Magnetic snakes

Taking a bit of code from here and a snippet from there, Robert Hodgin made an animation of 3-D snakes in Processing. Check out Hodgin's use of constraints to spur the invention of a way to keep the snakes from overlapping.

I had no interest in adding a complete 3D physics library because my needs at this time are fairly simple. I am not worried about environment... I just want the snakes to crawl over each other. I decided to try magnetic repulsion despite thinking it probably wouldn't work well enough. The thinking is this: Take each segment of a snake (200 segments each), and check its distance to every single other segment of every other snake on screen. Stupid, right? Yeah, pretty much. But with some optimization and only checking the segment distances if the snakes in question are close enough for overlap to be possible, I got it to run at 60 fps with 10 snakes.

Actually, when you get right down to it -- the atoms in snakes' bodies, that is -- magnetic repulsion isn't that far off from how matter achieves its electromagnetic opacity. Hodgin also made a video in which the snakes react to music. I wonder if this one's gonna end up in iTunes. (via waxy)

Flickr image pilfered for $235 Paul Smith t-shirt

Noted Processing practitioner Robert Hodgin had one of his designs lifted from Flickr and it found its way onto a $235 Paul Smith t-shirt.

I put the shirt on and it fit fine. I couldn't stop smiling. The whole thing was so damned surreal. Here I am in a Paul Smith changing room trying on a shirt that features a design element stolen from my Flickr site!

"It fits perfectly," I told the salesman. "It's like I made it myself," I joked and smiled at Lance.

"You did make it yourself," the man replied, oblivious to the inside joke but wanting to play along.

Lance asked the salesman if he knew anything about the print on the shirt. He said something about hobos and the passing of knowledge or something. I was too distracted to pay attention. I said I will take it and he led us to the cashier. $235 later, I was walking out of the store with my very own personalized Paul Smith shirt.