t-log

Look out Oxford Scientific Films?
Well, not quite. The quality is pretty bad, and most of the action takes place off camera, but Issaku found a green caterpillar which he kept in a bugbox on the terrace. On Saturday we set up a time-lapse camera and went to bed. Sure enough, in the morning it had transformed into a beautiful Aosuji Ageha (Blue Triangle, Graphium sarpedon) butterfly. See the film here.

Scrambled Loggs

'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.'

from scramblizer.com

and here is t-log, scrambled.

Enigma

http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/enigma/

Dad sent me this link last night. It's put together by Tony Sale, engineer and expert on WWII cryptography, and the man who saved Bletchley Park. The site is a very easy to read, memo-style history of the German electronic encoding machine, Enigma, and how the Polish, French and most famously the British, with Alan Turing, cracked it in the lead up to, and during, WWII. The great thing about the site is the virtual Engima machine that you can actually use to decipher a code. It's a pretty primitive bit of web coding, only works on some browsers, and you can only decode the message provided. But the hands-on feel is great. There are other virtual engima machines on the web, but none have the authority of Tony Sale's. I'm suprised someone hasn't built one in Flash - should be possible...

Bobcat

A new toy. A binary calculator, made in the 60s? for the Open University, to explain how a computer works. The system is really very simple - although it takes a while to get your head around it. There are 14 flipflops - off on switches. 7 small ones at the top are counters. On the bottom there are 3 large adjustable flip flops and 4 smaller ones. These are where the work is done. The machine is 'programmed' to do addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, by placing pins in the appropriate places. The 2 numbers to be calculated are input into the bottom flipflops, in binary. Ball-bearings are then rolled from the left side down to the right, passing through the flip flops. For each pass, a second ball-bearing is released to the counter flip-flops and counts the result. You continue running balls through the machine until it switches itself off, and the result can be read off the counter flip-flops. the photo at the top shows the result 100 - or 4. The main work is done by the 3 large flip flops at bottom right. These make up an AND gate. If any of the flipflops show 1, then the ball goes one way. If none of them show 1 (all are 0), then the ball goes another.

Fantastic!

sony navi

Just found these initial sketches for a navigation module built for Sony's corporate web in 2001, so thought I'd throw them on here. We were working on the 2001 Sony corporate site at the time. (We've rebuilt it several times since - the latest version last year.) Alongside the main site construction and design work, I worked in collabortion with Sony Design Center (see Concept into Form) on an R&D project to develop an experimental mini navigation tool that could be used across all Sony's 1000s of websites. The final version had a parent on the sony.co.jp site, and a junior version that was implemented across the Sony webworld. In the end it never really worked as a navigation tool, but it was a fun project.