Orissa Folklore

Not so Cuil

Jul 28, 2008

I was just trying out Cuil the new search engine and came up with some strange results. This is what the front page looks like, rather dark for my liking, but again they had to do something different from Google's stark white front page. if you click on the "About...

Eye Twisters

Jan 23, 2008

Eye Twisters: Ambigrams & other Visual Puzzles to Amaze and Entertain is a book edited by Burkard Polster, a professor of mathematics at Monash University. It features some of my work... From the back cover: Eye Twisters is all about ambigrams--words that are...

New ambigrams, Mert-Demir and one more…

Jan 7, 2013

I recently received an email with the following request: I am an engineer living in Turkey and I am going to have my second son hopefully in April and I would love to have their names as a tattoo. However having such a special work that will remain with me for my...

Creating Palindrograms, aka palindromic ambigrams

Nov 24, 2009

Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged...

Vijay Iyer, polymathy and trans-disciplinary creativity

Aug 17, 2014

Vijay Iyer, (http://vijay-iyer.com/) is an Indian-American jazz pianist and composer. He is a MacArthur Genius grant winner and is currently Franklin and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University and is widely regarded as being one of...

On writing less badly

Sep 12, 2010

I just came across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, 10 tips on How to Write Less Badly [H/T Geekpress]. It is not that I agreed with every point being made there but a couple of them (To become a writer, write!; Find a voice, don't just get...

Representing DNA as code

Mar 9, 2009

What does it mean to represent something? Sean Nash (of Nashworld) and I have been having some fun at the expense of periodic representations (my post and his response) and even children's books. I had been wanting to write about this for the past few days but travel,...

We feel fine about ambient findability (really?)

Nov 21, 2008

Most of us live our lives with the assumption of practical obscurity - i.e. the idea that what we do, even in public places, is essentially private. There are just too many people and just too few ways of tracking us individually. So we were for the most part,...

Plugin’ into superpowers

May 19, 2023

I have been playing with couple of the newly released ChatGPT plugins (you have to have the paid version to use them) and want to share some of my early experiments. The two I am going to talk about are the ChatWithPDF and the Wolfram plugins. Short answer, they are...