More (less) memory

Last October, I posted a picture of my 8k memory module. Turns out I’m not the only local with magnetic core – the science teacher across the hall from me produced this little gem this morning for my edification.

Front – if you embiggen, you can see the cores.

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Back.

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It looks to me like a (10 x 4) x (10 x 4) = 1600 bit array – I googled for ’10 bit byte’, ‘395643 memory’ and some others w/o any luck. I don’t think it’s wise to assume 8-bit bytes, but just for purposes of comparison, that would make this a 200 byte memory card!

Finding Ada 2010 – Angela Sheehan

I first met Angela at a New Hampshire Media Makers meetup back in August 2009. During her three minute ‘here’s what I’m up to’ presentation she spoke of her interest in wearable tech: fabric/electronic mashups. I’m interested in any kind of computing/networking/digital tech that doesn’t involve a screen, keyboard and beige box; we said hello and struck up a conversation. Later in the week, she sent me links to work – REACTIVEfashion – she’d done (with Rebecca Grabman) as a senior at Bennington:

Interactive Formalwear.

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Tween Voodoo.

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Skate Power.

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Wow, said I.

Before we get to what Angela has been up to recently, a few words on the path she took into Making. She went to Bennington intending to paint and do illustration, but ended up in a 3D animation class. When the person teaching 3D animation left, that program was essentially done (perils of small colleges). Not to worry – Angela jumped into Robert Ransick’s Viral Media class, from there, on to Physical Computing. Her timing was perfect – Leah Beuchley was off and running on her pioneering work, the Arduino folks had produced their platform (since adapted/adopted into the wearable-friendly Lilypad) – there was a lot of fun and ferment around wearables. Her interest in physical computing led to the work above, which was presented in a couple different venues – including a runway show, and to a class that I have to mention because the title is so great: Experiments in Mixed Reality (incidentally, structured around rapid prototyping cycles).

Since I met her last fall, Angela has been producing great work at an amazing clip:

I’m probably missing a couple, too. Going forward, I’ve heard rumblings that she’s coordinating flash-mob fun (including interactive tech) with Tara Sullivan (organizer of the Portsmouth Thriller Dance last Halloween) and know for sure that she’s looking into makerspace possibilities here on the seacoast. Especially with the flash-mob planning, it seems that she’s exploring some of the group dynamics/interaction themes that were central to at least one of the rapid-prototype projects she’s described to me.

Why Angela Sheehan on Ada Lovelace Day? She epitomizes, for me, many of the best aspects of Maker kulturny. She mashes up things she’s skilled at with things she’s figuring out and isn’t daunted by ‘I’ve never done that before’. If it’s something she wants to know, she learns it; if it’s less intriguing, she’ll get help. She pulls stuff apart and repurposes components in service to her projects. Alongside the uber-maker thing is her creativity – Angela just has a ton of cool ideas, many of which involve technology (important for the whole Lovelace thing!). Three cheers for Ada Lovelace and three cheers for Angela Sheehan.

[Side note – you can find Angela’s chinchilla related work at The Fuzz Depot.]

Life imitates the virtual

NPR’s On the Media did a bunch of football related stories this past weekend (wonder why?); one really caught my attention as I drove back from the marsh. Bob Garfield interviewed Chris Sullentrop about Sullentrop’s recent Wired article, Game Changers. Game Changers is an survey of how sports-based videogames may be feeding back into the sports they’re based on – especially the Madden NFL/football loop. Football is especially fertile ground – a mix of complexity and speed for individual plays combined with  relatively infrequent games.

Just before he reached the end zone, with 17 seconds remaining, Stokley cut right at 90 degrees and ran across the field. Six seconds drained off the clock before, at last, he meandered across the goal line to score the winning touchdown. For certain football fans, the excitement of a last-minute comeback now commingled with the shock of the familiar: It’s hard to think of a better example of a professional athlete doing something so obviously inspired by the tactics of videogame football. When I caught up with Stokley by telephone a few weeks later, I asked him point-blank: “Is that something out of a videogame?” “It definitely is,” Stokley said. “I think everybody who’s played those games has done that” — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame “probably hundreds of times” before doing it in a real NFL game. “I don’t know if subconsciously it made me do it or not,” he said. *

No wonder younger quarterbacks are finding more and more success at the college and professional levels. This season, a 19-year-old freshman started for USC, a perennial Pac-10 power. In the NFL, rookie quarterbacks are entering the league and excelling immediately at an unprecedented rate (think of the Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger, the Falcons’ Matt Ryan, and the Ravens’ Joe Flacco). In decades past, young passers sat on the bench for a year or two while they mastered reading NFL defenses. Now, having learned to differentiate between zone and man-to-man coverage over the course of years on their Xboxes and PlayStations, the rookies are less in need of such apprenticeship.

It’s one thing to suggest that videogames may be making us smarter. It’s another thing altogether to say they might be making us better athletes. But when you add it up, the evidence starts to look pretty overwhelming. At the Pop Warner Super Bowl in 2006, the winning team had 30 offensive plays, which it had learned through Madden. (”I programmed our offense into Madden to help me memorize our plays,” one 11-year-old told Sports Illustrated. “It was easier than homework.”) Dezmon Briscoe, an all-conference wide receiver for the University of Kansas, credited Madden 2009 with teaching him how to read when defenses “roll their coverages” — move their defensive backs to disguise their strategy. Chuck Kyle, a high school coach who has won 10 state championships in football-mad Ohio, has programmed his team USA playbook into Madden and uses it to teach players their assignments. So have coaches at Colorado State, Penn State, and the University of Missouri, among other schools. An offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers used the videogame as a preparation tool for an entire season, scouting his opponents digitally. While even-more-sophisticated software is available for virtual sports training, coaches and players at all levels of football say that Madden’s off-the-shelf simulation is good enough. *

Wow.

I’ve been hearing some good things about Frontline’s Digital Nation – I may need to carve some time out for it – especially the section on learning.

Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade

Simultaneously hilarious and mind-expanding (one of my favorite combinations).

Freedom is just another word for nothing! There is no dead weight in my urban spatiality. No clotted semiotics, cajoling me to behave in the stereotyped haute-bourgeois manner that Deirdre once used to stifle me.

Dematerialisation is defined by its interfaces. That which was product will become a service. That which was a service will accelerate at warp speed toward de-monetisation on the Path-to-Free. So this is not so much a post-divorce flat as a vibrant zone of interactive transaction.

Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE.

A note on posting styles

If you look at the Monthly: box over in the right margin, you’ll notice that posting frequency has dropped by about 50% for the past 6 months. Some of it has been because I’ve been busy, but another factor has been what I can only describe as dilution. With so many ways of emitting signal – Facebook, Wave and especially Twitter – and some finite number of things to say, my attention has not been focused on posting. I read this entry by Eliza Gauger with interest; I’m not willing to go as far as Bruce Sterling and declare blogging dead, but it has taken a bit of a hit. While I was looking at the bookmarklet Eliza is using, I discovered that there’s similar functionality built into WordPress called Press This. I’ve started using it (‘sproke and the two Lottes were posted via Press This) and am going to mix a lot more Tumblr/Soup-ish quick links into the blog stream. Expect the blog to be – at least until I go off on another tangent – a mix of ‘ooh, shiny’ quickies, stream-of-experience pictures and bog standard pointless ruminations.

Augmented Reality: More than Hype? |NHPR|Word of Mouth

I’ve been chipping away at an AR post for weeks with zero progress – the terrain is shifting faster than I can think coherently about it. So – I’m going to post links as I run across them.

One thing is for sure – I want a pair of glasses with:

  • embedded video camera
  • IR dazzler
  • HUD/AR projector arrangement

Wandering around with a cell phone at arms length is a transitional state – I give it 2 years.

Augmented Reality: More than Hype? | New Hampshire Public Radio | Word of Mouth.

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

I don’t think I’ve ever posted pictures of this little cutie from my trash treasure collection. It’s 8k of magnetic core memory from a GE-235 (I think) digital info processing unit – warning – 235 link is to a pdf, but a worthwhile one. If you open the pdf, check the disk drive in the upper right of page two. It’s footprint was roughly the size of a chest freezer and it had big@ss pneumatic hoses that actuated the arms carrying the heads. Also check the printer control panel on page four – I have just the panel itself in the basement, waiting for me to get inspired.

This is why core dumps are (or were) so named – little donuts, one per bit.

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They weren’t exactly mass producing these back in 1966.

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The nameplate:

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And click here for a ‘did he really say it’ regarding the post’s title.