Opposable Thumbs

So, it occured to me that after soliciting everyone in DorkbotPDX to post the announcement for this to their blogs, I failed to do so myself. Bad self! So, here it is, the official announcement for the first ever DorkbotPDX event:

Come join DorkbotPDX, people doing strange things with electricity, for our inaugural event at Vendetta on June 24th at 5pm. If you're a hacker, painter, engineer or sculpture, musician or maker you'll fit right in. We bring together the tech and art worlds and enjoy it all over a pint of beer. We'll have presentations and performances by these fine folks:

Jason Plumb is a software engineer by day...hardware hacker, reverse engineer, and experimental sound geek by night. He will provide an overview of the Essential Reality P5 glove controller and explain how it can be used with free and open-source software to create and manipulate sound.

Jesse Fox studied music composition and physics at Bates College before getting a Master's Degree from the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. He will discuss his involvement with the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) and describe the detailed technical recreation of George Antheil's "Ballet Mecanique", which includes xylophones, bass drums, tam-tam, pianists, electric bells, a siren, airplane propellers, and a volley of player pianos.

Donald Delmar Davis, principal research anarchist at D3 Laboratories, will overview the deconstruction of Arduino and Wiring platforms to create artistic robot platforms with AVR microcontrollers. "AI Begins With Self Destruction"

paint & copter create multi-media experiences of regurgitated and improvised media. By synthesizing live and pre-manipulated video feeds, field recordings and live instrumentation, Paint and Copter filter cultural noise and reprocess it into a new, mesmerizing thread.

We will also have a brief open-mic of sorts referred to as Open Dork. This is a show and tell where you can have the mic for a few minutes to discuss your latest project, vent about frustrations trying to get your art grant or tell us about the intricacies of the color blue. It's your time to tell us what you think we need to hear.

Festivities will begin at 5pm and you can expect them to last until they kick us out. Please bring yourself, your friends and any thing you'd like to share.

http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/dorkbotpdx_0x00

So, just a quick update to let everyone know why I've disappeared and have been unable to find even a few spare seconds to update the blog. I've been just a wee bit busy.

Last month I attended OSCON and helped put on FOSCON II. Both of which were awesome and exhausting. I met a lot of great people and learned about some interesting things. Hopefully I'll find time to dig in a bit deeper on some of it.

Since then I've been working on two new projects. The first has been tech reviewing a new book for O'Reilly that's coming out later this year. More on that later.

But the most important activity in my mind has been putting together dorkbotpdx, the Portland chapter of the truely amazing dorkbot group. This one is certainly going to lead to more blog fodder, but that, too, will have to wait.

I think my brain just exploded. It appears that the Vatican are [dismissing Intelligent Design](http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=18504) while NASA scientists [are being told to alter their language](http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/02/04/outrage-at-attacks-on-nasa-science/) so as not to discount it.

Kottke acutely points out the "meaning" of Pi:

Oh, and as for patterns hidden in pi, we've already found one. It's called the circle. Just because humans discovered circles first and pi later shouldn't mean that the latter is derived from the former.

Tim O'Reilly proposes the term "make tank" for the companies like Applied Minds that:

figure out how to design and build hardware that solves interesting new problems.

Sounds interesting. Now, how to get a job working for them... ;~)

Scotsman.com News - Sci-Tech - Frozen sugar at centre of Milky Way

Here's a great idea: Sascha Brawer is responsible for finding hosting for his local green party's website and realized that he should find a solution that uses renewable energy. He's doing this in Switzerland, but I would hope there's options here in the States, too.

Here's one to think about -- it even seems obivous in retrospect. Researchers have determined that our cities are built on the most fertile lands, which is impacting the climate since that land is critical in the overall cycle of the ecosystem. It appears that our yearly 1.8 percent gain in NPP (Net Primary Productivity -- a measure of plant growth based on the rate of carbon absorption) is being offset by a 1.6 percent loss due to our urban landscape. Aside from the overwhelming nature of this sort of thing (I mean, our cities really don't cover that much of the total landmass of the country), it's interesting to note how they were able to determine this impact using satellite data and computer modeling.

Last night I was at Little City with Nicole, when I ran into my friend John who I hadn't seen in ages. John is a fascinating character. He teaches astronomy classes at Austin Community College and tutors in math and physics. In addition to all this, he has a deep connection with the truely spiritual aspects of the world. Our conversation last night began with a question about a book he was reading on Tibetan yogas and progressed through a relating of various experiences and thoughts on how the spiritual can creep up on even a cynical, critic like myself. We told him a story about our recent trip to Boston -- about which I need to write more here -- and how a statue of the Buddha at the Museum of Fine Arts brought tears to my eyes when I passed by it. Later, talking to Nicole about this facinating conversation, I mentioned that John used to send out emails on a regular basis with interesting snippets, links and thoughts on a handful of subjects -- most of them dealing with the environmental crisis, but scattered through with various small doses of beautiful imagery from space or other, sometimes obscure, tidbits from whatever he was currently reading. I dug around and found an archive of these emails that I had (in search of his email address) and found this wonderful little bit:

To know Atum's Being, contemplate him in thought. To see him with your eyes, look at the exquisite order of the cosmos; the necessity which governs everything you perceive; the Goodness of all that has been, and that is coming to be. Look at matter filled full with Life, and see Atum pulsating with all he contains. --Hermes Trismigistus Check out: http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-1999/phot-40f-99-normal.jpg

The previous entry's mention of needing enough variety to make a reasonable selection about which school for Nicole to attend remind me of another interesting subject which I've been reading about lately: Stafford Beer. Beer, who I was not familiar with until just recently, was the founder of managerial cybernetics. Before you turn your attention elsewhere, let me point out that this is not nearly as boring (in my eyes anyway) as you might think. The idea is to take a general systems approach to management of organizations. These could be corporations, polical systems or social networks. One of the ideas that struck me as I was reading one of his articles (PDF) was the concept of requisite variety. This is actually an idea that he borrow from . The idea is that to effectively control a system there must be a sufficiently large pool of possible choices/operations in order to allow for effective management. More info: The Law of Requisite Variety The Official Stafford Beer website A short Stafford Beer bio

Just realized that I have not linked to Vernor Vinge's article on the singularity (which you can read here). The reason I bring this up is this article which a coworker just refered me to. It talks about the coming robotic age (my appelation for it, not his) and it's affect on our economy. The reasons this caught my eye are twofold: one, it evokes the idea of the singularity and what might happen when all of this technology accelerates to these speeds; and, two, the idea that our economy is not quite prepared to handle this sort of change. The odd part of this is that two days ago a couple of my friends from work were sitting with me at lunch and this exact topic came up. I even referenced the idea of the self service lines mentioned in this article. I brought up the fact (yes, I said fact, you can't argue otherwise) that our economy is going to run into some very peculiar difficulties handling this sort of thing. Ours (despite the conservative view to the contrary) is not a wellfare culture and we are not prepared for the scale of change in our working population that this sort of thing is going to bring about. Somehow this also seems rather relevant to my last couple of posts. You can extrapolate for yourselves.

Here's a quote from the Neil Gershenfeld article I linked to in the previous entry that I find particularly intriguing:

The kind of taxonomy that biologists do has to turn into predictive design theories. Shannon did that once. He showed that the channel capacity, that threshold I was talking about, is equal to bandwidth times the logarithm of 1 plus the signal-to noise ratio. That let you suddenly take these disparate attributes and, independent of the details of a particular design, learn how to price them and trade them off. We don't know how to do that yet for hierarchy and adaptation and emergence, but there are compelling hints of an answer lying at the intersection of statistical mechanics, control theory, and geometry, mixed in with a bit of inference.

It seems to me that some really radical transitions are about to happen and this little excerpt points out a couple of places that people should be looking. In particular scientists and technologists, but for that matter pretty much everyone -- definitely the investment banking community -- should be taking an interest in this "field."

Part of the problem, though, is that there currently isn't a "field" to speak of. In fact the whole idea of forming a field of study around this area is almost absurd. This hits right up against the idea (so well developed by Mr. Buckminster Fuller) that the really critical developments are going to come together from a synthesis of knowledge. The people who makes these things happen are going to have to be, in some sense at least, generalists. No one particular area of study is going to give you the tools to anticipate nor instigate this kind of development.

• First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible,
he is very probably wrong.
• Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Interesting article over at Discover written by Steven Johnson, author of Emergence. It describes research into using swarm intelligence to generate music. Very interesting idea. I see a lot of artistic potential in this area.