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The ransomizr – a cool little toy.
Category Archives: making things
Got a Match?
Something a little different – a match on two categories of technology for reasons that are pretty abstract. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the shotgun and the bicycle. Bear with me – I think a case can be made.
Near-platonic simplicity. Lightness is important for both – more so, perhaps for the bicycle, which could weigh nothing and not effect performance – for the shotgun, some weight damps recoil. The general unwillingness of folks to carry/pedal around extra ounces leads to a paring away that leaves just enough gun/bike to get the job done. On a good bike or shotgun, everything there is necessary; all parts contribute and integrate.
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Fit. Shotguns are not so much aimed as they are pointed. When you put the gun to your shoulder, you want it to be in the same place every time and you want your head positioned so that you are looking down the length of the barrels consistently. If the gun is oriented slightly differently every time you mount it (stop giggling – that’s the right phrase), it doesn’t matter how well you swing through – you’ll miss more often than I do (in other words, lots). If you are looking to minimize wasted energy, fit is important on a bicycle. You can pedal a bike in a lot of different positions, but if the idea is to translate your effort into forward progress, you’ve got to pay attention to the saddle/pedal relationship. I can’t think of two other things (and I’m including clothing) that benefit more from a good body-object match.
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Decorative elements. Somewhat in tension with point 1, but within the tight constraints of weight and function – and often augmenting the effort on both in an artistic way – is the human urge to decorate and add meaning thereby. Color case hardening (shotgun), pantographing (bicycle), engraving (shotgun), lugwork (bicycle), choice of wood (shotgun), drilling out (bicycle) – all, when done well, enhance the object. On a personal note, I’m nuts for color case work. My ideal would be a sidelock with a tiny amount of engraving around the edges of the sideplate and any screws and the rest bare save for an oil slick of case hardening (and gold-washed inside, where no one can see, but where it will help prevent corrosion).
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Made by people. At the high end (where the similarities are most apparent), there are craftspeople involved – brazing, filing, carving, drilling. It shows, again, both in form and function.
I’ve had this little set of arguments (“bike and shotgun, why do I like thee so much? let me count the ways.”) floating around in my head for years. It’s getting attention now because of a recent post on Knucklebuster. Seems there was an American motorcycle manufacturer named Merkel.
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Way back when, bicycle and motorcycle (and aircraft) technology bled into each other pretty seamlessly. Shotgun lovers will also recognize the name – not the same company, but there is a famous German shotgun maker also named Merkel.
So – here’s thought 1. Since old motorcycles shared a lot of elements in common with bicycles – what would be cooler than a board track-ish moped? Small motor in that U-shaped down tube, pedals well positioned, brass tank with ‘Flying Merkel’ lettered in green paint and gold leaf. Design student – we need to talk.
Thought 2 – perfect pairing with the slightly greater complexity of the Flying Merkel moped? A Merkel 96k drilling (that’s a side-by-side shotgun with a rifle barrel tucked underneath, usually) in 12ga x 12ga x .30/06. Dinah running along side, the little teckel that I hope to get this spring tucked in a saddlebag or in my coat – jaeger, jaeger, über alles.
Marabunta!
My friendly neighborhood spidey-librarian got me a copy of Six Legs Better
The scientists and naturalists discussed in this book studied ants for their own sake, and often did so with remarkable passion. They did not merely adopt ants instrumentally as vehicles for social and political agendas. Yet neither could they step outside the cultural frames within which they operated. In each case there was a two-way traffic between science and broader culture, with the culture shaping the questions posed by scientists and the scientific answers in turn directing cultural views, reinforcing or slowly altering conceptions of the natural and its significance for the human condition.*
To go along with the reading, I moved The Naked Jungle to the top of my Netflix queue. I gotta admit – all I remembered of the movie (from a Saturday morning creature feature long ago) were the !attack of the marabunta! scenes – turns out the movie is mostly about Christopher Leiningen’s psycho-sexual confusion regarding his mail-order bride. I can’t decide what the right frame is to put around Chuck Heston’s scenery-chewing – 50’s? Turn of the century? 1954’s idea of 1901? Or how it looks from where I sit right now? I couldn’t for the life of me move out of my right-here-right-now reaction to Leiningen’s problem – in a phrase, what a douchebag. Leiningen freaks when he finds out that his talented, pleasant and very attractive new wife is a widow – yes kids, another man has already had carnival knowledge of her. This is an especially serious issue because Leiningen is a virgin. I guess he has some 1st time performance concerns. Pinhead. I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis Costello recently – Mystery Dance fits, but I really like these two bits from Two Little Hitlers:
You call selective dating
For some effective mating…
You say you’ll never know him
He’s an unnatural man
He doesn’t want your pleasure
He wants as no one can
He wants to know the names of
All those he’s better than
But, of course, the ants (standing in for the rainforest/Ma Nature) are held off, and Joanna Leiningen’s bravery wins her husbands heart. Yay!
Went off to the Manchvegas herp show on Saturday to pick up various and sundry food items. Andy the phasmid guy was there and had some young Macleay’s Spectres (Extatosoma tiaratum) – I couldn’t resist. I’ll post some pix when she’s a little bigger. In reading up on their natural history, I was semi-surprised to find a commensal relationship with – you got it – ants:
The outside material of E. tiaratum eggs consists of lipids and other organic compounds that ants identify as food. They carry these eggs to their colony, consume the edible outer portion, and dump the intact eggs into their waste piles.
Newly-hatched E. tiaratum nymphs are ant mimics and resemble the insects in whose nest they are born. Their aposematic pattern — orange head, white collar, the rest black — mimics the ant genus Leptomyrmex and makes them appear toxic. Although most adult stick insects are notoriously slow, these nymphs are speedy, active, and quickly make their way to the trees.*
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Last, but not least, this post over at BLDGBLOG caused me to immediately order Ant Farm: Living Archive 7
Fun with minifigs
Go Steam Venture!
Maybe it’s just the zeitgeist in the corner of the universe I inhabit, but I gotta admit, last night’s Venture Bros. episode made me do a little victory dance. First off, we got to meet Col. Venture – Hank and Dean’s great (great-great?) grandfather – a guy who flies around in an airship with Sam Clemens, Fantomas, Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley and Sandow pursued by Nikola Tesla. Cement the retrofuture-steampunk-Venture connection? I’d say so. Also – a glimpse at the origin of the Guild of Calamitous Intent. Then, during a commecial break, this ad for Scion.
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Say what you will about the Scion line (I understand many are put off by the officialitude of the Scion factory mod parts) the fact remains that what they are trying to do is to tap into the customizer vibe – something that I noted earlier.
Update – I predict the orb is either a seed (universal self-replicator as in The Diamond Age) or a complete kludge/failure – or both. If it’s a seed, I really appreciate its incremental genesis – like the Cryptonomicon in the eponymous novel. Is Jackson Publick a fan of Neal Stephenson?
Mangrove project
Random thoughts on Steampunk
I told Matt M. ages ago that I’d post some thoughts on steampunk – here goes nothin’.
First, a little scope narrowing/definition – the steampunk I’m talking about is the steampunk of things – the design sensibility that takes inspiration both from Verne et al. and from the second generation of steampunk lit. It’s too bad Gaslight Romance didn’t take as an appellation for gen 2; it’s more accurate, but -punk seems to be to speculative fiction genres what -gate is to political scandals. So, across the board, punk it shall be, though the first generation – Gibson, Sterling and friends – was the true punk: a critique rather than a celebration. Steampunk things, especially now that the subject is getting some mainstream attention, can be all over the place. If pressed, I’d offer up a top hat and goggles as the essential pieces of clothing and when it comes to other ‘stuff’, I’m going to point to Jake Von Slatt’s keyboard and Morse code RSS reader as sitting firmly at the center of the Steampunk universe.
Steampunk is the child of maker culture. I’ve posted about makers before – the steampunk practice of modding, hacking and fabricating is of a piece with what many others are doing to make commodity items uniquely their own. Steammakers are well positioned: many of their favorite materials – brass, wood, leather – are relatively easy to work and they are echoing/emulating a period when the inventor in his workshop was paradigmatic (they don’t call ’em Edisonades for nothing). If you want to tinker, taking as your model a period when the tinkerer was king ain’t a bad idea. Doing it in a time when sharing ideas and information with like minded people is incredibly easy? Another good idea.
If maker kulturny is how, retrofuturism is why. Retrofuturism (or postmodern paleo-futurism, if you prefer) addresses a fundamental question: “Where’s my friggin’ flying car?” More seriously, it’s an attempt to look at past visions of the future to see what we can learn about the times the predictions were made in and figure out something about how the world works (why were the predictions so wide of the mark). For many of us, retrofuturism and disappointment go hand in hand – I was brought up on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on my tenth birthday and bought into the Star Trek “Little UN on the Bridge” vision of science and Vulcan rationality overwhelming all our petty differences (yeah, I know Kirk was white, male and a bit of a hound, but you have to start somewhere). Where are we now? It’s been 35 years since Apollo 17 left the moon – we’re dinking around in low earth orbit, going noplace fast. Further, if you take a hard look at the distances and energy budgets involved in interstellar travel you’re left with a choice between non-starter and Clarke’s 3rd law. Yes, the future will involve magic tech, but relying on the Underpants Gnomes (collect underpants, ?, a starship!) isn’t where I’ll be putting my money. The ultra-modern future predicted in the sixties is nowhere to be found and the road to Infinity and Beyond has a Darien Gap the size of the Pacific in it. Instead, what we have looks disturbingly like plain old day-to-day life.
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I’m going to skate past the fact that the world has changed – maybe even progressed – quite a bit since ’68 and ignore the incredible stuff our metal and silicon kids are doing around the solar system. Part of it is that we tend to adapt to change when we’re in the middle of it. Cell phones? Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. GPS receivers in damn near everything? Yawn. Another piece – and the root of retrofuturist disappointment IMHO – is the tendency of sci-fi types and futurists to concentrate on extremes – Mad Max or Futurama II. Utopia or dystopia; is there a word for a -topia where baldness is an issue, where kids get frustrated with their parents, where one waits in long lines to renew a drivers license? The biggest single tech change of the last quarter century – data networking/the Internet – is used to connect people to each other and to information with unprecedented ease. It’s also used for v1agr@ spam, 419s and zombies. The problem with the future is that there are people in it – a fact that I think we’re realizing.
I know I’m veering a bit, but I need to acknowledge the ultimate superscience sendup – The Venture Bros.
The series’ predominant homage is to Jonny Quest, as it is the basis for many of the main characters. Dr. Venture is loosely modeled on Benton Quest, Brock likewise on Race Bannon, and the Venture boys correspond to Jonny and Hadji. The comparisons, however, are taken to the level of an extreme parody by making the characters the “next generation” after an age of scientific heroism – and the next generation doesn’t always fare well.
Thus Dr. Venture is a pill-popping, barely-competent scientist who treats his children and those around him with overt disdain and contempt; Brock is a hyper-macho man with a (frequently used) license to kill; and the boys are nincompoops stuck in an out-of-date mindset. One newspaper critic remarked, “if filmmakers Woody Allen and Sam Peckinpah had collaborated on Jonny Quest, it would have come out a lot like this.” *
We have seen the future and it looks like a cross between the alley behind a liquor store and a Massachusetts DMV office (with costumed supervillians!). (Also – proof blogging makes you smarter – I knew I’d seen the Venture Industries building somewhere before – now I know where.)
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So… recent superscience boosterism is bunk. Maybe Verne and company got it right. If not, at least their miscues aren’t within living memory (too cheap to meter, anyone?). Steampunk goes back farther for it’s optimistic vision of the future for practical (brass), thematic (Tesla) and temporal (old enough to be malleable) reasons, but it does – in spite of it’s frequent darkness – have it’s own customized, idiosyncratic view of a possible good life.
Finally, Matt asked whether Steampunk might be the new counterculture. I responded in comments, but I want to elaborate slightly. The 60s/early 70s counterculture – as a label applied by the mainstream – merely identified a large group of people who were not pleased with the way things were going and/or thought they had a better way. Within this population there were a million different tribes and tendencies; one could develop a taxonomy of different kinds of acidheads, let alone try to figure out what tied together SDS, jesus freaks and Merry Pranksters. I think we’re seeing similar kinds of things happening today – makers overlap Steampunks overlap (yes, clothing counts) goth and on and on – with one important exception. The center – mainstream culture – is less dominant and more easily fragmented than it was 40 years ago. It’s CBS/NBC/ABC (then) vs. The Golf Channel/Discovery/Versus/etc., etc. (now) to use an obvious example. Personally, I think this is a good thing – diversity (and tolerance) in cultural systems builds in some resilience – if you’re going to fall victim to groupthink – and you will – smaller, more amorphous groups sound good to me.
I’d like to do my part in the mash-up/creativity/fragmentation movement – allow me to point to a series of posts on Lord Whimsy’s LiveJournal. For those of us who would rather be in the woods than in the workshop – neoleatherstockingism (I gotta clean up that name). Where steampunks have brass goggles, we’ll have silver gorgets (also gunstock clubs, dogs, hawks, optics, net access)! Manifesto to follow – I’m 75% serious about this.
Zoos and Flies
A recent post on the always excellent BLDGBLOG got me doing a little thinking. First, a long quote from the post:
I have to register my fascination again, however, with the idea that zoos actually represent a kind of spatial hieroglyphics through which humans communicate – or, more accurately, miscommunicate – with other species.
That is, zoos are decoy environments that refer to absent landscapes elsewhere. If this act of reference is read, or interpreted correctly, by the non-human species for whom the landscape has been constructed, then you have a successful zoo. One could perhaps even argue here that there is a grammar – even a deep structure – to the landscape architecture of zoos.
Zoos, in this way of thinking, are at least partially subject to a rhetorical analysis: do they express what they are intended to communicate – and how has this meaning been produced?
Landscape architecture becomes an act not just of stylized geography, or aesthetically shaped terrain, but of communication across species lines.Of course, this can also be inverted: are these landscapes really meant to be read, understood, and interpreted by what we broadly refer to as “animals,” or are these landscapes simply projections of our own inner fantasies of the wild? Or should I say The Wild?
While this latter scenario sounds much more likely to be the case – humans, like a broken cinema, always live inside their own projections – nonetheless, the non-human communicational possibilities of landscape architecture will continue to fascinate me.
Three observations – general, personal and tangential.
General. In the post-wunderkammer/boxes with iron bars era, zoos have tended to define their mission as a mix of conservation (breeding) and education (exhibits). The 2 pieces sometimes don’t align well; often species needing conservation may not be charismatic (lots of LBJs – little brown jobs – need help). Further – when trying to educate the public there’s the animal itself, its behavior (especially in groups) and its habitat. If you want to tie education back to conservation, informing people about the biome is critical – to paraphrase the real estate saw, it’s habitat, habitat, habitat. An accurate, naturalistic setting may not be what you want, though, if breeding is your goal. Keeping track of rations, who’s doing what to who, and controlling environmental parameters (I’m thinking of herps that need to be put in a rain chamber to kick off breeding, for example) may be facilitated by a less complicated – though still far from a white plastic box – enclosure. Two audiences for the landscape architect’s communication – the viewing public and the animals inhabiting the landscape. Two measures of success – does the public come away with a better understanding of how/where the animal lives (and pressures on same) and does the animal display the same range of behaviors it would in it’s home range and does it breed? It’s my impression that zoos deal with this tension by doing a lot of the breeding work off-stage where they can manipulate stimuli without having to worry about a bunch of follicly challenged primates tapping on the glass.
Personal. I keep and breed poison dart frogs. There are many reasons I enjoy them – behavior (parental care, especially), physical beauty, size (manageable); one ties in to this post – the opportunity to do some world-building. Dendrobatids and naturalistic vivaria go together like, I dunno, lobster and butter. You don’t need a planted tank to be successful with darts – lots of leaf litter, some film cannisters or a petri dish – depending on the species’ egg deposition preference – and a mister bottle will usually do the trick. It’s almost the reverse case – you can put PDFs in a planted tank and rather than destroying the plants and trashing the joint, they will settle in and, if you’ve done your world building well, thrive. To circle back to Geoff’s communication point again – I guess I’m trying to communicate with the frogs in an unnecessarily complicated way, with the complexity being for my – the observer’s – benefit.
Tangential. I’m reminded of one of the lines of polarity in fly (as in fly fishing) design: impressionistic vs. realistic. At the extreme, realistic flies don’t serve an aquatic audience at all – they exist solely for the human observer. At the other end of the scale, impressionistic flies are all about trying to guess what attributes stimulate a take. Shape, size, material, etc, are all chosen as a best guess at what makes a hatching caddis look like food to a fish. It’s about listening to what the trout said
Mangrove project
Conspiracy, mashups and correlation
- Via Bruce Sterling, a great series of summer reading lists.Lots of interesting books – two that I’m going to put in my queue: The Resurrectionist
This weird yet well-researched book by a former science advisor to Walter Cronkite argues that NASA is an occult control system, created by Nazi SS officers and high-ranking U.S. Free Masons, that discovered alien technological artifacts on the moon. Hoagland believes the “secret government” has been reverse-engineering alien technology for decades.
- One of the folks tapped for summer reading materials in the link above is Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky :: That Subliminal Kid. I heard an interview with him a few days ago – I especially like his notion of “artist as search engine”. I think there’s a sense where this has always been true – part of the artist’s job is pattern recognition – pulling something (at best, something unexpected) out of the ground. An MP3 of the interview is here and you can click here to get to Miller’s Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus mix (Buddhist hip hop).
- Another dispatch from the digital edge – The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Not sure how I feel about tossing theory over the side… Update – an example of scientific petabyte computing – the Large Hadron Collider – 2Gb of data every 10 seconds.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, a picture of Barbie finials on a miniature trebuchet.
Two tech snippets
Firefox 3. It’s out, I’ve downloaded and installed it and so far I’m liking it a lot. Biggest single thumbs-up? It does seem to be significantly faster – huge win. If you’re extra cautious, you may want to give it another few days before taking the plunge, but I haven’t had any trouble yet. Extensions I’m running: Better Gmail, Delicious Bookmarks, Quickdrag and Tab Mix Plus.
Fabjects/3D printing. I’ve posted about fabbing at home; here’s an interesting perspective on the topic:
I do believe that home manufacturing will develop in the future and feel more strongly about it now than ever. People that manufacture at home, however, will serve as “providers” that sell to others, primarily on the web. Individuals will see it as a low-risk, low-overhead business opportunity to manufacture from their basement, spare room, garage, or dorm room. They will discover a niche market and serve this market from their home. A few are already doing it.
Case in point: Fabjectory is a one-person company that has been producing models from Second Life, Google SketchUp, and Nintendo Mii for some time. The price for a color model from Fabjectory is typically $50–200. The home-based operation has been written up in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, Wired, and other major publications. I am also aware of others here in the U.S. and abroad that are offering part-making services from the comfort of their homes.
via Bruce Sterling.
Arcologies, Urbmon 116 and protocols
Summary – folks who are designing super-mega-structures are missing the boat. Designing interfaces/protocols to allow pieces of very large structures to link to each other is, as far as I’m concerned, much cooler.
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I’ve long been a fan of very large structures – I discovered Paolo Soleri and arcologies via the Whole Earth Catalog many years ago and was fascinated by the scale and organic beauty of many of his designs. Sci fi – generation ships/space habitats and Robert Silverberg’s dystopian The World Inside – helped fan the flames. I’ve been thinking big again – the past couple days have been one of those ‘the internet is telling you something’ experiences.
It (re)started two days ago when Bruce Sterling put up a link to an Inhabitat post: MILE HIGH ULTIMA TOWER: Vertical eco city works like a tree. What struck me – not for the first time – is how static this thing would be. It’s supposed to hold a million people – we’re talking all of Detroit or Birmingham or Adelaide. None of those cities is finished, in the sense that a building can be said to be finished – they’re churning, tearing up/down, growing/shrinking – there’s no point at which the prime contractor turns the keys over to the developer. Does it make sense to think that a million person structure would be a scaled up Petronas Towers?
While I was visiting Inhabitat, I indulged my curiosity a bit – I searched for ‘shipping containers’ – I keep thinking about putting some containers together as (hopefully) very low cost shelter out in the hinterlands someplace (maybe something Bruce Goff-esque – Bavinger or Bob Barns, using containers, phone poles and cable – yes, I’m a hack and a nut). Sniffing around led me to Lot-ek (warning – they’ll resize windows on you and the site is set up in a way that makes linking to specific pages impossible – I recommend you just take a peek at the screen cap below). They’ve not only designed small container based houses; they’ve also put together plans for larger structures.
Lot-ek Train Station
Shipping containers are well defined – sizes, how they fit together – but as far as componentry in a larger structure is concerned, the definition is pretty shallow – no power, water, or other services in or out.
Geoff Manaugh’s (BLDGBLOG) Flickrstream supplied the final thread (he put up this post as I wrote the last para). The idea of floating cities has been, well, floating around for a while – the ultimate pirate utopia. Governance issues aside, seems to me that this could be a fruitful area for work on interface specifications. Just as the internet doesn’t care if you are sitting in front of a Mac, or are telneted into an IBM z-series or are using WebTV (does that still exist?) as long as you comply with relevant RFCs, so too Floatopia-land shouldn’t care what your bobbing pleasure palace looks like as long as it connects to the rest of the structure in a specific way, it’s sized in multiples of X by Y by Z, complies with stability standard 1.1.1, etc. The marine environment is pretty unforgiving – marine architecture isn’t a specific field for nothin’ – but the safety and survivability problems need to be addressed regardless. RFC 1149 meets The Raft from Stephenson’s Snow Crash – let’s float!