Interesting projects, or not. The projects described here range from one night ideas turned into code to life-long endeavours. Click on one of the
projects to view the details. Most of them contain something downloadable that lets you play around with it.
Note that most projects are not open source. I supply the source, grant you the right to play around with the
source, but I keep all rights, until somebody comes up with an improvement. If I receive the improvement, I'll release
the source code.
Mapped Web
Physical distances are not the same as psychological distances. Physical distances are easy enough to measure, but how do we go about measuring psychological distances? The Mapped Web does this by taking the chance that given a page contains the name of one country it will also contain the name of another country as a measure for psychological distance. The resulting images show us how close countries are to each other in psychological terms.
Google News Map
Google News Map shows a map of the World with on top of it projected the latest headlines according to Google News, pointing with their upper left corner to the country where it refers to.
Cambrium
One of my better alife programs. Cambrium shows creatures crawling around the screen in search for food. The creatures are controled by a neural network and assembled out of parts.
Land Geist
Land Geist is a combination ofGoogles Zeit Geist , GoogleMind Share andVisited Countries . For keywords like 'war', 'poverty', 'party', this project shows which country (names) have the highest relative scores (google shares). I.e. 35% of all pages with the word Iraq on them, also contain the word War, making Iraq leader for war, just after Afghanistan and North-Korea. The axis of evil appear therefore in red.
Visited Countries
Visited Countries is a small project demonstrating the power of manipulating the palette of a gif image on the fly. Here we start with a map of the world with each country in a different color. The script asks which country you have been to and sets the colors of those countries to red, the rest to green.
Word Color
Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the average hue, which is later converted to a color.
Archean selforganization
The Archean project explores self organization by multiplying the six dimensional strings in a matrix world with a transformation matrix, a little likeConway's game of life , but then in full color. From a random pattern something more ordered emerges. Different every time!
Sea level rise
A little program that allows you to see what would happen to the coastline of europe with the sea at a certain level.
Chinese Radicals
Learning Chinese is hard, they say, but it is made easy with the Douwe Osinga's learn to read Chinese method, to be downloaded for free from here. Chinese Radicals is a simple program that teaches the user in an interactive way the 215 radicals used in Simplified Chinese.
Google Random Image Google Random Image is a little javascript code that scans the html of the page it is on and uses that to find a matching image on Google Image Search, which is then displayed. This way you can always have a fresh image on your site/blog.
Google Top 1000 Google Top 1000 is a list of website who have the number one position at google when you search for the corresponding number. If, for example, you search for the number 42, the number one position is a site on Deep Thought (why not the HHGttG?), so this site would apear in slot 42 of my Google list. I wrote a script to do this, which you can download, but it is very easy to do by hand of course.
Google Date Google Date lets you enter a date and then searches using Google for what happened on that date and shows three results. Since Google isn't very good at sorting documents for relevance when it comes to dates, it usually doesn't give you a list of big events, but of the things happening in the lives of random people.
Collective Proza
You know this game where everybody gets to add one sentence to a story? Well, here's the online version. In order to make it a little bit more interesting and protect the concept a bit from abuse, each visitor can contribute one candidate sentence. When there are four options, a vote starts and the first one with two more votes than the others gets added. Repeat.
Collective Poetry Everybody knows thosemagnetic poetry kits that let you form poems with magnetic words on your refrigerator. This projects lets you do the same thing on the web. That has been done before, but here the thing is real time (you see what others are doing) and persistent (if you restart, you'll see the same config).
Poetry in Translation
Poetry in Translation uses Googles Automatic Translation service to translate sentences from English to German, then to French and then back to German again with sometimes funny results.
20 Words
simple project that allows you to check the languages you speak and get a list of coverage
Speakamylanguage
simple project that allows you to check the languages you speak and get a list of coverage
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