This collection features man-made objects that have become unintentional foci.

Layers placed upon layers of walls, and posters, and signs and sidewalks, which have weathered, cracked, left the faintest traces of their existence, and then been reinstalled, looking like a stack of insurance stickers on a car’s license plate.

They may draw our attention or tell a story - sometimes untrue - but no one ever meant them to. I have tried to capture a few examples, and I hope viewers will be inspired to find their own unwitting works of art, outside and even in their own home.

I plan on posting a few every week for a few weeks, as of October, 2013.

The whole set is on Flickr: Unintended focus.

Here is a 16-page long emacs pdf reference card from Aaron Hawley’s list. It is my first elisp program and undoubtedly full of hacks and such, but the result is useful to me.

I have converted the source of Aaron Hawley’s reference sheet from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Reference_Sheet_by_Aaron_Hawley_source and used it in the reference card that ships with emacs, by Stephen Gildea.

It is possible that the elisp I wrote will help someone expand this card, so I have included it here. It is my first elisp script ever, and clearly shows the limits of my abilities in elisp and is probably full of ugly hacks. Nonetheless, it can be modified and run again to create new versions of the Long Reference Card. To use it, copy and paste Aaron Hawley’s source from the above link into a buffer called aaronref.tex. Copy the elisp code below (after removing the TeX comment % symbols) into an interactive lisp buffer and execute it (C-x C-e).

The TeX document compiled on my mac with tex longrefcard dvips -t landscape longrefcard ps2pdf longrefcard.ps

Here are the downloads Long Reference Card pdf Long Reference Card Plain TeX source Elisp to convert Aaron Hawley’s source into the TeX source1013longrefcard.pdf, 1013longrefcard.tex, ,

I am very excited to present my work at Bridges 2013 today, in Enschede.

Alejandro Erickson. TatamiMaker: A combinatorially rich mechanical game board. Proc. of the international conference Bridges: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture, 63–70, 2013. ^{http://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2013/bridges2013-63.html}

Download the slides HERE.

It is my pleasure to give the presentation for my paper with Frank Ruskey, Domino Tatami Covering is NP-complete, at the International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA) 2013.

I have built tensegrities with nearly 1000 kids this year, and it keeps me quite busy. I finally found a moment to work out how to make a (approximate) module of the Needle Tower out of my materials. The result is fairly wobbly, of course, so it works better as an arc than a tower. Here is the first picture, and you can look forward to an instructable!

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