haeckel_Actiniae Haeckel_Melethallia Haeckel_Discomedusae Haeckel_Arachnida Haeckel_Stephoidea

Ack! I almost wet myself just now, after realizing that tons of Ernst Haeckel illustrations are available in high-res, in the public domain, on Wikipedia. I am downloading them now. I’m going to cycle through them for my desktop background. And someday I am going to make them into wallpaper prints. (You know, when I get some walls.) Seriously, can you imagine??

This one would look awesome in the guest bathroom…
Haeckel Polycyttaria

If you’d like a zip file of all the Haeckel images I downloaded, you can get it here. It’s 187 MB, 121 images.

March 5, 2008. patterns. 7 Comments.

Where the yin yang symbol comes from

yin yangWow, this page has a description of where the yin yang symbol comes from. It claims that the symbol is actually a graph of the length of the shortest shadow observed each day throughout one year. It’s a simple spiral.

yin yang graph

(Apologies for linking to pages with pop-up ad windows!)

March 5, 2008. information visualization. 1 Comment.