leafcutterjohn.com

What kind of beast is this?

When I was at university a wasp crawled up my trouser leg whilst I was sitting outside, I didn’t realise what had happened until about 20 min later when I had gone inside and was sitting in a lecture and began to feel something tickling my thigh. On scratching my itch the little fella started stinging and much commotion ensued. I was stung five times before I managed to get the wasp out. I have not been very fond of wasps since that day.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that wasps had begun nesting in a water tank just outside of my kitchen window (which is 3 floors up) the entrance to the nest is via an over-flow pipe. I wanted to make some recordings of the wasps so I went out onto the water tank with a microphone & stand running the cable back to my computer. I realised that the wasps were actually very friendly considering how close I was to their nest, they didn’t seem to mind the mic which was a couple of inches from the entrance.  A couple of curious wasps came to check me out but didn’t seem overly concerned by my presence. 

While I was out on the roof I noticed a Large reddish looking insect close to the nest entrance. The insect which was about 3-4 times the size of the regular wasps and had reddish brown wings and back and had yellow makings on it’s abdomen. I didn’t have my camera at the time but this morning I saw it again sitting on the entrance to the nest and managed to get some shots. 

Who are you?

The regular looking wasps don’t seem to mind the larger insect seen here sitting on the entrance to the nest.

Buzzzzzzzzz

So my question to you is, What is it?

Here is a video of the wasps coming and going.

Cheers,

Leafcutter John.

Tags: leafcutter john, wasp

Return of the Attractors!

I recently received an email asking for more information and code about my attractor experiments in Processing. I initially thought I’d write a little tutorial but as I was searching around I found a great site with code examples by Dave Bollinger. His experiments do almost exactly what I have been doing but his examples are probably better programmed than mine and thus simpler to understand, you can find a load of his work here. And a nice attractor here.

While I was playing with my own attractor I got some nice new images by concentrating the attractors on the x axis:

orbs aligned on the x axis

and a surprising set of moth wings:

Attractors give you wings!

I also did some non-real-time animations in which the attractors are moved slightly each frame which creates ever-shifting fields of attraction and repulsion which = pretty!

All best,

Leafcutter John.

Tags: animation, attractor, leafcutter john, particle, Processing, video

Feather Study – PT I – Skeleton

Finding more and more ‘educational’ ways to avoid filling in my tax return! Yesterday I started a study of feathers. As is my want at the moment i’m doing it in Processing and have learned lot’s already. 

The feather is built along a Bézier Curve (green). This forms the spine of the feather and is deformed by the two red control points. The spine is divided into equal lengths and a ‘barb’ projects out from each subdivision. The length and angle of the barbs create the different feather shapes. 

Leafcutter John x.

Tags: Bézier, feather, leafcutter john, Processing

Processing Arrows

Randomly generated arrow compositions which came about while I was learning about classes in Processing. Click image for more on flickr.

Tags: arrows, leafcutter, Processing