Clarke Scratch Club – Year 4 begins

Scratch Club started up again at Clarke. This is the fourth year that I’m running  the Scratch Programming Club after school at the kids’ middle school. The sign up sheets were overflowing with names as usual. I started with just the new members again this year – that seems to work pretty well. It’s becoming more challenging though. About half of the new members had already done some (or a lot) Scratch programming as they’d heard about it from older siblings, at the week-long summer camp run by a local elementary teacher, or even at school. Scratch has been getting a lot of press lately. It was the cover story for the Communications of the ACM magazine this month (my apologies – you need a membership with the Association of Computing Machinery to view the actual article). I also have a very nice crew of high school volunteers (previous Scratch Club members) helping out each week.

On Friday I introduced the new members to the Scratch website.  Since it was the day before Halloween, I encouraged students to work on Halloween projects and upload them. However, it also happens that it’s the birthday of a couple of people in the group. So one of the members (MasterL on Scratch) created this project to wish them a Happy Birthday (Click the image to see the project in action).

Regie Gibson

We had an assembly today we saw a man called Regie Gibson perform poems with his band Neon Juju. He has a daughter that goes to Fiske school in Lexington. The band members are a drummer, a guitarist, a Bassist, and a clarinetist/saxophonist.

He performed Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare and The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe. It was very funny because he performed them to hip-hop like music. I liked it a lot.

Here’s a video of him performing a poem with his band.

And here’s an interview Regi did with Christopher Lydon.

Next month we go to see The Mayhem Poets.

Quines

A quine is a computer program which prints out a copy of its own source code when it is run. The name comes from Quine’s paradox:

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

There’s a long history of quines being written in various programming languages. In some (e.g. various Lisp dialects) it’s pretty simple. In others, it can be quite complex. They became popular with a lot of programmers because of GEB.

I just heard about one (from Asiajin via HackerNews) which really impressed me. It’s not exactly a quine though. It’s doing something even trickier. When you run the program, it prints out the source for a program in a different language. If you run that program, it’ll print out the source for a program in yet another language. So on and so forth, until the eleventh one prints out the original text! Go check it out here on Yusuke Endoh’s blog.

To understand how a quine works, let’s look at my favorite MATLAB quine. It was written by Iain Murray. It looks like this:

a=['ns}z2e1kGe1116k6111gE16;:6ek7;:61gg3E1'];
disp(['a=[''',a,'''];',10,[a-10,']]);']]);

Let's look at what's going on here. The first line is pretty weird looking, isn’t it? Let’s skip it for the moment and concentrate on the second line. We can see that the second line is using disp to do the following 3 things:

1. Print out a copy of the first line.
2. Print the number 10.
3. Subtract 10 from the value in the first line and print it again.

The first step is pretty obvious. That’s how the output gets that first line.

In MATLAB, printing the number 10 starts a new line of text in the output, so that explains step 2.

But what’s the story with step 3? You can see the answer if you go into MATLAB and subtract 10 from the variable a. What you get is a copy of the second line. OK, but why did he add 10 to it? The reason is that you can’t put the second line directly into a variable because it has special characters in it like ' and [. The interpreter is going to see those and decide to break the line up into pieces. You would need to add some escape characters, and then it wouldn’t be exactly the same, so you wouldn’t have a quine. By adding 10 to the values, he shifted them up so that there weren’t any special characters in the line. That’s the sort of trick that you need to use to write quines in most programming languages.

Now you can go back to the other quine and try to figure out how it works. But you’ll need to be comfortable in the 11 different programming languages first!

Cucaracha

Here’s another Processing applet. It’s a variant of Bees, but it uses a Mexican Hat function for computing the force. Basically that means that they’ll try to stay a specific distance (in this case ~80 pixels) away from you. This also includes the motion blur from the Blend Cube sketch.

 

Source code: cucaracha

Built with Processing

This one’s written in Java because I’m still having some trouble packing up applets from Scala.

Our favorite trick with this one is to let them settle down into a circle, and then give the mouse a tiny little twiddle. Enjoy.

Fish Risotto

On a couple of occasions this year I have made stock from the left-over fish bones after filleting the CSF fish. That was really the best way to make sure we made the most of the fish the week we had Yellow tail Flounder. When you fillet flounder you don't actually get a lot of meat, and the fact that the remains are mostly cartilage means that it makes lovely gelatinous stock. Until recently it was too hot to think about doing a fish chowder, so I ended up using some of the stock for a fish risotto.

I couldn't find a recipe that I thought sounded just right, so I took ideas from Rimini's Fish Risotto, this Risotto with Tilapia, and a Lemon Herb and Fish Risotto. Here's what I came up with and it turned out pretty well.

Fish Risotto

1 lb white fish fillets, (e.g., cod, pollock, hake etc.)
1 onion chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup white wine
4-5 cups fish stock
2 pinches saffron
400 g arborio rice
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp lemon zest
3 Tbsp chopped fresh herbs (parsley, chives, oregano)
3 Tbsp butter
olive oil

• Season the fillets with salt and pepper. Heat a tablespoon of butter with a tablespoon of olive oil in a pan. Saute the fish a few minutes on each side until done. Set aside on a plate for later.
• Add another tablespoon of oil to the pan and cook the onion and garlic until the onion is translucent. While that is cooking bring the fish stock to a bare simmer in a separate pot.
• When the onions are cooked, add the rice and the saffron and sauté for a few minutes stirring so they don't brown. Add the white wine and lemon juice and stir until the wine is absorbed.
• Add a half cup of the hot fish stock and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until all the stock has been absorbed.
• Continue adding the fish stock a half cup at a time until the rice reaches the al dente stage.
• Add half of the chopped fresh herbs, lemon zest, salt and pepper and stir. Taste and add more flavorings as needed.
• Flake the cooked fish and add it to the rice.
• Take the rice off the heat and stir in an additional tablespoon of butter for extra creaminess.

Serve immediately.

Notes: I also added a few tablespoons of light cream with the stock near the end. That seemed to add to the richness.

Organism

We just found out that UbuWeb has several of Hilary Harris’ films on line. I hadn’t seen Organism in years, and the kids had never seen it. If you haven’t seen it, or have forgotten how cool it is, check it out.

UbuWeb’s collection of art films is pretty amazing.

They have everything from Marcel Duchamp …

… or a wonderful film of Alexander Calder and his circus …

… to people like Laurie Anderson.

The Public Option in 2D

We had a meeting at work yesterday about naming some classes. We’ve had the same meeting over and over for months (years?) now. Again and again, we’ll get everyone to agree on a naming system and start applying it to all of the classes. Then when we get down to the last few classes, we’ll rip the whole system up and start over. Why? And what the heck does this have to do with the public option and the health care debate?

Humans brains have built-in models that they try to fit new information into. These are often in the form of a story. Sort of a timeline. First this happened, then this other thing happened, then this thing happened. Stories are inherently 1 dimensional. We have a tendency to try to jam all new information into this sort of 1 dimensional model.

You can find examples of this everywhere you look. If you go back through the posts on this blog, you’ll see instances of this.

• For example, in the US we try to pretend that everyone’s political positions fit onto a 1D scale. But then where do Christian Democrats fit in?
• We try to map people's world views onto a 1D artistic/scientific scale. But then what’s the difference between artists and designers or scientists and engineers?

Everywhere I look, I see cases where moving a problem from 1D scale to a 2D domain makes things clearer.

But again, what’s this got to do with health care?

Well, Nate Silver had a nice post on the public option last night. The press has been talking about the public option for months now. There’s been lots of discussion about who’s for it and against it. Analysis about how strong support is for it. But the details seem to go around in circles and keep starting over like that series of class naming meeting at work. Then I see a diagram like this one from Nate’s post:

and I kind of go Ah!

But personally, I’m very much a visual thinker. I see things as pictures and then have to translate them into words to explain to other people. So I tend to think that going up a dimension is a basic tool that everyone should pull out when they’re looking at a problem. But I understand that other people are verbal thinkers and relate to the world through stories. Does that make them reluctant to pop up to this sort of 2D view of a problem?

The people in those class naming meetings I was talking about really, really want to turn the problem into a linear story. When I draw it on the whiteboard as a 2D table, they go Ah!, but as they start actually naming classes, they construct a 1D story-like model in their head. When they reach the places where this can’t fit (like putting wallpaper on a sphere), they figure the story must be wrong and they want to start over with a new story.

In the same way, the press always seems to want to turn a political discussion into a linear story. But it seems clear that in a lot of cases, the concerns of the stakeholders in a political discussion don’t fit well on a 1D scale.

What do you think? Do you find Nate’s diagram helpful?

Using SPDE with IntelliJ

This is mostly a note to myself, but I figured out how to get SPDE to work in IntelliJ IDEA.

SPDE is a port of Processing to the Scala programming language written by Nathan Hamblen. Scala compiles to Java byte codes, so it can be integrated with code (like Processing) which is written in Java.

IntelliJ IDEA is an IDE for developing Java which also supports Scala.

Putting the all of these pieces together was relatively straightforward, but there were a few tricky bits I don’t want to lose track of.

1. Download and install IDEA. I used the preview of the new Community Edition which is available here.
2. Start IDEA and choose File/Settings
3. Go to the Plugins section and choose the Available tab
4. Scroll down and choose the Scala plugin.
5. Now download the SPDE Graft jar from here.
6. Unpack that somewhere. You’ll end up with a bunch of directories. Find the directory lib_managed/compile. It should contain two jar files named something like processing-core-1.0.3_0.1.3.jar and spde-core_2.7.6-1.0.3_0.1.3.jar.
7. Now go back to IDEA and choose New Project. You want to select Java Module, but on the “desired technologies” page, choose Scala.
8. Go to the Project Settings dialog. Select Libraries and hit the + button to create a library. Call it whatever you want.
9. On the page for that library, choose “Attach Classes…” and go select the first of those SPDE jar files.
10. Choose “Attach Classes…” again and go select the other jar file.
11. Go to “Edit Configurations” and create a new configuration of type applet. Remember to set the module pulldown to refer to your project.
12. I found that the version of IDEA I downloaded was missing the appletviewer.policy file. I just created one that looks like this:

    grant {
    permission java.security.AllPermission;
    };

13. Close the Project Settings dialog.
14. Right click on the src directory of your project and choose “New Scala Class”. Create a class that extends PApplet.
15. Hit compile and run. Your applet should appear. That’s it!

Here’s my first trivial SPDE example.

 
class simple_example extends  processing.core.PApplet { 
 
  override def setup() { 
    size(400,400) 
  } 
   
  override def draw() { 
    val x = mouseX 
    val y = mouseY 
 
    noStroke() 
    fill(random(0,255),random(0,255),random(0,255)) 
 
    beginShape(processing.core.PConstants.TRIANGLES) 
    vertex(x-10,y-10) 
    vertex(x+10,y-10) 
    vertex(x,y+10) 
    endShape() 
  } 
} 

I'm afraid I haven't managed to export a jar file that I can embed in the blog yet, but the result looks something like this:

Hopefully I’ll have some better examples coming soon.

The Reign of King Edward III

Finding a lost play by Shakespeare is the stuff of legend, but Brian Vickers is claiming he did it. Well, there have been suggestions that the play in question was Shakespeare’s since about 1760, but Vickers claims that he has finally proved it. He did it using software that was designed to detect plagiarism in homework. His analysis is that Shakespeare cowrote the play with Thomas Kyd.

Go read the whole story in the Times.

Skiing Robot

Now that we’ve had snow (twice already), it’s time to get some inspiration for winter time projects.

If you want to think big, check out this one from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia.

Pretty cool, huh?

via Boing Boing.

Neuronovels

Marco Roth has an interesting article about the Neuronovel in n+1. Neuronovel is his term for a notable trend in fiction over the last decade or so. I’m sure you’ve noticed that in a number of recent novels, one of the main characters has some type of interesting neurological disorder. Some examples include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Echomaker, and Saturday. BTW, I think that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might be an example Marco missed, although that’s certainly not as explicit as some of the others.

His article is a pretty good summary of the trend and a reasonable analysis of what might be behind it. I do think that he misses one possible cause though. I think that Oliver Sacks’ books are one of the most important factors in the rise of this sort of novel. I think that some of his stories are so compelling and well written, that a number of authors were inspired to explore similar topics in their fiction. In fact, Sacks appears as a thinly disguised character in a couple of these books. I think that is clearly a case of the author tipping their hat to their inspiration.

The article is worth a read. I really enjoyed some of his details. See what you think about how things have changed between the time when Lionel Trilling was worried about the effect of Freud on the novel and our time when the concerns are more chemical. After reading that, follow through to the New Yorker profile of Ian McEwan that Macro mentions. I enjoyed the bit about McEwan’s son getting a D for a book report about his father’s novel from a teacher who didn’t think the author’s opinion counted for anything.

Glad you’re not here?

Yup, it’s snowing today. This is as early as I can remember the first snow of the season around here. It’s not sticking on the ground as that’s still too warm, but there’s definitely enough to have to clear the cars.

Sexual Selection Of Cool Demo Features

Jens Alfke gives his $0.02 on the Google Wave debate in a blog post that he calls The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing. It’s a reasonable take on the value of certain features of Wave, but I think that he also makes an interesting meta-point.

There are two parts to the life-cycle of a piece of software. In the first, it is trying to get funded, shipped, and bought. In the second, it is actually getting used. There are a lot of cases where a feature which is great for one part is bad for the other. In his example, the live-typing feature of Google Wave makes for a great demo, but users find that it actually inhibits their use of the product.

This is actually very similar to something in evolution called sexual selection.  The classic example of sexual selection is the peacock. The enormous, brightly colored plumage of the peacock does not make his life easier, but it does make him more attractive to peahens. As a result of that, he produces more offspring and the result is more peacocks with the genes for wild looking plumage.

Cool demo features in software are kind of similar. When a VC sees the cool demo, they want to fund the product. When a manager sees the cool demo, they want to green light the project. When a customer sees the cool demo, they want to buy the product. This means that the world ends up with a lot of software with cool demo features. In many cases, none of this is directly related to how happy the customer will be when they actually use the product. The result is that the world tends to end up with a lot of software that demos well, but not necessarily a loft of software that works well for its user.

Lego Servo Brick

One thing we knew we needed to do with the Arduino is to figure out how to connect it to our favorite building set. It turns out that the servo we have (a Turnigy TG9) is almost a perfect fit. To build the following:

We took a 2x8 plate and shaved 6 of the pins off it. Then we stacked a 2x2 brick and a 2x2 plate at one end and a 1x2 brick and a 1x2 plate at the other end. Then we set the servo in with a little “hut glue” and added another 2x8 plate across the top. A Technics lift arm is a perfect press fit on the shaft. The result is a 2x8 double height brick with a computer controlled servo built into it.

You can use this as a basic building block to assemble all sorts of funny machines.

Sleep No More

Last night we went to see Sleep No More by the American Repertory Theatre and Punchdrunk with Tom and a couple of his friends. Tom’s friend Ben had gone to see it on Thursday (opening night) with his family, but his sister got freaked out and they had to leave early. So on Friday, Ben was telling his friends at school about his experience, and trying to get some friends together to go again so he could figure out what it all meant. As we have an ART subscription and already had tickets to the show, we agreed to take Ben, Tom, and Matt, a friend of theirs along with us.

Arriving at the address on the tickets, the first challenge was to find the entrance. Having Ben with us, we thought this would be easy, but it didn't turn out that way. However with the help of a friendly stranger, we found the entrance. At the end of a dark passage we found ourselves in a bar called Manderley. The bar was populated by characters from the 20's, one of whom handed each of us a playing card. We each had an eight of hearts. I thought this would be a good thing as I believed it would allow us to stay together. Our group was called and we were each given a white mask to wear and led into an elevator. When the elevator reached the top floor, Mike was summarily ejected on his own, while the rest of us were taken to a different floor. So much for staying together.

Sleep No More is based on the Scottish play* with a dash of Hitchcock. Instead of being performed on a stage, the scenes are scattered through the rooms of an abandoned school. Imagine, four floors of classrooms transformed into incredibly detailed sets. You are free to wander from room to room exploring at your own pace, interacting and trying to make sense of it all. Books left open to a particular page, letters half written, the remains of a meal.... Everything has been artfully arranged with great attention to detail.

I left the boys to explore on their own while I went looking for Mike.

Tom: We set off blindly, trying all the doors, even the ones with big padlocks on them (yes Ben tried them), looking for interesting places to explore. We noticed that an actress was on a door that was getting carried down the hallway by an actor, who periodically stopped to allow the actress to move around. We had no idea what was going on. So we explored some more, finding a room with a crib in the middle surrounded by paper maché headless babies floating in the air. It was kind of weird because we were all alone in the room, and we wondered, ‘What’s this about?’

We were in a hallway when this dude comes running down the stairs and nearly knocks Matt over. Another guy in a pink shirt with a jacket comes running along and nearly knocks the first guy over. The first guy pushing him away runs off down the hall, the pink shirt guy follows him. So we follow them, and we come into a room that has cardboard walls. In the room three guys are playing cards. Other spectators are in the room and it’s all very quiet. The game was completely unintelligible. Eventually one of the players picks up a card and a hammer and nails the card into the wall. They continue playing, and are about to nail a card into the table when a dude with blood all over his chest arrives. Later we figure out this is Macbeth. He starts beating up the guy in the pink shirt for no apparent reason and throws him over a counter. We later notice that the card, which Matt picks up, is the suicide King, King of Hearts.

That was basically the tone for everything that happened. Completely surprising, unexplained and confusing. Ben had wanted to return to get some answers, but seemed to end up just as confused after his second visit. It was still a lot of fun wandering around finding weird stuff like a room that was completely dark except for a telephone that when you picked it up gave a busy tone. It doesn’t seem as though this will be useful in understanding Macbeth when I eventually have to read it for school, but it was a lot of fun.

Chris: I wandered alone for a time, distracted from my search by walking into the middle of a scene involving a woman walking along the tops of the school lockers while a man held a door as a bridge. After this and other confusing experiences, I encountered Mike standing in a room filled with bathtubs. One was filled with bloody water while another contained an eel swimming around. Wandering into another room we encountered the King getting ready for bed. While he was sleeping, Macbeth stole into the room and murdered him before our very eyes. The alarm was raised and people started running up an down the halls.

We continued to explore and watch. After hours of wandering in and out of half familiar scenes we found ourselves back at Manderley where the boys were sitting at a table listening to the band playing old show tunes.

Motor Shield

Peter’s friend Will was over today. One of the things they did was to assemble a motor shield for Peter’s Arduino.

An Arduino has a bunch of output pins, but they aren’t powerful enough to drive motors. The motor shield adds a couple of H-bridge chips that let you drive up to an amp or so of output. It can drive 2 servos, 4 DC motors, or 2 stepper motors.

Here’s what it looked like when it was all done.

That’s a little hobby servo it’s driving back and forth with this simple program.

#include <servo.h>

Servo servo1;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("Servo test");
  servo1.attach(10);
}

void loop() {
  Serial.print("tick");
  servo1.write(180);
  delay(1000);

  Serial.print("tock");
  servo1.write(0);
  delay(1000);
}

The instructions which come with the motor shield say you need to download and install a library to use a servo motor, but that’s actually included in the current version of the Arduino software. It’s really easy to do neat motor tricks with an Arduino. Next we need to connect a sensor at the same time. We’ve got force sensors and a motion detector. The instructions say that the motion sensor is not guaranteed to work on zombies though.

Friday Night Music Videos

Here are some of the music videos we’ve been watching recently. Be forewarned, it’s a pretty random collection.

Astronaut – YILA featuring Scroobius Pip

Scroobius Pip has always been a big favorite at our house, and this is one of his best. It's funny and serious at the same time. Plus it rocks.

 

Pendulum Music – Steve Reich

These students at Pomfret did a great job of staging Steve Reich's Pendulum Music. It’s another of his great phase pieces, but this one has a great physicality with the swinging microphones. There’s a lot of great Steve Reich stuff around lately because of his 60th birthday.

 

A Glorious Dawn – Carl Sagan featuring Stephen Hawking

If anyone deserved to meet the autotune meme, it was our favorite Cornell professor. It's kind of weird, but inspiring. And Pete says it's good for the universe.

 

Code Monkey – Jonathan Coulton

Best. Song. Ever. - Tom.

Johnathan Coulton has been writing one song a week. This one was a big hit all over the internet, and we've really enjoyed it. Mike Spiff Booth from Adobe added the cool WoW video. That really makes it, doesn’t it?

Undulatus Asperatus

Remember when I mentioned the Cloud Appreciation Society back in June? Well, there’s big news in their world right now. A new type of is in the process of getting named. It is called Undulatus asperatus, and it looks something like this:

If it gets approved by the World Meteorological Organization, it’ll be the first new cloud type since 1951. The classification is based on pictures Jane Wiggins took in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2006.

Merluza a la Sidre

This week we got Hake from the CSF. This was definitely a new fish for me, so I went looking for more information on the 'net. What I discovered was that there is a traditional dish from the Asturias region of Spain called Merluza a la Sidre (or Hake in Cider). Given that I didn't have any clams or other shellfish, just the hake, I put together a variation of a couple of the recipes I found.

Merluza a la Sidre
1-1.5 lb hake fillet
4 large red potatoes
1 spanish onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1-2 Tbsp chopped parsley
1 tsp smoked spanish paprika
12 oz hard cider (dry - I used New English Cider from Nashoba winery)
1 Tbsp butter
olive oil

Wash the potatoes and slice into thick slices. You can peel them if you like, but I didn't bother with the red-skinned ones. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Put about a tablespoon of oil in a large dish that can go in the oven, add the potatoes along with salt and pepper and toss. Dot the top with a tablespoon or so of butter and put into the oven to start cooking while you prepare the fish.

Heat another tablespoon of oil in a frying pan and add the onions and garlic. Saute the onions until they get a little brown and carmelized, then add the parsley and paprika. Stir to combine and take off the heat.

Cut the fish into serving size pieces and season with salt and pepper.

Take the dish with the potatoes out of the oven. Give them a bit of a stir to make sure they're all getting cooked. Put the pieces of fish on top of the potatoes. Spoon the onion mixture over the fish, then pour the cider over everything. Put it back in the oven for 15 minutes or until the fish is cooked. Serve with a crusty bread as there will be a lot of juices to mop up.

The other good thing about having a new type of fish to look up is that I found two more good places to go for fish recipes. One is foodista which has articles about food along with recipes. And the other is all-fish-seafood-recipes. What I like about both of these is that they include a wider variety of fish in their recipes.

Yesterday I made Hake with Peppered Macadamia Nuts from a recipe on Foodista. I put some red-pepper mayonaise from last week with it. That went really well as the coolness of the mayo countered the heat of the chili pepper.

Note By Note

We got a chance to see the film Note by Note last night. It’s a documentary which follows a concert grand piano through the Steinway factory. It’s a fascinating movie.

The movie talks to a wide range of musicians about pianos. They follow Pierre-Laurent Aimard through the process of selecting the piano he’ll use for a concert at Carnegie Hall, which is a really interesting process. They also talk to Harry Connick Jr. and Hank Jones about how they choose a a piano. And Hélène Grimaud plays the finished piano at the end of the movie. But Lang Lang is the one who really stands out. He’s so full of excitement. When he tells the story about first getting interested in piano after watching Tom & Jerry play the Hungarian Rhapsody he makes you remember what it is like to get excited about learning something new.

But the people who really make this film are the ones who actually make the pianos. Each of them has such a stock of specialized skills and they all work together to create something amazing. It got me wondering when was the last time I saw a movie which really celebrated Americans making things. It used to be an important part of our mythology, but it’s faded into something we don’t really talk about and don’t seem to take pride in.

A lot of the workers seem surprised to find themselves doing this. They talk about how they planned to take a job at Steinway for a couple of years before going off to do something different, and then they find themselves engrossed in it and spending decades there developing esoteric skills that haven’t changed in generations.

To learn more about the movie, see this website. To learn more about how the pianos are made (and what a bellyman does), check out the book that inspired the film, or this NYTimes article based on it.

Closing Time on Route 7

Rich Cohen wrote a nice article in The Believer recently chronicling the history of the American car industry from the point of view of the dealers. In many ways, the story of the American car industry starts with Henry Ford screwing the his dealers to pay off his creditors in 1918, and ends with the manufacturers screwing the dealers again in 2009.

Nonsense

The NYTimes had an interesting article yesterday about how nonsense primes your brain for problem solving. It’s based on this research paper:

Psychological Science
Volume 20, Issue 9, Date: September 2009, Pages: 1125-1131
doi 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02414.x
Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar
Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine

The authors had subjects try to remember long strings of letters. Some of the subjects first read a nonsensical short story by Kafka. The subjects who read the story first remembered more of the letter sequences. The theory is that the nonsense primed the pump on the part of your brain which searches for patterns.

Maybe we should start ever day with a little Dadaist poetry after breakfast?

The Plenitude

The Plenitude is an interesting book about creating stuff. Rich Gold worked at places like Sega, Mattel, and PARC. He created a lot of interesting stuff during his career “making stuff for the Plenitude”. But more importantly, he thought clearly about how you create stuff, and what it means to create stuff.

When he talks about creating stuff, he’s not talking about making stuff. Today most stuff is made by some sort of machine. But it’s still people who create stuff.

The people who create stuff generally wear one of four hats.

It probably takes a certain type of person to divide types of people into a 2x2 matrix. And, as he says:

… nobody likes to be put in a square in a box, particularly creative people. Particularly a cartoon box.

But it does serve as a useful framework for discussing the different styles of creating.

He also talks about 7 different patterns which you often encounter when creating stuff.

• Necessity Is the Mother of Invention – Find a problem and solve it.
• It’s a Thing of Genius – I had a vision and just had to do it.
• The Big Kahuna – Scientific deduction from 1st principles.
• The Future Exists – We just have to intersect it at the perfect moment.
• Colonization of the Unowned – Find the unowned, package it, and sell it back.
• Stuff Creates New Objects of Desire – Stuff desires to be better stuff.
• Change the Definition – Language and metaphor create/are the world.

Once you read his description of these patterns, you’ll start recognizing them all around you.

In practice, these 7 patterns are interrelated, and they interact as shown this simple diagram:

He also appeared to have some regrets about creating stuff. The world certainly has plenty of stuff, and a lot of the new stuff that gets created doesn’t really seem to make the world a better place. He points out that this is because of one of the interesting differences between the plenitude of created stuff and the wild variety of organic life. For the stuff people create, it is actually illegal to create something that’s just like something that already exists. Every newly created thing has to be different, even if it isn’t better.

If you’re at all interested in the stuff which makes up modern life and how it gets created, then you would probably find Rich’s book interesting. He has a number of insights which will make you go hmmm, and he presents them in a humorous, self-deprecating way.

Blend Cube

Tom had some geometry homework today which involved calculating the surface area of a unit cube with a 1/3 wide square hole punched through the center of each face. Sort of a level 1 Menger sponge. The reminded me of a demo I've written for a number machines over the years. It was one of the first graphics demos on each of the machines we designed at Stellar. So I sat down and wrote it in Processing. As you can tell, I stole some code from the RGBCube example sketch.



Source code: blend_cube



Built with Processing


For extra fun, try hitting the 'b' key. Once it's in that mode, the space key clears the image and the 'b' key gets you back to the original mode.

Blogging @ MIT

The NYTimes has a nice article this morning about how MIT is embracing student bloggers as a way of connecting with high school students. It’s a good idea.

It’s very hard for high school students to get a feel for what a college is “really like”, and no amount of material prepared by the admission’s office is going to bridge that gap. There are a couple of reasons for this. There’s obviously difference in language and point of view between admission officers and high school students. But more fundamentally, someone who works in admissions is always going to view the act of communicating with a high school student as a task that is trying to accomplish a specific goal. That view is going to cause them to attempt to control the flow of information.

Direct blogging by students has the potential for changing the conversation. This has real benefits for the person reading the blog. The problem, of course, is that for this to really succeed, the people in admissions will need to step back and relinquish a lot of control. This is difficult. A number of software companies (including the one I work for) have tried to do something similar, but it results in a delicate balance between having a real conversation and accomplishing the company’s goals. It’s very hard to keep this sort of communication channel open and unfettered. The basic reason it’s hard is fear. An open channel isn’t safe, and it is the nature of large organizations to be risk adverse. It’s better to control the flow of information and be safe.

Go check out the blogs yourself and see what you think about how MIT is balancing this.

Hawai’i Volcanoes & Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau

We visited two parks when we went to the Big Island in 2007.

Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park

Hawai’i Volcanoes surrounds Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano, and the smallest of the three mountains which make up the big island. This is the youngest volcano of the Hawaiian chain. It is still smoking, rumbling, creating land, and occasionally destroying houses.

There are a number of craters scattered around the mountain. The largest is the caldera, with the Halema’uma’u crater in the middle. In the 19th century, this was a lake of molten lava, but it’s much quieter now. It did cough up some boulders one night while we were there,  but mostly it just smokes. Kind of stinky sulphurous smoke as you can see from the picture with the sulphur around the fumaroles.

Next to the caldera is the smaller Kilauea Iki crater and the Pu’u Pua’i (the hill). One of the rangers we talked to lived in the park as a child and remembers this hill forming from a fountain of lava which shot hundreds of feet into the air. He was a funny guy. At the beginning of our hike with him, he pulled out his walky-talky and told the main office to turn on the sun and the bird noises for us.

 

You can hike down into Kilauea Iki and across the floor and back in a couple of hours. By the way those cliffs in the distance are the far edge of the main caldera, about 2.5 miles away.  Walking across the floor of the crater is kind of like what you would imagine the surface of the moon is like, but without the funny clothes, and more gravity too, I guess.

Nowadays, most of the action is down the mountain near Pu’u Ō’ō. When we were there, there had been a series of earthquakes earlier in the summer which blocked everything up. When we left at the start of our trip we weren’t sure we’d get to see anything as most of the roads in the park had been closed because they weren’t sure what would happen next. Things had settled down and the roads had just reopened when we got there. The lava still hadn’t started flowing again down by the ocean, but that end of the park was still pretty cool. It’s the windward side of the island, and it’s completely barren because of all of the lava flows. There are also swirls of vog everywhere. The result is rather unearthly.

 

Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park

Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau is also known as the place of refuge (particularly if you are having trouble saying the Hawaiian name – Tom is the only one of us who can still rattle off the Hawaiian). In the old days, if you had broken a law for which the punishment was death, then your one chance was to try to make it to this peninsula on the western side of the island. If you could make it there without being caught, then you were safe.

Tom really liked the ki’i. He wants to look just like them when he grows up.

One day, when we were visiting the park, a large number of native Hawaiian volunteers were there showing how to make local Hawaiian crafts. We learned how to make head garlands out of flowers, …

 

… and toy fishes out of palm leaves. We also tried homemade kava which looked and tasted like dishwater, although it was relaxing.

There were a number of woodworkers there. We spoke to one of them who makes drums and mentioned that we were visiting from Boston. That got a reaction. He remembered getting stuck in Boston for a couple of days when a snowstorm shut down Logan and his flight got cancelled. It wasn’t all bad as he went up to Salem to visit the Peabody Essex while he was stuck here staying with a friend. He remembers it as having one of the nicest collections of Hawaiian artifacts he’s ever seen. The whalers from the Boston area would often spent the winters in Hawaii. A lot of the artifacts they brought back ended up in the museum.