A friend has been egging me on to buy a gadget called the Silhouette Cameo. You can think of it as a printer, but instead of a print head it has a little blade that can cut through paper, up to pretty thick cardstock. It comes with a surprisingly powerful editor, like a baby version of Adobe Illustrator. It’s surprisingly easy to use. This is my First Thing Ever, cut from a single piece of paper. I think this is going to be a lot of fun! The inspiration for this design came from Paul Jackson’s wonderful The Pop-Up Book.

While walking my dog Niko tonight, I was talking to him, as usual. I was just babbling. I was also mumbling. I thought there should be a nice portmanteau word combining babbling and mumbling. Both end with “bling”, so the first three letters have two choices: m/b, u/a, and m/b. That situation can be nicely drawn as a cube. Here are the axes, and the results. Of the eight possibilities, two are already words: in the back-lower-right corner (the cube we can’t see) is bubbling, and in the near-lower-left is bumbling. But the one I like best is bambling. I don’t know, it just feels right. To see a larger view of this image, and another image of all the cubes isolated, click here:

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At SIGGRAPH 2013 I gave an invited course titled “Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics.” The good folks at SIGGRAPH recorded the course and have now made it available for free on the SIGGRAPH website. It runs just under 3 hours, but unlike the attendees at the convention center, you can stop and start it whenever you like! The link to the video is:  http://siggraphmediablog.blogspot.com/2014/01/siggraph-launches-free-program-offering.html  Thanks to Eric Haines for alerting me that this was now available.