So, I went more for breadth on my last post than depth, which is where I should've put my efforts. No worries--it's worth getting a wide area of ideas. I'll focus on three of those now, though.

• Ethics
• Open Source/Content
• FSF
• GPL

Concepts for Final Project

My motivations can be summarized roughly according to the domains I've detailed in the diagram.

Science

For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by science. From a very young age, I devoured books on dinosaurs and space. I really enjoy seeing how the world works, and science, in its many fields, has provided me with a window onto that. I went to a science and technology high school, where I first developed a love for biology and engineering, and I graduated from college with a degree in anthropology. Following school, I dove into computers and taught myself comp sci and the math and theory behind it. By training, at least, I am a scientist.

Ethics

I've been curious about ethical choices for almost as long as science. Partly due to my upbringing and partly my own pig-headedness, I'm stubbornly in defense of my beliefs about fairness and equality. I believe that information should be free for everyone. I believe that people and countries with many resources have a moral obligation to act for the benefit of the less fortunate. I believe, in so doing, that the fortunate benefit from this as well: a rising tide lifts all boats.

Physical Computing and Wireless

Both of the areas are new to me, and I love novelty. Both provided interesting approaches to problems that arise from both my scientific and ethical senses: How can people without money or infrastructure begin to organize their lives for the better? How can solutions be created from inexpensive parts through methods that are easily reproduced? What are the technical and human possibilities that we haven't yet considered?

Games

Games are fun. They're also interesting windows onto human behavior, as well as possibly powerful tools for education and understanding. They also give people the ability to examine realities that exist only in potential space for now, which could aid science and humanity via further investigation.

My notes follow:

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.

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.

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.

Here are a few snaps of our build day on Sunday for the Trauma Bear project. It has really come together:

Guts Of the Machine

On the heels of our wildly successful play test of the trauma bear, I bring to you images of the ursine innards.

Arduino

Breadboard

Breadboard and Arduino Connected

And here's a brief video of the experience: