### Archive

Archive for the ‘Appreciation’ Category

## The Trouble with Burger a la Carte

I appreciate the simplicity and elegance of this build-your-own-burger a la carte menu, but it does create some real problems.

From an ordering perspective, it’s nice that all toppings are a uniform \$1 in cost.  But is it fair?

A burger’s worth of applewood bacon is probably worth a buck; a fried egg is reasonably priced at a dollar.

But how many bread-and-butter pickles would I expect to get for a dollar?  Or pickled jalapenos?  Way more than I could put on a burger, I suspect!

www.MrHonner.com

## Uneven but Parallel

The uneven bars get kind of a bad rap.  I mean, they’re parallel, too, after all.

www.MrHonner.com

## Cool Milk Experiment

This video demonstrates a really cool and simple experiment that can be conducted with milk, food coloring, and dish soap.

Watching this pattern change and evolve made me think of chaotic dynamical systems, and their representations like the Mandelbrot set.

I wonder if there is mathematics that models systems like this and describe how they behave?

www.MrHonner.com

## Averia: The Average Font

This is a clever and interesting idea:  creating a new font by taking the average of all existing fonts.

http://iotic.com/averia/

By overlaying all the small letter a‘s, say, from all the different fonts, one can take a visual average and create a new letter a.  Repeat for the whole alphabet, numerals, and punctuation marks, and voila!, you’ve got Averia.

The idea of taking a visual average may be a bit mysterious, but the author describes a few different approaches in how to combine the images.  Essentially all of the instances of a particular symbol are placed on top of each other, and the the darkest parts of the new image are where the instances intersect the most.  The result is then smoothed over to create a readable letter.

And the font looks pretty nice, if not too exciting.  Just what you might expect from the average font.

www.MrHonner.com

## Sidewalk Sphere Sculpture

I really don’t have any idea what this is, or why it is in this person’s front yard, but now I kind of want one.

www.MrHonner.com

## So Many Switches

As I was changing over to play guitar, my friend started explaining to me how to operate his complicated foot-switch setup.  He stepped on a switch.

Click.  The light came on.  “This one’s slapback.”  Click.  The light went off.

Click.  “This one’s long delay.”  Click.

Click.  “This one’s boost.”  Click.

I started to get confused.  Then it hit me:  there are

$2^{10} = 1024$

possible combinations of effects!

So I asked to go back to the bass.