Hi Everyone,

The session I proposed is a short demonstration/discussion of a “constraint” developed by the OuLiPo, a mid-Twentieth research group comprised of (mostly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians. They were interested in experimenting with what language could be, and they did it oftentimes with the help of math. The snowball was one of their popular applications. It is essentially a triangular number set that is used as the basis for developing texts/poems. In other words, it’s a text in which an additional element — a letter, a syllable, or a word — is added to each successive line; so,

1

2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

etc.

Since this is a chapter about which I’m writing for a book on Flash ActionScript 3 and rhetoric/writing, I thought it might interest some of you.

… BUT as I read your posts and bios, I get the impression most of you would already agree and/or probably know the basic arithmetic and algebra I’d show. I’d love to collab with someone who could show me a bunch of interesting math. I’d also be happy to go with the flow and change gears in order to collaborate with others. I enjoy programming in Flash AS3, if anyone wants to try to do something with it. There are a pretty wide range of APIs — from Twitter to Yahoo/Google Maps — to play with as well as stuff we can just make up. In fact, Bill’s post about Arduino got me thinking about Flash and Arduino. Brendan Dawes’ book, Analog In/Digital Out, demonstrates some experiments with Teleo, but it’s no longer available.

David