Yes, it’s total military propaganda. But it’s also a pretty innovative approach to getting people — young people especially — excited about science. LabTV, a component of the National Defense Education Program’s website, focuses on scientists and engineers working in the U.S. Dept. of Defense, giving teachers, students, and science geeks a look at what’s [...]
The New York Times has a nice article and great set of photos on voluntary, apparently sane modern “recluses.” Who have beer and computers and stuff. (This guy brews his own for trade.)
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My friend Erin at the Cooper-Hewitt museum recently showed me a video about this collaboration between nonprofit playground builder Kaboom and architect David Rockwell, called the Imagination Playground. Got a bunch of press last fall, which I somehow missed. But this system of “loose parts” for kids play looks great. Official kits are kinda pricey, [...]
SimpleGeo used their new tool Vicarious.ly to create this visualization of location-based data — Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged tweets from Twitter — logged over 8 days of the South by Southwest conference in Austin. The patterns of people’s movements, day and night, are fascinating — and it’s easy to [...]
Jason Bobe, one of the “founders” of the DIYBio movement and director of community for the George Church-led Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, recently gave a talk as part of a forum on biosecurity at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Bobe’s slides, which can be downloaded here, neatly describe the current scope of (known) [...]
By far one of the most interesting sessions I attended at South by Southwest Interactive last week, was a refreshing talk by Jaron Lanier, whom can I remember being a sort of techno-guru back when all this stuff was new. Anyway, he has a book out now called You Are Not a Gadget, a deeply [...]
Hey, everyone loves robots. Recently I learned that we have one of the foremost researchers on robot learning, Josh Bongard, working right next door at the University of Vermont. He spoke the other night as part of the Echo Lake Museum and Science Center’s Cafe Scientifique series. I missed it, but they did post a [...]
Over the past year or so, I’ve been playing a lot of guitar again. I’ve been especially interested in working with open tunings, which have opened up a fat new toolbox of techniques — not to mention the lion’s share of the Keith Richards song catalog. Coming back into standard tuning after playing for a [...]
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Here, two views of the holy scroll (original manuscript of On the Road) that launched a million journeys — enlightening, courageous, maybe foolhardy, but no doubt life-changing. Working in the dark ages before personal computers, Kerouac hacked a fix to accommodate the free-flowing, speed-fueled writing method he adopted for his breakthrough novel, which marked a [...]