Author Archives: Ben

Fast Colgate Website

February 9, 2012 | Posted by Ben in Design, Web

It has taken me a while to post this. Back at Colgate, I thought there should be an easier way to navigate around my school’s many complicated websites. To solve the problem, I put together a site with links to the most frequently used pages by Colgate students. The site is fcolgate.com (Fast Colgate). Fast [...]

Heating Your House With BOINC

January 18, 2012 | Posted by Ben in Articles, Editorial

We all know a bunch of environmentally friendly phrases, laws, axioms… Recycle paper. Turn off the lights. Conserve water. Here is another one you might have heard: Power down your computer when you are not using it. In summer climates, the above statement is true. But, during the winter, the best environmental option is to leave [...]

3D Cellular Automata

November 16, 2011 | Posted by Ben in Code

This is a 3D cellular automata example written in just a few lines of Mathematica. To view and interact with the 3D CA object you will need the Wolfram Computable Document Format (CDF) player, available [here]. For anyone uninitiated to the CDF format, the object above can be manipulated in 3D space by clicking and dragging [...]

Catherine Chalmers

November 1, 2011 | Posted by Ben in Design, Web

This is a website for artist Catherine Chalmers. The intent was to create a simple portfolio site to showcase her photographs and video. The site design is a totally fluid layout, built to resemble a blank gallery space. Here is a link to the site. [Link]

Panorama Viewers Comparison

October 28, 2011 | Posted by Ben in Articles, Research

I have been thinking about adding a panorama viewer to a few of my pages, or eventually to a fullscreen WordPress theme. This weekend I did some research into the kinds of panorama viewers that could be incorporated into a website design. If you are not sure what a panorama viewer is, it is a piece of [...]

Cellular Animation

August 19, 2011 | Posted by Ben in Animation, Video

Here is some video from a cellular automata system. I started playing around with the footage to see how it would look at different speeds and scales. A future version of this video will be produced in 3D and look more like the video below. Animations of cellular automata are very cool; so much energy, [...]

4K Video from a DSLR

June 5, 2011 | Posted by Ben in Photography, Video

I recently made 4000 pixel by 4000 pixel (4k) video with an ordinary DSLR camera. The example on this page shows curved video for a fulldome planetarium, but this technique will also work for producing standard footage. The Problem For a student, the main challenge in producing good 4k video is cost. Without an IMAX film [...]

Colgate Senior Show Photoshop

May 12, 2011 | Posted by Ben in Design

My senior year art class needed an image for advertising our final project art show – so I made something cool in Photoshop. I put the faces from all twelve people in the art class into The Last Supper (La Cène) 1652 by Philippe de Champaigne. Here it is:

Stop-Motion Applescript

March 10, 2011 | Posted by Ben in Articles, Code, Research

Canon EOS Utility does not provide detailed control for stop-motion photography. I wrote a simple AppleScript that allows Canon’s EOS Utility to do three new, useful things.

3D Fulldome Video

December 10, 2010 | Posted by Ben in Animation, Video

Put on your 3D glasses! Here is an awesome little animation that my computers took all last week to render: The content of this 3D video is a short illustration of the history leading up to the housing bubble. This animation may be the start of a more comprehensive piece about tech/finance/politics. I also made [...]