psychomugs

Thanks!

There is a guide available in the repo's wiki: https://github.com/hrc2/blossom-public/wiki

Our contributors' forks and extensions may also be useful:

https://github.com/interaction-lab/blossom-public

https://github.com/interaction-lab/BlossomNav

Regarding sourcing the parts, there are online services available to order 3D-printed parts as you would a PCB. The *.stl files are available in the wiki. Though with how accessible 3D printers have become — the well-supported Ender 3 is available for under $100 at Micro Center — you may want to consider taking up printing as a family activity.

Plugging my own robot: Blossom is an open-source social robot made from 3D-printed or lasercut parts and a crocheted / knit cover.

https://github.com/hrc2/blossom-public

It's basically a floating head that others have customized with more functionality (e.g. cameras, microphones, screens, control with a phone) for research applications in human-robot interaction (education, telepresence, an assistant for ADHD task-focusing and CBT). We ran ~90 minute bot-building workshops for middle schoolers; they all successfully completed their robots and seemed to enjoy the hands-on experience.

I've been working on a redesign of a small robot platform I designed in grad school ( https://github.com/psychomugs/r0b0 ). We designed the robot as a small robot construction kit for other researchers and roboticists, and is basically a floating head under a fabric exterior. My last research project used the robot as a tabletop motion-controlled telepresence device accessible through a no-downloads mobile browser.

I never had the time to polish the platform so I did a ground-up hardware and software refactor. The hardware was redesigned as an homage to popular snap-fit robot model kits, with runner layouts and instructions ( https://github.com/psychomugs/r0b0/blob/main/docs/assets/bls... ).

I've tried to generalize the software as an `aconnect` for non-robot-specific hardware devices. The software powers this digital back I designed for my >50-year old Leica M2 ( https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/leica-mpi-a-pi-zero-retrofi... ) and enables quick prototyping of physical IO, e.g. using a MIDI keyboard to control motors or a gaming joystick to control a mouse.

It's mostly a passion project to refine the platform into something more usable than how it was left, but I'm open to suggestions or beta testers!

Not an official startup, but I developed an open-source laser cut and crocheted social robot platform during grad school. We ran a few workshops for ~middle schoolers to build it and there are a few built by other researchers and roboticists out in the wild.

https://github.com/hrc2/blossom-public

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I've been making origami bookmarks since elementary school [1]. Recently I've been making them out of ephemera, e.g. old coupons, the receipt for the book itself.

[1] https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Bookmark

Sounds project-y.

"hell is other people"

Also, from the same author, "heaven is each other."

That great guy sounds like a great guy. Wish I knew someone like them.

Fish rarely know what water is.

Now more than ever, it would behoove photo-makers and -viewers - i.e. everyone - to read Sontag's "In Plato's Cave" as a reminder that there is nary a thing as a real photograph.

https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/chengphotoarth1100f2019/fi...

BetterSnapTool is the first thing I install on macOS.

As an Asian American, yes.

I wonder what captcha-like mechanism they'll use for annotating this new dataset for their self-driving cars. Gamifying the videos post-drive with AR?

The HBO show is great, but his Vimeo is better IMO. I particularly like 'The Road To Magnasanti' and 'How To Remain Single.'

John Wilson, the mastermind behind HBO's Nathan Fielder-produced "How To With John Wilson," shot some beautiful scenes of Vegas' Pinball Hall of Fame.

https://vimeo.com/180067392 (~13:00)

bully each other at a scale

A phrase I didn't know I needed to learn.

Behind my phone, the Fuji XF10 - their answer to Ricoh's GR - is probably my most-used camera out of a cabal that includes the X100V, X-T3, and X-Pro2. It's a shame that this pocket of pocketable cameras with physical controls is dying out.

"The idea of opportunity costs presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once they are reduced to the abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate. But, against the ever-expanding imperium of economics, we do well to insist on what we know firsthand, namely, the concrete heterogeneity of human experience - its apples-versus-oranges character. From an economistic mind-set, spiritedness or pridefulness appears as a failure to be properly calculative, which requires that one first be properly abstract. Economics recognizes only certain virtues, and not the most impressive ones at that. Spiritedness is an assertion of one's own dignity, and to fix one's own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one's car, and of oneself." - Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

Thanks! I imagine this would drop in unmodified on the M3, which may actually yield a nicer experience thanks to the the increased magnification of the viewfinder compared to the M2.

As simple as grabbing it off with tweezers.

Thanks, I felt like the term I was using was wrong.

I got the M2 for $500 in 2017. Combined with the 12mm I bought in Japan on the weak ¥en, I had just under $1000 into the system.

Do you not see how your position could be interpreted in a negative way by the very people you intend to malign?

Again, politics aren't people; I can hate the game but not the players [1], who are also human beings with their own lives and issues. How personally you're taking this says more about you than me or the argument, which I'd recommend you reflect on as we both go touch some grass.

[1] _Please_^n do not read too much into this.

You seem to be arguing again that the stakes are quite high.

The sources I provided regarding mental health are barely within the last decade. The original quote is from several decades ago. The stakes referred to refer to research output and outcomes, not researchers. Any politics or discussion on mental health is belated band-aiding that only concerns higher-ups when output is at stake.

We have the best universities in the world. Student loans are national issue in front of the Supreme Court right now,

"Best" is a useless superlative when without an adjective. Ironically, US institutions are definitely the "best" at indebting their students.

I realize you've never been a part of those discussions, so you wouldn't know...

Another ad hominem and appeal to an authority (yours) that you haven't disclosed.

I mean, this discussion started with a non-argument ad hominem against all of academia...

"Ad hominem" = "to the person." Politics involve but are not people. The only remarks "to the person" have been yours to me.

The definition you provided is "dangerously aggressive; marked by violence or ferocity". You can't just leave out key aspects of the definition to make it fit your narrative (and again, that's all your providing here is a narrative, no proof or evidence). How is anything you've noted "dangerous"? How is it "marked by violence or ferocity"?

As said in an earlier response, dangerous aggression comes in the form of the mentor-mentee power imbalance that uproots and fucks (again, in one case I personally knew of, literally) over students. Here are some sources - evidence in papers - to fit this definition [1,2,3,4,5], assuming mental distress counts as dangerous.

... the stakes can be as high as...

Yet very little of this trickles into broader societal impact - the stakes implied by the original quip. The institutional gatekeeping discussed in TFA is complicit in this lowering of stakes.

To me, this really just gives the impression that you couldn't make it in academia.

Thanks for the ad hominem. I had the most first- and only-author publications in my group, which was enough for me to bow out.

[1] https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.21-03-0077 [2] https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1868055/v2/f39b79... [3] https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2019/12... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7199285/ [5] https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/79473041/Work_organiz...

The statement isn't mine [1] and employs the literary device of hyperbole (noun - extravagant exaggeration) in the use of "most."

Definitions of key words from the original statement from Merriam-Webster:

- politics (noun) - ...; the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government; political actions, practices, or policies

- vicious (adjective) - dangerously aggressive; marked by violence or ferocity

- bitter (adjective) - ...; distasteful or distressing to the mind

- stake (noun) - ...; something that is staked for gain or loss

The primary _stake_ (something gained or lost) in academics is not the individual academics' wellbeing, but publication and research output, which is often only relevant to very few within siloed fields. The politics (actions, practices, policies) behind this process - e.g. papers that receive positive reviews but are rejected to protect research moats, or otherwise receive undeservedly _vicious_ (aggressive) comments because peer review operates on a volunteer system that overworks at best and nepotistically gatkeeps at worst - are _bitter_ (distressing to the mind) to the authors who receive mixed feedback as the process is out of their locus of control, yet it is the measure by which academics advance (e.g. graduation, promotion).

In (anti-)academic fashion, I'll bow out of this conversation because the stakes are so low.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/

I’m not sure that strife is something to “appreciate,” but, thanks(?)

Peer-to-peer politics is vicious because of the incentive to compete for citations in a publish-or-perish milieu were big players block little players with few alternatives apart from favor currying. Mentor-mentee politics is vicious because the institutional power dynamics are skewed overwhelmingly towards the former with little recourse for the latter. The stakes - publications read by and impacting very small fractions of very small research fields and whose individual contributions are further diluted by the modern diarrhea of least-publishable units - are low.

I have a PhD.

Students are shackled to dead-end projects, uprooted from their communities by careerist mentors, and generally fucked over - in at least one case, literally - by their PIs. Scooping - having work similar to yours get published by another party - is a pervasive enough fear that reviewers can block publications to guard their own moats. Publication venues choose arbitrary selectiveness criteria, e.g. conference acceptance rates around 24.3%, to maintain an aura of high quality despite most papers being useless apart from bolstering citation metrics. Large projects that require many person-years of effort can only be done by already-established hype-leading "paper mill" labs where several grad students rotate who gets first author credit - the main measure for graduating. All of this accumulates into student depression and academic burnout that leaves academics alienated from each other, let alone other departments.

As my advisor put it, academia is a pyramid scheme.

Of course national politics would be represented by the media as vicious and high-stakes: the media needs vicious and high-stakes messages to keep up viewership as its lifeline. Not even academics are interested in academic politics beyond their own immediate purview of the next publication or deadline.