Links

KAHBAHBLOOOM: The Art and Storytelling of Ed Emberley

youtube.com

The exhibition draws on the Massachusetts-based artist’s personal archive of original hand-drawn sketches, woodblock prints, final proofs, and first edition books to survey his career and examine his influence on generations of readers and nascent artists.

Ed Emberley was a huge influence on me as a kid; I still have the books. I worked and worked to be able to draw some of the things by memory, and to this day his technique influences the way I think about breaking things down into simpler, smaller parts.

My history with Forth & stack machines

yosefk.com

He also showed how he scaled the values to simplify the calculation. It is pretty obvious that he has sped up the inner loop a hundred times by simplifying the calculation. He adds that his calculation is not only faster but more accurate than the standard SPICE equation. … He said, “I originally chose mV for internal units. But using 6400 mV = 4096 units replaces a divide with a shift and requires only 2 multiplies per transistor. … Even the multiplies are optimized to only step through as many bits of precision as needed.

This is Forth. Seriously. Forth is not the language. Forth the language captures nothing, it’s a moving target. Chuck Moore constantly tweaks the language and largely dismisses the ANS standard as rooted in the past and bloated. Forth is the approach to engineering aiming to produce as small, simple and optimal system as possible, by shaving off as many requirements of every imaginable kind as you can.

Raytracing

fabiensanglard.net

I recently came across Paul Heckbert’s business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert.

The goal was to produce the source code for a raytracer…that would fit on the back of a business card.