TNT and the Entropy

For a colleague's birthday, I drew quickly a TNT holding an equation often used in our research, the definition of the entropy of a vector of integers. I hope that he will hang it in his office so that it helps his students to memorize it! I was first thinking about writing it on the tee-shirt, but it might have been perceived as sexist, and I was uneasy about getting right the deformation of the writing by the breast of TNT in the short time I had to draw this. At least it was the occasion to try my new sharpies:

TNT and World Peace

I like the idea of non-verbal comunication: human people, even when they speak distinct languages, still have enough in common to communicate through images and gestures. Monkeys and dogs are able to play together, I even saw a video of a dog trying to imitate an elephant! Even though English is the common language on the web, non-verbal videos are much more likely to go viral than verbal ones. If I could generate non-verbal educational material (e.g. in mathematics), having a larger audience would permit to spend much more time for each material (and to distribute it for less). I want to explore ways for TNT to comunicate non-verbally some abstract concepts. And what better abstract concept to begin with than "World Peace"?

TNT and Today's peace

My mother is easily worried. I found this quote on the web and sent it to her via our shared Dropbox folder, and forgot about it. She liked it so much that she asked me to write it on a wood spoon. I told her that the text was a bit too long for a spoon, so she brough me... a cutting board :)

My mother had complained about the knife falling from the other cutting board when one admired the drawing, so I reversed the design for her, and did not draw on the knife this time.

As for the previous one, I enlarged the eyes to make it more "chibi", and left simplistic hands to not take away the attention from the text. TNT looks like she is wearing gloves, but at least people focus on the essential!

I like the result a lot!!!

And it fits very well in the kitchen with the wordy wood spoons =OD

TNT and Owl on cutting board

My grand mother eats a lots of vegetables, so I made her a cutting board. I had already etched her portrait on a glass with doves, from an old picture of her in the garden of my parents. This time I decided to go for an owl, symbol of wisdom.

You can see the evolution of the drawing: first the general forms, then adding the details such as the belt and the decorations of the dress.

I enlarged a lot the eyes in the end, both to insist on the chibi aspect and to increase the similarity with the owl.

My grand mother loved her present! She promised to use it and I promised to make another one when this one will be damaged!!!

Codecrafter and "Hooks" to Computer Science.

I finished the novel "Codecrafter" in two days and liked it a lot: I think that not only young girls, but also computer aficionados and pedagogues, would find it interesting. You can get it through the author's webpage: http://www.ericasandbothe.com/.

Erica introduced in very few pages some mathematics principles (induction and pigeon hole principle) and a few programming principles (libraries, compilers and file permissions), and weaves them very cleverly in the story line, such that those are not merely background material but key elements of the story (e.g. the heroine escapes her enemies thanks to her understanding of the pigeon hole principle, and causes trouble because of properties of a Unix-like permission system of files).

It is definitely NOT an introduction to programming or computer science, rather just a hook, and definitely not sufficient by itself to "seduce" little girls to computer science, but it's a nice demonstration that such hooks are possible and attractive. I hope it will inspire many projects among the same line, and that I might make the time to draw a short comic book story inspired by Erica's story and/or universe....