I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.
The blog here at dsandler.org is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on Google+.
So, this is exciting: The cafeteria downstairs carries some products
from Sukhi’s, an Indian-food
retailer in Hayward, CA. I just polished off a “Naanwich” —
despite the jokey name, it was surprisingly tasty!
By the way, I just did some work on my RSS
feed to make it fully compliant with RSS 1.0. [dsandler.rss]
Just for kicks, I used one of the applets I mentioned in my last post to plot out
the positions of the actual rocks in the Ryoanji Temple. Voilà: the
hidden tree revealed.
New Scientist: “Hidden
Tree” the secret of Zen garden.
Summary: A 500-year old Zen rock garden in Kyoto is almost entirely
empty, yet is almost subliminally pleasing to the eye, in the
same way that man-made
shapes echoing the Golden Ratio tend to seem harmonious. A similar
mathematical secret has just been discovered: the regions of symmetry,
when traced out, tend to draw a branched tree.
Is it just the CS geek in me, or are we looking at a half-millenium-old
Voronoi diagram?
More Voronoi links: a rigorous
definition courtesy MathWorld; path planning and
medial axis at Rice (I took Dr. Kavraki’s course while I was there);
an appled called VoroGlide;
another applet
at Cornell.