Gianteye

I was just jonesing for just such a device. I'm in the same bind and would love to play with a similar design but with a dial to log different jobs.

Excellent job.

I wonder how easy a cheap, low tech version of this would be to make. A camera staring at the underside of a clear gel with an incredibly thin layer of opaque reflective pigment on top of it could pick up and translate a depth map if the surface were evenly lit.

I wonder what office could officiate the official announcement that cell phones are killing bees. I would assume this would be some kind of department of natural resources or environmental protection agency, yes? This office would not likely be the trashy British tabloid the Daily Mail, right?

I'm not quite clicking with the design. I'd figure you'd need at least the wing span of an ultralight to get that off the ground, plus a bit more for the weight of its fully paneled body. I'm just not seeing how you fit an engine and enough fuel for a reasonable flight in that package. The doubled wings buy you a little span, but it just doesn't seem to have enough surface area.

But the author doesn't state why that equilibrium cannot change. He states that is hasn't, which is different.

It's the difference between a double blind experiment and an epidemiological survey. One attempts to isolate a mechanism that is predictive, another attempts to explain historical trends.

I'd rather the headline read "hasn't popped" versus "never popped". It implies there's some force keeping the high heel bubble (whatever that may be) from popping in perpetuity, and seems to draw a connection to the education bubble doing the same.

This is like an article in 2007 reading "The High-Hell Bubble never popped, and the Housing Bubble may not either."

This seems to be too simple and straightforward to be true. Also, the promise of a follow up video with no link to a description or more of the author's work is a bit suspicious. You seldom get this brand of hack without having a handful of projects you're proud of and make a website for first.

Still, it would be lovely if this turns out to be true. Stuffed with potential.

I would suggest TechShop. Desk space, internet access, and $25/day.

It's completely news to me, but I don't have strong ties to the infosec world. This could be standard practice as far as I know.

Is it usual to find analysis/info traders doing this brand of malicious software injection? Are a portion of active worms and rootkits used today derivations of tools built by infosec companies?

Apparently the secret sauce involves a bit of SQL injection.

I posted some advice in the replies on his wordpress. I'll repost it here as I think it applies to anyone in the making/programming/mathematics venn.

Although I think you could conquer art as a lasting business it's difficult to simply pick up as a stopgap measure. It takes time to build up an audience, figure out promotions, weigh out the cost of merchandise, and tour the right conferences. However, once all the proper mechanisms are in place it can develop into a really rewarding career.

You might consider joining the http://100kgarages.com/ 100k Garages Network to contract out some time on your equipment as a short term solution. I've been selling through Etsy and producing work on commission for a few years. It takes time to ramp up, but promoting through MAKE magazine, BoingBoing, and various geek and maker magazines is easy if you make things that capture geek imaginations. Writing Instructables and giving talks at Makter Faire and Hack Labs are both ways of giving your work a long tail that brings in a steady stream of visitors.

http://www.pacificpuzzleworks.com/ Lee Krasnow is an inspiring example of a successful home maker. He produces intensely mathematically driven complex wooden puzzles. He makes them with such precision and skill that he can charge a fairly high price on each and make a decent living out of the affair. I feel the same about http://www.taomc.com/ Bruce Shapiro, http://www.arthurganson.com/ Arthur Ganson, and http://oilpunk.com/ John Saurriuguarte. http://sternlab.org/ Becky Stern makes her living through a combo of writing for MAKE and beautiful crafty projects. http://adafruit.com Limor Fried, better known as Lady Ada, spun out her hacker electronics kits into a thriving business.

With your skills a career in interaction design (at a place like http://tellart.com/ Tellart, http://www.wetdesign.com/ Wet, http://tangibleinteraction.com/ Tangible Interaction, etc.) might be a solid fit. Doing a combo of engineering, fabricating, and design is a mighty force for companies that produce one-offs like conference booths, promotional sculptures, art installations, lobby displays, signs, and interactive advertisements. I've done little jobs for Tellart for years and it's always rewarding.

Your work is impressive and I'd like to see more, bigger, and more impossible varieties of it. Please get in touch if you'd like to chat about more possibilities, places, and art.

-M@

Apparently you can't have a party, even a political one, without "Arrrrrr."

You've got it. The other half of the problem is that there's a chance that when you start flipping coins the first 100 flips will all turn up heads. Now, does this mean that the universe is bent and has begun preferentially treating Mr. Lincoln's head different than his backside? Does this mean your testing apparatus is biased? Is this an inherent property of coins? If you stop flipping at 100 it'd very tempting to conclude that this is the case.

The only way to find out is to do enough flips to eliminate the chances of your final result being influenced by statistical flukes. Measuring small differences, like trying to answer "does a coin preferentially land on one side vs the other?" usually takes hundreds of thousands of tests to guarantee you're seeing objective data, rather than seeing patterns in noise.

Isomers do tend to act differently in certain situations. You can't shake someone's left hand easily with your right. Although I'm not certain on the exact mechanisms I believe it is possible to screen molecules of different chiralitites by using chemicals that only attach to a right hand or a left hand partner. They might also pass through mazes and filters in different directions.

It's a good question, and I'd love to hear a detailed answer.

Sweet Jesus! Scientists have discovered gravity! In addition, to add insult to injury, as things get closer they only increase the gravity between them. Soon, the world will collapse into a swirling singularity if we don't take swift, immediate action. Refrain from forming crowds. Be cautious not to marry your dinner service. Only you can prevent black holes.

/sarcasm

The reasoning of this article is incredibly specious. There is no adequate evidence or inference that mirror cells would have any advantages over standard life forms. Isomers aren't incredibly divergent structures that nature fails to handle on a massive scale. Isometric molecules are a basic part of molecular life. Mirror cells would have the same biotic survivorship of the rest of the cells on the planet.

By synthesizing cells that use a proportion of molecules that have an inverse chirality to the majority of biotic life we're not exactly making cancer airborne and contagious.

There are lots of folks at Eyebeam, Fat Lab, and NycResistor who produce art for a living. Some are artists for hire, constantly living from project to project, others work for agencies. I'd definitely look into those labs and possibly collaborate on projects to get a handle on the lifestyle that comes with being a creative programmer.

I'm applying this round.

Eyebeam is amazing. Or, that is to say, the group I worked with was an amazing group of people. There were lots of creative people making the shops hum, teaching classes, and sharing ideas. Though, the group of people using it as a work/research facility changes almost entirely every six months. It's possible that the personality of the group changes substantially with it.

It's universally guaranteed to be brilliant. There are also a lot of dramatic transformations the whole place goes through as different people change the gallery spaces to suit their projects. While I was there working on Fairytale Fashion it changed from a formal art gallery, to a small faux bookstore, to a museum, to a fashion runway. It was sometimes like watching mushrooms grow in fast motion.

I've often considered myself a genius at being stupid. My stupidity aptitudes are staggering across all categories.

Fortunately this has lead to some spectacular failures and the burden of knowledge that comes with. I think I've successfully managed to leverage my multiple stupidities effectively.

Best of luck. I'm feeling the same brand of anxiety.

Prof. Raskar has a good set of advice on the Camera Culture page http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/join

I'd recommend reading all of the pages relevant to the groups you want to be a part of. I second Storborg's advice to read some recent graduate papers.

I'd also recommend working on your site specifically for the eyes of MIT professors. Highlight your work and how it applies to the world outside the field in which it was made. Talk about what inspires you and what you want to pursue in your own work. Think of it as an ad campaign with your professors as your target audience. You need to sell them on why you are right for that lab. Ask yourself the question "why should I be at Media Lab versus anyone else" and then answer it through your portfolio.

Oh my yes. Where's my head at. Neuromancer.

I had no idea William Gibson was so insightful and urbane. I suppose I might have read Necromancer without any appreciation of how early it came in the timeline of cyberpunk literature, but I was never able to get into it.

After reading this interview, I feel pretty compelled to give Zero History a look.

Seconded. I'd feel a lot more comfortable chatting people up with questions if I had a peek into the projects they've done before.

And, knowing I'd like to have people call me up with their projects, it's to everyone's advantage to bring the barrier to entry down as much as reasonably possible.

I'm sure a decent proportion of scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and folks in fields that tend to be dominated by men that couldn't give a toss for the gender of their fellow researchers. They couldn't care in the least who's publishing and who else inhabits their labs. They care about the truth.

Unfortunately, it only takes a few extremely chauvinistic individuals to sour an entire field towards women. If you look through James D. Watson's book The Double Helix, you'll see dozens of disparaging references to Rosalind Franklin[1], inditing her for such crimes as not wearing enough makeup, and being a woman running a chem lab.

I think the flavor of a field can be tinted strongly by edge cases. Although it is a form of confirmation bias, I believe people can't help applying extreme behaviors by individuals to their understanding of the group. I'm sure if I heard the president of some college spouting racial epithets, I'd look a little more sternly on the college as a whole and question how it treats its students. I would make the association that if someone with these views was allowed to become an authority, if it had taken a number of people who shared these views to allow them to get there.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin Rosalind Franklin had an incredibly fascinating life, and most likely would have been credited with a Nobel prize for the discovery of the DNA helix if she hadn't died before it was awarded. She actually died of ovarian cancer, caused by the xray machinery she operated in investigating the composition of the DNA crystal.

It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far. My mother designs curriculum for gifted education, and over the years I've seen that part of the difficulty in raising a gifted child to being a healthy, successful adult is knowing what to do with them.

Richard Feynman was building complex electronic booby traps in his room when he was seven. Before turning ten he had nearly burned down his house with a homemade transformer in his ad hoc laboratory. Most parents would see him as a problem that needed to be fixed, or be so confused that he'd end up being ignored. Many parents can't see the world from the perspective of a gifted child, realizing how slow school seems, how frustrating their peers might be. Many parents wouldn't consider sending their kid to math camp, or Robot One, or having them apprentice for an electronics engineer. Since the adults wouldn't consider it fun, it doesn't occur to them, unless they're very close with their child, that their kid might love a month doing advanced math, or learning physics early.

I believe that gifted kids are fragile. They need strong reinforcement at home telling them to do what makes them happy, whether the other kids dream of being scientists, or a cellists, or a astrophysicists, or not. Since smart kids are also very aware of themselves, they're also very sensitive to the expectations of their parents and teachers. A lifetime of being told how exceptional you are can lead to severe depression if you wind up simply average. Someone with those kind of expectations lumped on them can even become very successful and still spend the remainder of their life lamenting the potential they had, judging themselves for not becoming a first chair, first rate, phd everything.

For each of the Rain-Man savants in the world who can look at a pile of dropped toothpicks fresh from the box and tell you that there are 1996 rolling across the floor, there are a hundred savvy chaps who will see a fresh box with "2000 count" on the side, the four remaining un-dropped toothpicks, and make an educated guess.

There are people who have always been able to look at a Rubix cube and solve it on intuition, but that number's piddling compared to the people who can do something that looks exactly the same, but involved practice, study, interest, and the gradual honing of some basic principles into a slick, refined art.

It would have made the headlines if a google rep gave boingboing or IO9 a brief interview saying "we are not evil, but no one messes with the google."

I'm not sure about that. There are plenty of boring jobs to be had, and quite a few of them are to be had at Google. I suppose banality and life satisfaction aren't mutually exclusive, but it's the case for me. Doing computational database analysis whether at Facebook or at the local grocery store for me is a bitter kind of hell.

I think I agree with the point, but would refine it. Both talented and talentless people have the option of living boring lives. The more talent you have, and the more willing you are to focus and direct it, the more leverage you have to launch yourself into a fascinating and entertaining lifestyle.

Well said. I wonder how vulnerable this system would be to griefing.

I can just picture people being as annoying about posting your status at places your not as tagging you in collages of their favorite ponies.

It's kind of a fun concept. Your scores are your money. I suppose it would also be good to have a levels system where you gain xp or ranks for juggling your finances well. You set goals for yourself, do daily tallies that give you a discreet "whistles and bells" review of all your gains and losses. When you meet important goals like making rent this month or paying down your credit card it lets you know what you can go out and buy or do with your remaining income, e.g. "You just paid down INSURANCE today! With your extra cash you can get yourself a BURRITO at UNION BURRITO!"

You could incorporate it with a wishlist so that it alerts when you've got enough to go out and buy that Upper Playground tshirt while still making rent this month.

I always thought that RPG's make their impact by giving people a constant stream of small, finite rewards. Growing numbers and flashing lights are something that just seems to fill people with an addictive pleasure, e.g. slot machines.

What strikes you as unnatural about RPG's? Do you think there will be some kind of generational shift where their popularity will wane?