Here in Champaign-Urbana, where Roger Ebert was raised, I took notice when Disney announced the end of its long relationship with Ebert & Roeper. Disney also announced the replacement critics, Lyons & Mankiewicz. Was there something intentional in that? A quick run on my Mathematica programs returned this anagram: Lyons + Mankiewicz = Monica Lewinsky + Z Did Disney do this deliberately? Words sometimes have hidden meaning. For over 30 years, I've been sharing puzzles with Will Shortz. Many of these I've found with Mathematica, such as computer user = supreme court, and Will has used them in his weekly NPR puzzle segment. Anagrams have of course been popular for many years. A 1936 tour de force by David Shulman is a sonnet where every line uses the letters of “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The National Puzzlers League maintains a list of best anagrams. Also, anagrammy.com regularly ranks new anagrams as they are found. Here are some good ones:

Reading Theo’s blog post about his website reminded me that our excitement about the grand projects that get done in Mathematica often make us forget to talk about all the exciting little things that Mathematica makes possible too. It would be easy to think that Mathematica is only suitable for website production if you have something on the grand scale and high traffic of periodictable.com. So I wanted to write about using Mathematica to make a website that is anything but grand and far from popular... my own. My pages are just an attempt to put my footprint on Google so that I can be found. It mostly consists of a few basic pages about me and my work with Mathematica. So what advantage did I get out of doing it in Mathematica? Well, the first was pretty basic personal practicality---why learn new tools if you don’t have to? I know Mathematica, and I knew it would be faster for me to create it in Mathematica than to find and learn how to use other content management and authoring tools. Once I had coded up a page template in the symbolic XML features of Mathematica, I could create any new page by applying that function to the page content text. The whole lot is automatically written out as HTML and uploaded to the server by Mathematica. But the one unusual part of the content is ONLY practical with Mathematica. My work with Mathematica takes me to a lot of places---giving talks about it, meeting business and technology partners and all kinds of users. I also travel for fun. I wanted to make a definitive list of places that I have been to and to present that visually.

Yesterday, I put together a Demonstration about the Clarke Belt---the ring of satellites 22,300 miles above the equator. Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1945 about the future usefulness of geosynchronous orbits, and I wanted to see a picture of them. Coverage of the Pacific seemed spotty. A few hours later, I saw the first news reports about his passing.

Search for “heart” on any image search engine and you’ll turn up a wide variety of forms from squat to tall, geometric to curvaceous, all recognizable as heart shapes. In order to explore those possibilities, I wanted to capture the essence of the heart shape in a Mathematica Demonstration that had the smallest possible number of controls, but would nevertheless let me recreate most any heart I ran across. I found that three circular arcs strung together and reflected about the vertical sufficed to capture the essence of “heartness”. The result is the Demonstration “Sweet Heart”. The Demonstration is underconstrained, giving you the freedom to explore hearts as well as a large number of forms that are not even remotely heart-like. But that freedom is good. If there were interesting surprises lurking in those un-heart-like forms, I didn’t want to exclude them a priori. Indeed, while exploring near the boundaries where hearts dissolve into non-hearts, I stumbled onto two different ways of making hearts within hearts---from three simple arcs. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. That’s a nice Valentine’s Day surprise.

In April, we invited high-school and college students in Russia to participate in a Mathematica competition. We gave the students a week to answer a set of seven Mathematica questions. The response was great, with submissions coming in from all across the country. The first-place winner was Vladimir Dudchenko, an undergraduate student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). He correctly solved all seven competition problems and displayed remarkable ingenuity and skill in his use of Mathematica. In addition to a student copy of Mathematica 6, Vladimir won a new MacBook Pro, a top-of-the-line machine donated by Apple and DPI Computers (Apple’s partner in Russia).