Ugh. I just realized that the post I put up for the last Major Studio assignment didn't actually make it up. I wrote it in the gallery sometime between the insanity and the madness. For some damn reason, it didn't actually get posted. I think I may have hit preview instead of submit. At any rate, I had to shut down my computer because of the power failures, and I didn't check it carefully when I had the chance. Ugh.

I'll try to re-post it later. Ugh.

Ugh.

What's in the box?!So we've got Spy in the Lab running. That unassuming little box on the floor? That's a high-power robot Hell bent on mass destruction. Just a few minutes ago we had him scooting around the gallery, terrifying the other pieces. Muhahahaha!

This show has really come together nicely in the past few days and even in the past few hours. The whole show is amazing. If you're reading this and anywhere near 11th Ave. and 22nd St., drop in!

It really does. Check out the features. I just started running it on my Ubuntu laptop. Kick ass!

Just one more reason to start moving over to Linux. Yes, I'm the only dork in the department (that I know of) who is running Linux full time, with the exception of Dave D. But, a few years from now, there'll be many more of us. And they'll be rocking Beryl, too.

I'm trying to nail down everything for the big Ten Years Running show that our department is putting on at the Chelsea Art Museum.

So far, the piece I'm working on with Paul Notzold is working pretty well. You send a message to a phone running Sydewynder, and it kicks back a random message from a set of Tom Cruise quotes. I also tried to get it to hook up to twitter, but that didn't work. Lame.

Spy is trickier. We still need to get networking going for that.

Ideas that will change the world--or not.

1. What is Love?

   I wish the net had a site that could determine what love, or other emotions, are represented in web content. This would allow to search the web emotionally, and not just semantically. The idea would be that the site's backend would crawl through major web services, like del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon.com, etc. and use existing tags and other keyword fields to identify which other keywords and data appear in entries related to "love" or other emotions. Then it would make predictions based on new content, and flash these up to web users. In HotOrNot style, users could say whether the found items represent love or not. The search would become more refined over time.

For our midterm project in Yury Gitman's Interactive Major Studio, we made a teddy bear that had a beating heart, lungs, and tons of sensors that felt chest compressions, its physical orientation (with an accelerometer, ) the instruments placed into its mouth, and a magnet to trip the switch we placed in the "paddle" that would restart his heart.

Here is how the trauma bear play testing went down (maddest possible props to Tracy for editing this):

and here's a clip of what we did leading up to this:

Voltaire wrote, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this is what happened. The artificial gods that humans did create assumed, to varying degrees, control over large swaths of the natural and human world. But, as the Enlightenment began to reveal, this was not necessarily the case--systems based on increasingly better understood scientific principles controlled the world and all those living within it.

In Kevin Kelly's Wired article, "We Are the Web," Kelly asserts that our collective involvement in the Web is feeding its intelligence, when we consider it as a single machine and the nodes within it as the interconnected neurons analogous to the human mind. By naming the things we place on the web, by contextualizing these thing with links, by asserting their importance by our degree of chattering about one thing over another, we are teaching the Internet in a way not dissimilar from the way humans learn.

Cisco Systems - Binary Game - Cisco.com - [My del.icio.us]

Thanks to Lena Ghaleb for sending me this. I think this game would be really useful for teaching the basics of binary in a lot of contexts. Nice example of worthwhile educational game--fun and challenging.

So I had some free time during this break (not really, but I didn't feel like doing the work I'm supposed to do.) I've been wondering for a while if we could have made the infrared (IR) stuff work, so I posed that as a challenge for myself. Turns out, it wasn't all that hard.

First thing I had to do was make a IR camera. Very easy. Initially, I just taped two pieces of photo negative to my webcam (the darkest stuff at the end of the strip.) That worked well enough to pick up the LEDs shining out of a remote control.

Then I got a little more adventurous and hacked open the webcam. That was pretty much just one screw and some careful dismantling of the rest. Right in front of the lens is a square of iridescent glass; that's the IR filter. I popped that out with a screwdriver (it kind of chipped at first until I broke away enough to pry the whole thing out.) I replaced it with two small squares of the negative and put the thing back together. Props to Cameron Browning for teaching me this trick.

So I had my first cross-country skiing attempt yesterday. Fun. Painful and humiliating. Lots of falling. But fun!

One thing I discovered was that the entire aim of the sport is to maximize efficiency. I'm oddly drawn to that aspect--the less energy you spend, per unit distance traveled, the better you are. There's a nerdy quality to that that's hard to not like.

And this led to my other observation. As I got more and more weary, I started trying to achieve the right kind of form, within the limits of my remaining muscle control. And I think that my greatest "flow" moments occurred when I was flat out exhausted. I totally gave up on thinking and just started to get the glide going.