Anunnaki Human Genome Analysis

On a recent walk I was listening to a podcast that discussed translations of ancient Sumerian tablets and the lore they contained about the Anunnaki. I won’t expound on it very much except to say that it conveys an incredible set of creation myths, many of which you can directly trace elements right up through […]

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Programatic Circular Mosaic Filtering

Inspired by some artwork consisting of overlapping circles shaded different colors I decided to write a program to generate my own interpretation. My objective was to create an aesthetic abstract picture from a source image as a mosaic where the pattern was constructed from overlapping circles. The software first takes a picture and generates a […]

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Etch-A-NFT robot

Have you ever wanted to doodle on an etch-a-sketch but didn’t feel like getting up from your computer? Worry not my nostalgic lazy friend, for this dilemma has now been solved using robots, the cloud and blockchain! Let me introduce you to the Etch-A-NFT, now live at www.etchanft.live! What the hell am I looking at? […]

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Building Mazes in Photos

I was leaning back in my chair gazing out the window last week looking for inspiration for a photo project. A small house across the street has so many surfaces and facets but it’s stark whiteness caught my attention as supplying a unique blank canvas. So I waited until sunset and snuck over there with […]

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Paint Dipping Robot Crane

Like most homeowners, I have a sizeable stash of half used and expired paint cans that I know that I am never really going to use for touch ups around the house. That got me to thinking about what I might be able to use them for. I remembered reading about “motor agates” and “fordites” […]

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Study of a Modulo Sequence

As I’ve discussed before, many great findings in mathematics have arisen from the study of silly arbitrary functions. These functions often look quite simple but produce surprising results when carried out at length. Occasionally I attempt to come up with my own novel routine and almost always find that they collapse to something well known […]

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Sovereign: UnCensorable Social Media

Motivation Like many, I have been very troubled by the rise in wide spread surveillance, psychological warfare and censorship of journalists and citizens engaging in any discussion at odds with the preferred national narrative. Certainly Snowden‘s revelations 8yrs ago left no doubt on the veracity of what many (including me) dismissed as conspiracy theories up […]

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CryptoQuakes NFT

Further exploring unique possibilities for NFTs I decided to develop a system to create videos generated from seismographic readings! Substantial research and development was required to obtain the appropriate data direct from seismographic stations around the world, process it, generate the necessary data, imaging, audio and video. Even more work was required to implement a […]

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Studies in Chlandi Figures

Ernst Chlandi was a scientist in the late 18th century that is often referred to as the father of acoustics. One of his contributions was the development of Chlandi Plates, a means of studying wave patterns. In these experiments a metal plate of a particular geometry is suspended, sand is placed on it and a […]

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Moon Orrery

orrery [ awr–uh-ree, or– ] noun,plural or·rer·ies. an apparatus for representing the positions, motions, and phases of the planets, satellites, etc., in the solar system.   This endeavor has been the longest continuous build I have ever committed to so it is with great personal excitement to finally post about my Moon Orrery.   The […]

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3d Printer Laser Etching

This year for my birthday I stepped up my 3d printing game from my 3yr old Monoprice Select V2 to a new Ender-5 Plus; huge upgrade after many years of headache. I was left with what to do with my old printer, certainly too much potential to just throw it away. I thought it too […]

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Cathedral Radio

I’ve always wanted a cathedral radio, the antique sort that is at the corner of classy and gothic. Last summer I came across one at a flea market, it was in incredibly sorry shape which commanded the meager price I was actually willing to pay to own one. Initially I sought to restore the original […]

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IBM Ponder This 04-19 Solved

Credited with solving this (unusually easy) puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: This month’s challenge is from Reda Kebbaj. (Thanks!) Find nine different prime numbers that can be placed in a 3×3 square in such a way that the average of every row, column, and diagonal is also a prime number. I don’t know what happened here, […]

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IBM Ponder This 03-19 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Every real number can be approximated as a ratio of two integers. For example, pi is close to 22/7 but even closer to 3138/999; and there is an even better approximation with a denominator < 1000 (what is it?). We define m=BAT(x,N) as the denominator, m, of […]

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IBM Ponder This 01-19 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Alice and Bob are playing the following game: they start from a number N and each one of them in his or her turn (Alice starts) divides N by any divisor that is either a prime or a product of several distinct prime numbers. The winner is […]

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Firing Lasers at Ghosts

Back in the day I always wanted to send the Ghost Hunters TV show a device and see it used on TV. I didn’t want compensation or credit, I just wanted to see something I made on a TV show. One of these devices I thought of was to be left unattended with audio/video equipment […]

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IBM Ponder This 03-18 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Alice and Bob are given an interesting challenge. Alice will be given a random vowel (A, E, I, O, or U) in a room without Bob with six randomly set toggle (on/off) switches. She may change the state of at most one switch and then leave the […]

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IBM Ponder This 05-17 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: In the string CABACB, each letter appears exactly twice and the number of characters between the “A”s is one, between the “B”s is two, and between the “C”s is three. The same problem with the letters A-E cannot be solved, but adding a space (in the form […]

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Walking on Grids

Infrequently I stay in Manhattan for work. On one occasion I ended up staying quite some distance away from the office to save the company some money but I still opted to walk in. Along the way I came to think that there is a certain potential efficiency to traveling between two points in the […]

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IBM Ponder This 04-17 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: IBM recently announced a commercial Quantum computer. Such a computer can factor large numbers, using a Shor algorithm. The challenge this month is to factor at least one of the following three numbers: 27771495424394652906650011597233066116343506387184320546233728271726480989807112498372640545334956743914011373 98296593067163321549931012857525979998165090637663230976866143160359417516252340928637985390415053795128313 1412534667091752138605679066750993949837793629454397369052717798704788621599573184763086599428517731585079 Bonus ‘*’ if you factor all three. Hint: The challenge is […]

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Other Conway Geometries

I am a huge fan of cellular automata. The fingerprint of God is in the nature of the universe from atomic, to biologic, to economic, to cosmic and at each scope the emergence of complex systems arise not in spite of the lack of a central control but precisely because of it. This is how […]

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Magic Square Sigils

While there are variations, a Magic Squares is a grid of numbers where any row, column and the diagonals sum to a singular constant. There is no shortage of material on constructing them and interesting mathematic facts about them, but of interest to me was the ancient occult fascination with them. They are found around […]

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Multidimensional Minecraft

Imagining physical worlds in higher dimensional space is a passion of mine and I found myself thinking about what architectural features a building might have if it were designed in higher dimensions. To that end I decided I wanted to create a 4d CAD system of sorts so that I could design and explore 4d […]

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IBM Ponder This 03-16 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle (w/ extra credit!): Ponder This Challenge: This month’s challenge is from Yan-Wu He (thanks!) For a non-zero number (in list) (a1,a2,..,an), its square is (…, an,..,a2,a1), Let’s call the number N “squareversed” if its square ends with the reverse of N. For example, N=69714 is “squareversed”, since its square is […]

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IBM Ponder This 02-16 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle (w/ extra credit!): Ponder This Challenge: This month’s challenge is about IBM’s InterConnect 2016 conference. Assign each letter a different digit such that the following mathematical equations would be correct (** denotes exponentiation): a**connect = c (mod inter) a**connect = a**toe (mod at) a**connect = a**toe (mod cm) n**i = […]

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IBM Ponder This 12-15 Solved

Credited with a solving this puzzle.  Tricky one, only a couple solutions in the world submitted: Ponder This Challenge: Last month, Gene Amdahl, an IBM fellow who was the chief architect of the legendary IBM 360 system, died at age 92. In memory of his work, this month’s challenge focuses on the IBM-360 character set […]

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IBM Ponder This 11-15 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle.  I added an extra twist to this one to make the phrase have some meaning and I set out to submit a second one that was inappropriate to make the judge chuckle 🙂 Ponder This Challenge: To mark the announcement by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty about a new era of […]

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Gendered Numbers

An observation I’ve made on mathematics is that much of it seems to be able to be traced back to some bored mathematician coming up with a seemingly arbitrarily rule system for fun and following it through to conclusion.  In so doing they discover interesting and often seemingly useless principles along the way.  This fine […]

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IBM Ponder This 08-15 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle.  This was fun software to write! Ponder This Challenge: Find a way to fold a loop of string in three-dimensional space such that all three projections will be loop-free (i.e., you won’t be able to make a path from a point to itself without backtracking). Provide your answer as a […]

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Alchemist Cocktail Analysis

How might the prototypical alchemist go about designing the perfect cocktail? It would seem to me that they might start by defining the nature of each ingredient and expect the cocktail to be the composite nature of its parts. While somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I was interested to see what I would learn by taking to completion […]

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IBM Ponder This 07-15 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Four people stand in line with hats on their heads. On the back of each hat is a unique number (i.e., no two people have the same number) between 1 and 6. Each person can see only the numbers of the people in front of him. One […]

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Multidimensional Visualizer

I spend a lot of time thinking about and working on multidimensional problems.  This can be particularly daunting to visualize so I created a visual tool to allow for the exploration of multidimensional problems.  First, let’s better explain what I mean by a multidimensional problems; so let’s look at an example.  Let’s say my mood […]

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IBM Ponder This 06-15 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: IBM’s QRadar system keeps track of events by measuring something every second. It has an anomaly detection system that alerts the user when the current measurement is more than three standard deviations away from the average of all previous measurements. An imaginary attacker is trying to deceive […]

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IBM Ponder This 05-15 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Three people are playing the following betting game. Every five minutes, a turn takes place in which a random player rests and the other two bet against one another with all of their money. The player with the smaller amount of money always wins, doubling his money […]

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Autocomplete Fun

Before all the Facebook fun was common with posting silly autocomplete recommendations I was a trailblazer laughing at the recommendations Google had for completing your search strings so I decided to write some software to explore this further.  It took a bit of dabbling but I was able to feed text and pull back recommendations […]

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IBM Ponder This 11-14 Solved

Credited with a solution for this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, from alpha, beta, and gamma, through chi, psi, and omega. The names of the letters are of different lengths, from short two-letter names like mu or pi through the seven letters in omicron. We want to generate […]

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IBM Ponder This 09-14 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Let b = (2^3^4^5) / (e^n), otherwise stated as “two to the power of (three to the power of (4 to the power of 5)) over e to the nth power”, where n is an integer such that 1 < b < e. Find b, with an […]

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IBM Ponder This 07-14 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: 32 pebbles are placed on the six edges of a tetrahedron, as shown in the following figure. Two players are playing a game. Each player, on her turn, can take as many pebbles as she chooses, but a minimum of one pebble must be taken each turn, […]

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IBM Ponder This 06-14 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle (w/ extra credit!): Ponder This Challenge: Design 25 cubes so that each cube’s six faces display integer numbers in the range 0,1,…,31 such that: On each cube, all the numbers are different Any given two cubes share exactly one common number Please give your answer as 25 lines of six […]

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IBM Ponder This 05-14 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: This month’s challenge is from Michael Kleber, based on a problem invented by David Wilson. Every second, a gun shoots a bullet in the same direction at a random constant speed between 0 and 1. The speeds of the bullets are independent uniform random variables. Each bullet […]

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IBM Ponder This 04-14 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Inspired by the viral 2048 game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2048_%28video_game%29) game, this month’s question is a simpler one-dimensional version of it. Assume that random independent numbers, either 2 or 4 with a 50% chance each, come in from the right side of a bar with N slots. The numbers are […]

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IBM Ponder This 03-14 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: N lamps are set in a circle, and for each integer M you have a tool that can toggle the state (on/off) of any set of M consecutive lamps. Find a possible N which satisfies the following statements: The sum of its digits is less than 10. […]

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IBM Ponder This 12-13 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: This month’s challenge is from Michael Brand (thanks!) and a related riddle can be found as the December challenge on his site (“Using your Head is Permitted”, http://www.brand.site.co.il/riddles). Every Christmas, the employees of MegaCorp play a gift-giving lottery game. On the first of December, each of the […]

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IBM Ponder This 11-13 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: A three-dimensional cube has eight vertices, twelve edges, and six faces. Let’s call them 0-D, 1-D, and 2-D faces, respectively. Denote f(d,k) as the number of k-dimensional faces of an d-dimensional hyper cube, so f(3,1)=12. Find three cubes (with different dimensions d1, d2, and d3) such that […]

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Multidimensional Encryption

As more of a study in multidimensional reflections I devised and built the software for an encryption system that obfuscates a message through essentially multidimensional billiards. The process works like this: I define two boundaries, a large outer hypercube within which is a smaller hypercube. Bounded within the large hypercube and containing the smaller hypercube […]

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IBM Ponder This 12-12 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle (w/ extra credit!): Ponder This Challenge: 36 people live in a 6×6 grid, and each one of them lives in a separate square of the grid. Each resident’s neighbors are those who live in the squares that have a common edge with that resident’s square. Each resident of the grid […]

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Turtle 4D

As a child of the 80s I fondly recall learning to program in Logo.  This was a simple language that allowed you to instruct a turtle to draw pictures.  You could give it instructions such as move forward 50 spaces, turn 60 degrees, move forward 50 spaces and repeat 4 times more and it would […]

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IBM Ponder This 11-12 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Thanks to Adir Pridor for the following challenge: A gardener plants a tree on every integer lattice point, except the origin, inside a circle with a radius of 9801. The trees are cylindrical in shape and all grow together at the same rate. As the trees grow, […]

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IBM Ponder This 05-12 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: This month’s challenge is based on a wooden puzzle presented at the tenth Gathering for Gardner conference at Atlanta. There are six sets of jobs. Each set is performed on a different server and each set contains jobs that take 1,2,3,…,10 minutes to run. Obviously, all six […]

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IBM Ponder This 04-12 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle, this was a fun one: Ponder This Challenge: This month’s challenge is based on a model suggested by Harry Buhrman, Serge Fehr, Christian Schaffner, and Florian Speelman, who described the garden-hose model in their paper “The Garden-Hose Game: A New Model of Computation, and Application to Position-Based Quantum Cryptography” ( […]

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Math Music

I don’t recall what I was puzzling over at the time but it was some set of formulas that I was struggling to understand the relationship between.  In my frustration I started to wonder if I were to be able to “hear” the equations would their relationship be easier to grasp, like harmony.  Our brains […]

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IBM Ponder This 03-12 Solved

Credited with solving this puzzle: Ponder This Challenge: Arrange the numbers 1, 2, 3,…, 63 on the nodes of a balanced binary tree of height 6 such that each distance 1, 2, 3,…, 62 is realized on an edge; i.e., it is the difference of two vertices which are connected with an edge. Please supply […]

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ElectroResistivity 3D Scanner

I experimented with the notion of being able to generate 3d scans of objects based on their electrical resistance.  This came out of the work I did on my water keyboard that was controlled by locating your hand in a trough of water.  Aside from being able to simply create a novel 3d imaging system […]

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Binaural Beat

I enjoy the show Fringe but I often feel disappointed in myself that while I usually have a number of contraptions in various states of progress on my work bench, none of them are worthy of Walter Bishop’s attention.  I happened to be researching building an ECG to monitor brain waves for a different unrelated […]

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Time Machine Metronome App

I developed this Android application based on a request from a musician friend to build a metronome that could change time signatures.  Fun project! The Time Machine is the premier metronome for both the student and professional alike.  It is hard to fathom but it is the first and only metronome on the market that […]

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2D Synthesizer

I went out to see a friend of mine play with his band and It was the first band I had seen play in many years.  My wife was sick and so I went by myself and on the way home I spent the long ride back alone thinking about music theory and instruments.  I […]

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