Category Archives: making things

The Pratt Engine Room

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I traveled down to Brooklyn last weekend – it was Homecoming/Parent’s Weekend at Pratt Institute, a Certain Design Student’s base of operations. While there, he took me to see the Engine Room. What a place! It currently generates electricity in the winter – exhaust steam goes to the main heating system. It’s the most beautiful co-gen facility imaginable.

Some notes cribbed from the handout that details the Engine Room’s history along with some pictures:

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Three 75KW generators driven by one-cylinder steam engines. Installed in 1900, they replaced two steam engines driving three generators. Originally a third engine powered machine shops via the classic flywheel/belt arrangement.

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In 1927 the switchboard reached it’s current size.

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Sometime during the 1980’s the three steam machines passed the million hour running time mark. Planned obsolescence? Nay – back then, they built to last.

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Feline staff members are well taken care of. They have their own entrance, there is a wall of ribbons recognizing their achievements, and one has her own memorial.

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Pictures

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In response to my Ranchero post below, Steve sends along this picture of a ’61 taken 300 feet away from his house:

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Cue Homer Simpson slobbering noises from yrs truly.

Let me also put in a shameless plug for A Certain Design Student’s MoMA Flickr set. Well worth a peek. The shot below is not from his museum set, but I post it because I love panoramas (as usual, click to embiggen).

Moleskine mania

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Via Cool Tools:

A second skin for your Moleskine that itself will become an elegant heirloom. Priced at $39.95 it is an excellent value and will provide exceptional service, becoming a comfortable second skin for that valuable Moleskine. We used our regular English kip, a thin very tight-grained leather that is exceedingly durable. (Also available in Chocolate or Black calf finished cowhide or buffalo, depending upon availability.)

Droolworthy – and Gfeller Casemakers offer some other wicked pissah leather goods. I’m sure Gfeller is a familiar name to some out there (my money is on RF, for one), but they are new to me.

For a certain design student

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Mr. Jalopy says,

Unbelievably Elegant and Savage Design – This is an easy one. Monkeys can do this. Look at the Ferrari at the top of the page and figure out how it appears so elegant and fine boned while still having the demeanor of a bloodthirsty savage. Decipher that simple formula, update it in a respectful way, carve a many-cylindered engine block out of a single chunk of billet and, with the hammer of Buddha, pound aluminum fenders over Italian stumps that have Enzo’s initials carved in the base. Eat prosciutto for lunch and truffles for dinner, bathe in cognac, drink espressos during victory laps, road test at midnight, change tires for thunderstorm wet practice, whisk baguette crumbs from the oxblood leather seats with a boar bristle brush, keep sterling flasks of courage in the glove box, smoke cigars with the commitment of Mark Twain and feed your chickens at dawn.

Yep, that just about covers it…

Blinded by science

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I walked into the classroom across the hall from my office this morning to water my plants and saw some objects that were begging to be photographed. The middle school science teacher/friend/coworker whose room this is lets me keep some of my orchids, bromeliads and carnivorous plants in a sunny window; I like going in to check out the latest projects in process – kids working on rockets or IDing dragonfly nymphs – you get the idea…

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Light box

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Via the Make: blog, I discovered this great post on building a $10 macro photo studio. I liked the idea a lot; I have some gadgets I want to unload via eBay (good pictures help sell) and there are many other things – flowers, shells, bugs, etc. – that I’d like to take decent pictures of. I invested approximately $7, most of which went for a pad of tracing paper, and ended up with:

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It may not look like much, but I’ve already used it a couple time and even poorly lit (one compact fluorescent on a gooseneck) it does a surprising job. Stay tuned for a few pictures…

Systems thinking

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In my post on internet radio I mentioned the adaptation vs. control choice that the media industry is facing. I’m going to eventually post Kauffman’s rules of systems thinking, but since there are 28 of them, I thought I’d soften everyone up with 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline (from Peter Senge’s book):

  1. today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions”
  2. the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back
  3. behavior grows better before it grows worse
  4. the easy way out usually leads back in
  5. the cure can be worse than the disease
  6. faster is slower
  7. cause and effect are not closely related in time and space
  8. small changes can produce big results –but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious
  9. you can have your cake and eat it too –but not at once
  10. dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
  11. there is no blame

I remain suspicious of folks that lay out characteristics of effective organizations – the descriptive often segues into the prescriptive and as far as ‘just do these things and your organization will flourish’ – if it was that easy I’d think we’d see a lot fewer Dilbert meets Kafka workplaces. I spent many years working for a very large corporation; we had a CEO who was regularly fêted as a managerial genius. Down in the trenches one of my favorite inside jokes was filling in the blanks on a couple bits of management speak: the inside-out view (how do we see ourselves) and the outside-in view (how do our customers and suppliers see us).

  • inside-out = “I wish I worked for the company he’s talking about”
  • outside-in = “I wish I did business with that company”

In fairness to Jack, I think he realized that the company he liked to describe was some kind of idealized construct – that didn’t make the cube farms any more hospitable though… Whining aside, thinking about systems rather than a naive linear cause and effect is a habit all of us need to cultivate (IMHO).

Rule 10 makes me think of another rule from one of the best project management books out there – The Mythical Man Month. To paraphrase a point from Brook’s book in call and response form:

Q: How do you make a late project later?

A: Add more people!

4th Gen Media, part II

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Incompatibabel
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My last post on the subject was less coherent than I would have liked; I’m going to keep this one short and linky. First, the link from the quote above to Tim O’Reilly’s essay on online distribution is worth following. Tim is a middleman – a publisher – and he gets it (his lesson #5: File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.) What he publishes may have helped him see the light – O’Reilly is responsible for some of the internet’s canonical dead-tree resources. So, for the 4GM II web tour, start at Kung Fu Monkey for a couple quick observations and jump from there (or from here) to Alice’s snippets from a keynote speech given by Chris Anderson. The Long Tail (Mr. Anderson’s phrase for a power-law tail applied to businesses/distribution channels) is another key element in the 4GM puzzle. Be sure to check the comments on Alice’s post – a good reality check. Also – credit where it’s due – I lifted the O’Reilly quote from a recent kfmonkey post.

Goodbye Brad

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Bradford Washburn died last Wednesday. He was 96. To describe him as a legend (at least in New England) doesn’t do him justice. He was a cartographer, a mountaineer, the Director of Boston’s Museum of Science and, of course, a photographer. Of the three who I think of as the holy trinity of New England tech photography (Doc Edgerton, Ed Land and Brad Washburn), he was the one who combined technological achievement with an amazing eye for beauty. A friend of mine ran into Mr. Washburn on the summit of Mount Washington a few years back – Washburn was in his late eighties and still storming around the high places. With respect and admiration – goodbye…

4th Generation Media

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First, let me recommend this 4GM note over at kfmonkey. For a while it’s been pretty clear that ‘appointment based’ teevee was and is getting battered by new technology – TiVo was the thing that really crystallized out a couple of trends (time shifting, ad skipping), and as we move forward content pops up in more and odder places. Additionally the range of entertainment options available keeps growing; games (computer and console based) are an entire genre that didn’t exist at all in the heyday of 3 (here in the US) networks. It’s never been easier to be creative – there are lots of tools to make stuff: music, video, even writing – and to get your work in front of people. Sure, much of it is of questionable quality but 80% of everything is crap and a certain amount of work is produced for the pleasure of creation. So, on the one hand we have blossoming diversity and on the other hand? We have folks like the RIAA and MPAA who are desperately trying to, if not put the genie back in the bottle altogether, at least control something they can’t. The record industry’s anti-piracy efforts are a joke. They can’t be bothered to obey their own rules. They sue first graders and grandmothers. They vandalize their customer’s PCs. They’ve also managed to cripple an entire distribution channel – legal music downloads. The DRM the industry insists on is such a pain in the @ss that, in my experience, it often drive folks to abandon online music services in favor of other approaches. I don’t mess with the iTunes store or with p2p stuff – I buy used CDs, rip ’em (FLAC format – lossless) and either keep or re-sell the CD. The RIAA/MPAA customer-hostile approach is about to jump to the next level with all the ‘protection‘ features built in to Windows Vista and the hardware Vista will run on. The protection being engineered in will protect copyright holders from the folks that bought and are using the computer. I’ve got no plans to upgrade – in fact this may be the event that causes me to exit the Windows world (on machines that I own) in favor of Linux and OS X – but as someone who fields a lot of computer questions, I’m afraid… Aside from pissing a lot of folks off, I wonder what effect this mess will have on consumer electronics manufacturers and the adoption of HDTV. Sony’s consumer electronics wing is the poster child for serving 2 masters – the customer and the content folks (Sony Pictures, Sony BMG), but unfortunately, it looks like all the big guys (MS, Intel, AMD) are rolling over and playing dead rather than serving the paying customer – not usually a good business plan. Although I wouldn’t mind a nice new 16:9 teevee, I’m going to wait until the dust settles – I have better things to spend money on and I can’t shake the feeling that this is yet another attempt to rope me in to monthly fees for something I don’t need.

Armor

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Very nice armor for cats and mice:

The suit above would be perfect for the Caracal X Abyssinian I’m going to breed someday (unless I move to a state where I can own a pure Caracal or – even less likely – I get my hands on what I really would like to course: a cheetah).

My suggestion to Mr. Boer? Work up a few Thracian-style helmet and greaves ensembles suitable for frogs and let the Batrachomyomachia commence!

By this speech he persuaded them to arm themselves They covered their shins with leaves of mallows, and had breastplates made of fine green beet-leaves, and cabbage-leaves, skillfully fashioned, for shields. Each one was equipped with a long, pointed rush for a spear, and smooth snail-shells to cover their heads. Then they stood in close-locked ranks upon the high bank, waving their spears, and were filled, each of them, with courage.

Via Make.