I didn’t get any photos, but the verdict was clear after Saturday night’s impromptu gathering: you totally can make delicious grilled-cheese sandwiches with a flamethrower. Use a soft cheese and keep the slices thin (so it’ll melt quickly), don’t butter the outside of the bread (it catches fire), and smash the sandwich between a couple of cast iron skillets (or use a panini press) if you’d rather not char the outside. 15-20 seconds of heat will do it, but you can go longer if you want the bread to get super crunchy.

Also, don’t assume that those propane cylinders you haven’t touched since last summer are still full.

A nice solid side-table lamp made of oak and epoxy, with step-by-step photos.

Colorization using optimization:

In this paper we present a simple colorization method that requires neither precise image segmentation, nor accurate region tracking. Our method is based on a simple premise: neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors. We formalize this premise using a quadratic cost function and obtain an optimization problem that can be solved efficiently using standard techniques. In our approach an artist only needs to annotate the image with a few color scribbles, and the indicated colors are automatically propagated in both space and time to produce a fully colorized image or sequence. We demonstrate that high quality colorizations of stills and movie clips may be obtained from a relatively modest amount of user input.

O-expressions are a new syntax for Lisp-like languages, with an implementation called Liso which is based on Racket.

I’ve been playing with similar ideas recently, from a slightly more functional-programming perspective. Everyone agrees, for the most part, that delimiter pairs create structure, and that commas have higher precedence than semicolons. The idea that any consecutive sequence of non-delimiter punctuation characters constitutes an “operator” token is useful, and I like the use of INDENT/DEDENT as another form of bracketed delimiters. Is it possible, given the additional constraint of “no reserved identifiers”, to construct a language sufficiently general that a language like Python, Javascript, or (my own) Radian could be constructed on top of it as a macro library?

Aluminum extrusion channels for LED strip lighting.