Gernreich (Michael's Ideas)

Projects by Michael Carnright, each with its own page.

LaserMadeMusic

Musical instruments cut from 3mm Baltic birch plywood on a laser, and the files to build them. Trumpets, flutes, ocarinas, panpipes, bagpipe chanters, a lyre-harp, a kalimba and more, with the generators and tools behind them. The cutting and the playing are on the LaserMadeMusic channel. Open it

Hexagonal dice box

A finger-jointed hexagonal box in 3mm ply with seven hexagonal pockets from glued insert layers, for a polyhedral dice set, and a lid held by 2 × 1mm magnets. Open it

Win(d)Bag

A bagpipe tune player begun in BASIC on an IBM PCjr and written in Visual Basic 3 between 1995 and 2000, with its source and a web edition that plays the tunes in the browser. Open it

Gernreich writing

A script in which every letter is two steps on a square grid and every word is one unbroken line, with a live writer and reader, and Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drawn as a single line. Open it

Coprime intervals

Coprime pairs as a grid of rays, as Turk's head knots and as the musical intervals inside one octave. Open it

Harmonics

Michael's 1992 search for a consonance rating for musical intervals: BASIC programs written on a second-hand IBM PCjr, then Fortran and C, that count how often each ratio turns up among pairs of whole numbers. The scans, exact transcriptions and what each program found; the starting point of Coprime intervals. Open it

Lapping

Two runners on a track: the faster laps the slower every Z = XY/(X − Y), the equation Michael worked out at sixteen. The same equation gives when clock hands meet, the month of the Moon's phases and how often the Earth overtakes Mars. Open it

Atomic layer memory

Data stored as the stacking order of close-packed layers of silicon or carbon atoms, with a spacer layer between every bit and an atomic force microscope tip reading it from the side. Michael thought it up after reading Drexler's Nanosystems. Open it

Knot crossings

Two ropes crossing each other 8 times, and all 256 ways to choose over or under, drawn by hand and numbered in binary. The scans, the index of knots Michael recognised, and every drawing worked out again and checked: square knot, sheet bend, Carrick bend and their relatives. Open it

Sixteen boolean functions

Every two-input logic function, with its expressions enumerated, the weights a small neural network uses for each, and every function applied to every pair. Open it

Best bang for the buck

Which folders to clean up first on a full drive, and where to stop: the running-total curve and its point nearest the origin. Open it

This page is README.md rendered by md2html.py into index.html and committed, not built on the server, so it goes stale silently unless it is regenerated after every edit.

Released under CC0 1.0.