kip/bot/blog

We have the classic line from Picasso about artists being people who manage to hold on to their childhood curiosity, energy, and willingness to experiment. We sometimes connect them to toys and play (MAKE Magazine has the “Permission to Play” t-shirt). This ignite talk takes us into the ________ world of adult Lego fans or __________.

I’m leaving those words blank, cuz I’m not sure this talk demonstrates the value of re-connecting with toys. The speaker doesn’t talk about sparking lateral thinking, improving brain age, the wonders of a refreshed and open mind, or the chance to create. He just really digs it, and he’s amused about the mania that comes with playing with Legos.

Still, he has a great line at the beginning, “the dark ages are the time between you stop playing with Legos as a child and decide as an adult that it’s OK to play with a kid’s toy again.” (One other great moment is when he’s having dinner with a woman from Lego and he describes all “these marketing people who keep asking (in a whiny voice)’aren’t you afraid it will hurt your brand? how do you control your brand?”

A more interesting, or more immediately useful, look at Legos come from the editor of Nuts & Volts and a class he teaches at Harvard Medical School.

This video is the kind of thing that originally got me excited about the web and new media tools: someone with a compelling story to tell has the tools to make it engaging and a channel for putting it out there and finding an audience. Leaving aside the politics, this piece adds up to something great even though the individual production values are so-so.

I’m taking a two hour class about bio-electricity where I also make a DIY ECG (electro-cardio-gram, the one for the heart). Signed up yesterday, and today, there’s a video of a guy (who’s headed to dental school soon, dunno why, but that seemed an interesting detail to add), who made a really simple one:

He has a funny bit at :45 where he mentions that he needed a capacitor to smooth out the current — when he was hooked up to the oscilliscope (one of his out put devices) he was picking up Spanish radio!

The blog entry is pretty fun as well. He has lots of fun extra detail.

During President Obama’s Inaugural Address, lots of people got jazzed, and many tweeted about supporting, celebrating, and being “”the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.” MAKE Magazine is building the Maker Faire and the most recent issue of the magazine about the transformative power of DIY — to innovate,to satisfy, and to solve problems.

In the intro to the issue, Editor Dale Dougherty, makes the big but cool claim that “makers offer one of the best hopes for the future.” He has a list of things people can do to “Make Things”; improve “Energy Usage” (monitoring and improving home usage; make “Transportation” smarter and better for us (bicycles, electric cars, reduced transport overall); better handling of “Food and Water” (raise your own chickens!, cook (gasp!)); and do more “Learning”. I hope the list gets viral (I don’t want to do two scans), but it’s worth re-typing the “Make Things” list:

Make things that people want
Make things so that you don’t need to buy them
Start a business that employs people making things
Make things closer to where they’ll be used
Repair things instead of replacing them
Harvest usable components from devices and redeploy them
Get to know your local salvage yard and recycling center

For a while I have been, not obsessed but itched, by the notion that environment and sustainability has a big maker hook. In an age where men can no longer tinker with their cars (they’re too chip-based, and the engines are increasingly black boxes), focusing on their power supply, tweeking their environment, making their stuff last longer and hacking it to work better, could be a satisfying alternative.

Sadly, for me, the first place my head goes is my last trip to a hardware/home supplies store and my urge to buy a sewing machine and make pillows and curtains, cuz I hate buying that stuff. Ah save . . . I also had the urge to hack motherlovin’ sh*t out of solar panel backup systems at Home Depot. (Flickr link provided as proof that I had this impulse BEFORE admitting to the sewing one. Excessive swearing purely out of compensation, of course.)

Re-reading Ralph Ellison’s amazing Living with Music. The title essay is an excerpt from an article Ellison did for High Fidelity(!) magazine. The setting is his early days as a struggling writer living in a back-room, first floor apartment, surrounded by record players on the left, a singer above, and an airshaft/courtyard with variously entertaining, articulate, and annoying drunks (plus one very sad drunk who spent his last three days on earth yelling at the world to ‘shut up’). Ellison, a once fervently devoted student of the trumpet, decides to take control of the noise and buys a sound system and records:

Between the hi-fi record and the ear, I learned, there was a new electronic world. In that realization our apartment was well on its way toward becoming an audio booby trap [his phrase for a place filled with wires, cables, boxes all in service of the ever-elusive perfect sound]. It was 1949 and I rushed to the Audio Fair. I have, I confess, as much gadget resistance as the next American of my age, weight and slight income, but little did I dream of the test to which it would be put. I had hardly en tered the fair before I heard David Sarser’s and Mel Sprinkle’s Musician’s Amplifier, took a look at its schematic and, recalling a boyhood acquiantance with such matters, decided that I could build one. I did — several times — before it measured within specifications. … I built a half dozen or more preamplifiers and record compensators before finding a commercial one that satisfied my ear. … There were wires and pieces of equipment all over the tiny apartment (I became a compulsive experimenter) and it was worth your life to move about without first taking careful bearings. Once we were almost crushed in our sleep by the tape machine, for which there was space only on a shelf at the head of our bed. But it was worth it.

Gotta love a guy, a literary genius no less, who professes to gadget aversion but who can consult schematics, revisit childhood tinkering memories, and then go on to build sound systems — just so he can listen to music and get back to his writing. The people at MAKE would love it . . .

I’m a little late to this . . . The NYT has been creating a developer network and slowly opening APIs. Last week, they opened an API to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) database.

When we first started talking about creating and releasing APIs for databases collected by The Times, campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission was a natural choice. The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign.

Excellent talk from the last Maker Faire, by Robert Bruce Thompson, author of an Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, just posted on blip.tv.  The subject is the decline of the home chemistry set in the last 60 years.  The clip starts with Thompson going through page after page of chemistry, biology, hydroponics and other science sets that were available for young boys (mostly, though I imagine some girls went all young Marie Curie).  Thompson seems to be describing his experience as a child picking the chemistry set he wanted his parents to buy and the wide number of choices available to him.

For several months, I’ve been hearing older podcasters and bloggers (John Dvorak and Tim OReilly) talking about the decline of the “kit” — chemistry sets, electronics experiment boards, Heathkit, microscopes.  Most of the laments have been that the decline of these things is a lack of scientific curiosity (maybe because of the computer, maybe because of the end of the Cold War).  Thompson adds the theme of excessive fear and compulsive safety to that argument, arguing that people are so scared of injury and lawsuits that no one wants to sell or buy them.  This is similar to Gever Tully of the Tinkering School talking at TED about the end of the pocketknife ritual:  young American males (again) used to get pocketknives as a rite of passage, receiving their first powerful tool:  a blade, a spatula, a screwdriver.
While looking at a dizzying array of chemistry sets on a page, he concludes that “these are serious science, these aren’t toys for children.  These are tools for young people to get involved in and learn real science and do science.”  It’s a fun talk, looking through catalogs and seeing advertisements for old kits.  Thompson also shows pictures of Edison’s lab as well as his own, arguing that science happens everywhere.

Extra bits:

Good chemistry sets still on the market, but limited in how far they go.
Kevin Kelly Cool Tool review of Thompson’s book.

Kid in my neighborhood, just back from magic camp, doing card tricks on his stoop for tips and the pleasure of performing.

He had moves too, shuffles, lifts and patter had us mystified. In between tricks he was reading Ian Fleming! This kid will go far.

I had a conversation recently about what it means to post pictures on Flickr. I recently bought a pretty expensive camera (Canon EOS XTi) because I was starting to care enough about what I was recording to put money into some equipment that could compensate for my lack of talent and knowledge. After posting a bunch of very disappointing pictures on flickr today, I went back and found the first two pictures I ever posted — the ones that got me onto flickr. The first is a cool sunrise in Portsmouth, NH. I described it as a “Windham Hill wannabe moment”.

The second was a picture of my dog, Maggie, shoving her head into a hill of snow to pursue a scent she had picked up. I love canine moments of abandon.

I didn’t really learn anything concrete about my urge to share, but I did remember that urge to “put it out there” cuz I thought it was good to have it out there and not just on a disk drive in my closet (where pictures eventually must be archived).

I remember, in the early 1990s, reading a NYT review of a Bobbie Ann Mason collection of short stories, in which the reviewer said something like “Mason is terribly sympathetic to small-town people who live away from the things they love. They put up antennae to catch whatever signals they can of a life of the mind that exists only distantly for them” . . . I can’t find that line and am only sure about the putting up antennae part, but I think the urge to share is connected to that kind of reach — send out signals, wait for signals. Put it out there.

I’ve blogged about this guy before, but this is one of those places where amateur is really cool.  Flintstone Stargazer is a flickr contact who does astro-photography (as well as other kinds).  In addition to posting his astro-pics, he also posts pictures of his equipment set-ups, the impromptu devices he makes to get things to work (mounts, stabilizers and the like).  He’s been taking a lot of pictures of Jupiter recently:

Jupiter was my big “discovery” when JRube got me a telescope for Christmas years ago.  I was on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment, in February and was drawing pictures of what I saw (like Galileo!), and found four dots — one big one with three smaller ones — all on the same plane.  Remembered that’s how Galileo found the moons, check my maps and sure enough it was Jupiter.   A few weeks after that, after consulting maps and schedules, I was able to see the red spot.  Nothing like the clarity of the photo above . . . my telescope wasn’t that strong, and there’s too much ambient light in Brooklyn.