--Update April 2009: The first section (front page through pp.27) is more or less complete. The second section, "Part I", is about 60% (pp. 29 through 68). PDFs are here.
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I firmly believe that all the really interesting people in the world are just a little kooky. It's a prerequisite.

This is my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

Here's my latest quirk: I'm typing an old book from 1909 to put it on the web.

When I was a kid, my Dad had a Pendulart, and the family would occasionally sit around on a quite evening and toy with it, making all sorts of pretty pictures. In Uni I took math and comp. sci, and began to wonder how one could model the Pendulart. I discovered the "Harmonograph", an older precursor to the Pendulart, and eventually found a very hard-to-find book called "Harmonic Vibrations and Vibration Figures" which is the quintessential text on the Harmonograh and related toys. It's just a fascinating, quirky and likable little volume.

I eventually procured a photo-copy of the 1909 original. (Since it was published in 1909, the copyright had long-since expired, and it was now in the public domain, so a photo-copy was quite legal.) Since then it occurred to me many times that such a charming little book really ought to be more widely available, a la Project Gutenberg.

A few years ago I experimented with OCR scanners to see if it was easy to scan it in. But that did not pan out very well.

And here comes the nutty part ....

This summer I decided to type it in ... one page at a time. This isn't quite as insane as it may seem, since I touch-type pretty well. I figured a few minutes a day and I'd have it all typed in in about 3 months.

But part of the charm of the book is its format and it's idiosyncrasies .... so I decided to try very hard to stick to the original format and typography. That has proved quite a challenge, but rather an interesting problem in its own right. It was clearly typeset by hand by an amateur, and it is surprisingly difficult to mimic that in a modern word processor that wants so badly to correct mistakes!

The original typesetter insists on putting a space before each semi-colon, and often on either side of quotation marks, among other oddities.

Anyway, it's coming along, and it's surprisingly fun. I have about 36 pages keyed in.

I'm sure you are all just hanging on the edges of your seats to see how this all turns out!!! Well, you'll just have to wait and see. I'll let you know.

I'm suddenly reminded of the Pink Floyd album, "A Momentary Lapse of Reason".

Incidentally, modeling the Harmonograph is pretty easy on a P.C. Modeling the Twin Elliptic Pendulum is much more difficult and I have never figured it out. I never did figure out how to model the Pendulart either. Ping me if you have any suggestions .....