Amusings & other creations (from the early web)

by | Sunday, October 15, 2023

I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a variety of personal websites when I moved to MSU and they sat at punya.educ.msu.edu till I got my own domain name. You can actually see early versions of my website (and its evolution) by going to the Wayback Machine, The earliest instance that I could find was archived Nov 4, 1999, and amazingly enough has my daughter Shreya’s birth announcement archived as well. And for some strange reason, a snapshot of my website (from Jan 2008) is archived on the the servers at the University of Hawaii!

These early websites were hand coded, HTML pages with lots of content that has been lost to time. In most cases this is a good thing, since not much of it deserved being saved. But there were other little things that I had played with and created that I miss. These were random things like palindromic poems, and clerihews about famous (and not so famous) people; short essays and more.

Imagine my surprise when, while digging into my dropbox archives, I discovered a bunch of stuff, that had survived after all. I am not sure they have any intrinsic value but, they ARE meaningful to me. They also capture, visually, the aesthetic of the early web! (This isn’t the first time that my dropbox archives have surprised me, more about that in A (Wheatstone) bridge to the past).

Anyway, once I found them I took a few mins this morning to upload them to this website. What I didn’t want to do was redesign them to fit what my website looks like now. So be warned, early web experiments coming up. Small font sizes, glowing text, it is all there. In spades. But without further ado here we go, in no particular order.

First up, are a series of short essays that I called A-Musings: Occasional essays on technology and life. Looking back, I realize that what I was doing was blogging, before the idea of blogging had entered the general consciousness. I am guessing that I wrote the first one of these (Tea and Technology) sometime in 2000/2001.

Back in 1988, after having graduated from my undergraduate in Engineering, I joined the Industrial Design Center at the Indian Institute of Technology to get my masters in Visual Communications. (I have written and spoken about that shift in various contexts: a keynote at IDC, an essay titled My Favorite Failure, and even my TED talk.

It was in design school, that I started just for fun, a little project called “A2Z: A dictionary of design.” That ended up becoming a book and it is still archived on the IDC website. What I had forgotten was that I had designed a web-version as well.

I do want to apologize in advance for the design of this website – but it is a historical relic of the early days of the web, and the interface is quite clunky. I remember most of the alignments on the page are done with “invisible gifs” (does anybody remember that!). Anyway, here it is for your enjoyment: A2Z: The dictionary of design.

Clerihew’s are short biographical poems with a certain fixed format. As the Atlantic defined it:

The clerihew is a bit of rhyming doggerel invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). Traditionally, it’s a four-line verse made up of two rhyming couplets, with meter intentionally (often ridiculously) irregular. Its purpose is to offer a satiric or absurd biography of a famous person. Here are three of Bentley’s own creations:

At some point I got inspired to write a bunch, about famous and not so famous people. Here they are.

I have always been interested in the idea of symmetry, which can be seen in my ambigram designs as well as in my experiments with palindromic poetry. The first one I wrote was most probably when I was in graduate school, maybe 1994/5 and then a few more have come by since then.

Once again I should warn the reader that the interface of this mini-site leaves a lot to be desired. I was experimenting with javascripts and pull down menus and clearly went too far. But here they are: Palindromic poems.

My interest in fractals led me to think about the architecture of Indian temples (something I was introduced to by my professor Kirti Trivedi.). Once during my web browsing I came across this site, which is now gone. I just archived the entire site since I did not want it to get lost. This not created by me, and my attempts to find the author have come to naught. Here it is Indian Architecture.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Unlocking education… news story

Our very own Leigh Wolf is quoted in a story in today's State News. Check out, Education unlocked: MSU professors use open courseware to provide class materials for students Leigh manages to bring in the MAET program in to the picture (why am I not surprised?) and how...

Research conduct: The movie

From Ken Friedman & the PhD Design listserv: The current issue of The Scientist has a story on an interactive film that helps research students and early career researchers to understand and navigate the perils of research misconduct. Highlights: "The Lab is a...

ChatGPT3 writes a Mathematical Proof (in verse)

ChatGPT3 writes a Mathematical Proof (in verse)

Many years ago I got interested in writing poetry about mathematics (all archived on my Math-Poetry page). Just to be clear, I am not a good poet (far from it) and I am even less of a mathematician—but it was a fun exercise to engage in. That said, a couple of my...

Code, Kathak, and Confusion: A Story of Learning with GenAI

Code, Kathak, and Confusion: A Story of Learning with GenAI

One of the students in my Human Creativity x AI in Education class is an accomplished Kathak dancer and last week we got into a discussion of how she could bring this personal interest into projects we were exploring in the class. How could GenAI help? So yesterday,...

iPhones, higher ed & faculty resistance

Today's NYTimes has a story Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod about universities handing out iPhones and iTouchs to freshmen. A part of this may be making specific universities look "cool" to their incoming students - a requirement in the highly competitive world of...

More sketches

A few weeks ago I had blogged about my experiments with sketching on a Wacom graphics tablet. Here are more sketches I have created in the meanwhile. You can see them here as a webpage or view it as a slide show.

Endless rewriting: What great academic advising looks like

Helen Hazen, is the author of 1983 book, Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance, and the Female Imagination. In a recent article in The American Scholar titled "Endless Rewriting" she recounts the way the book came to be and in particular the role that her editor (Jacques...

Students video premiere on aftered.tv

This just in. Leigh Wolf just informed me that a video created by three of her students this past summer accepted by AfterEd - a web-based video channel produced by EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University. New content is published weekly, including news,...

Keynote Presentation: AI in Education Summit

Keynote Presentation: AI in Education Summit

Note: The image above is the result of a two-stage creative process—done in collaboration with AI. Dall-E was tasked, over multiple iterations, to craft a woodcut-style image, to abstractly capture the idea of AI and education, with dark and light motifs, aiming to...

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