Novel Handicapping, version 0.3.5 (update)

Another minor update to the 20th Century Novel handicapper.
- New category type: adaptations – includes screenplay, musical, and computer game
- New category: Laurels: MacArthur Fellowship – the “genius prize”, not a writing-specific prize, but there are a few important ones on the list.
- New category: Titular features: Eponymous title – books named after the protagonist
- Numerous data corrections, proper flagging of female authors, living authors, other missing flags.
- Flagged more books as “banned”, using the American Library Association’s Most Challenged Books list as a reference.
So if you’re looking for something to read, and prefer award winning novels that feature pirates and have been made into computer games, give the gizmo a spin.

20th Century Novels: Wizards

A minor update to Handicapping the Great 20th Century Novels, I have added some new categories:
- Wizards
- Dead-ly titles
- Heart-y titles
- Modern Library Top 100
I have started to add Hugo Award winning novels to the list.
I need your help! If you have a category you would like to see, and a list of authors/titles that would fit, please post them or send me an email. Plus please post any errors or omissions.
There are 324 books in the data set.

Handicapping the Great 20th Century Novels, part 2

A handy gizmo for Handicapping the Great 20th Century Novels.
I have made some major improvements to the interface, mostly dealing with adding and removing handicapping categories.
I have also been adding new books to the list, it now includes a full list of Pulitzer Prize winning novels, as well as Newbery Medal winners. There are 287 works in the data set.

Handicapping the Great 20th Century Novels

About a year and a half ago I became interested in the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. A few months later I put together a little gizmo for handicapping the great 20th century novels.
It is still rather crude, and the book list is rather short (170 or so titles), and the categorization is incomplete, but it is fun to tinker around with the numbers.
I’m posting about this now because I’ve just added a new category: Ireland. Some list editors have a thing for books set in Ireland, so it needs to be included.
Suggestions, clarifications, and classifcations are welcome. You can view the data file if you are interested (note that I’ve misspelled ‘canon’ as ‘cannon’).

Hexagonal Life

This has been on my to-do list for a while: create a cellular automata similiar to Conway’s Game of Life but on a hexagonal grid.
Hexagonal Life – Written in Flash, runs very slowly.

the thing with the cat head and the little icon men

Click here for the thing with the cat head.
I’m working on a game, and this is some code from one of the minigames.

Media Studies Title Generator

Need a title for that research paper, academic conference, or digital exhibition? Just click on the Media Studies Title Generator for some suggestions.

sphere grid

Here’s a strange Flash gizmo. Project a spherical map onto a rectangular grid, then show how each region of the map connects to its neighboring regions. sphere grid
The idea behind this was to remove the distortions you get when you play a game like Civilization with its rectangular map. With a sphere grid, you could build a city at the North Pole and do pathfinding that would follow great circle paths.

A* pathfinding

I was tinkering around with some code for an A* pathfinding algorithm written in Flash. Now, Flash is far from the ideal environment for writing fast code, but it is an interesting demo. It is set up so that you can watch the algorithm in progress. A* pathfinding demo.

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