Star Simpson

A quick photo entry –

in the morning at the start of motorcycle safety school

my new motorcycle as of today. Hooray — freedom ho!

It’s time for four new things!

Firstly:  Hooray — I’m in Seattle!  I’m here all summer, working on various engineering projects at http://intellectualventureslab.com.  Mostly, I’m shooting down mosquitoes with lasers to build fences to cure malaria.  What!?  Yep.  More at the IV Malaria page.

Secondly: As of this weekend, I’m a licensed motorcycle rider!  I got my motorcycle license (by taking the Pacific Northwest Motorcycles Safety class) over last weekend.  It was incredibly fun.  Granted, I’m doing it mostly for practical reasons (thrill, adventure commuting to work), yet I’m still terribly excited at the newly added freedom/adventure possibilities now in my toolkit.

My plans are to be in Seattle for just about all of the Summer (now-Aug 28), so if you’re in town, you should drop me a line!  There’s at least one exception where I get to travel — I will be in Los Angeles for SIGGRAPH over Friday July 23 until Thursday July 29, so if you’re in LA, you should drop me a line!

Finally, I’ll be at Burning Man this year with the Deus Ex Detective Agency — a small crew of folks who throw an elaborate 1940s-style theatrical murder mystery on the playa every year.  Detectives are actual hapless recruits/burning man attendees, who hunt down clues across the playa (secret insider info: some serious stuff goes down at our pal-camp, the White Dragon Noodle Bar).

That’s the word!

photo by Clark Little

The premise of the show is CUT STUFF APART AND FIND OUT WHAT’S INSIDE!!   Yes, even these robots.

Sometimes, a really great graph can make you really stop and think.

Here’s one now:

from “Physics of Particles, Matter, and the Universe” by Roger J Blin-Stoyle

Pickles, getting fried with 120V, are definitely a memorable experience (and smelly — hot pickle steam, yech).  The first time I saw the characteristic yellow glow of electricity arcing through juicy pickles, was when I saw folks from tEp flaunting Alex Hornstein’s “Pickle-a-tor” — a pickle-driving binary counter, unthinkingly counting from 0 to 256 over and over through its eight pickle slots, as those eight pickles fried, impaled haplessly on thrift-store-fork electrodes.

Imagination thus captured, the natural outstanding question has always been, “What else can be shorted?”  Are there any other household supplies that would look as cool?

Needless to say, my joy was boundless when my TA in Applied Electromagnetics flashed a graph in lecture of various vegetables, and purportedly, data with their primary emission spectra at 120VAC, including entries for bok choy, mandarin oranges, and a variety of pickle types (including “cornichon” — never heard of those before!).  

I should have known the paper was suspect — why study emission spectra at 120V?  Why those vegetables? But I was too excited, and missed all the hoax-paper indicators.  Instead, I went straight to MITERS to find out what it would look like in the first-hand.

So:

that’s: lime, lemon, tangerine, grapefruit. not shown: canned pineapple, mandarin oranges

After peeling each fruit and building my 120V electrode rig (wood screws in a board, wired to a switch-far-away, verbal warnings to everyone, nonconducting stick), I took great delight in skewering the big grapefruit, telling everyone to stand back, and flipping the switch.

that’s the tangerine (later)

Nothing could have been more anticlimactic.  Test probes revealed a healthy 130V across the grapefruit.  The screws were, in fact, conducting.  Nothing?  Nothing??   Nothing.  Neither, for tangerine or the lime.

Fortunately, MITERS being MITERS, rather than go home, Seph proposed stepping up the voltage.  Next step?  12,000V.  If 12kV don’t work, it’s probably an insulator.

So:

pronounced “FRANKEN-former”

assemble the pieces of fruit.. apply voltage.. create, FRANKENFRUIT!! yes?? no.

And again, no conduction, no arcs, no sparks, no corona, nothing if you turn off the light and look at it very carefully.

Only at this point, did I go back and look up the paper online.  It’s here, if you care to see the clever April Fools joke that duped us:  http://bit.ly/cy8yIS – Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory Technical Note TN-13 ”Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems“

The warm season has returned to Boston, and with it — everyone’s favorite paramilitary, high five-collecting, freakshow, chopper bicycle gang, SCUL.

Everyone in SCUL gets a special name — civilian names are never used.  I was officially inducted into SCUL around the time I finished my echolocation training-glasses, so for my echolocation and for my typically nocturnal habits, I am known in the ranks as FruitBat.

Accordingly, the universe in its prankster-apropos ways, incarnate as an artist I’ve been working with named Ben Sloat, found a way to give me the gift of a genuine fruit bat, which now adorns my wall.  It’s quite the face to come home to every day.  I’m seriously considering mounting it on the front of my next chopper bicycle.

Or, to quote Star Wars a bit more aptly — I have a sister!

This is news.  Definitely the biggest and most joyful news I have yet written.  Liana is my sister, and we met for the first time last week!  Here are some photos:

We took the free boat Solara out for some sailing — both of us are still dry in this picture.

We didn’t keep out of the water for long!

Victor and Brie on the raft, Liana on the surfboard.

Liana

Hilarity: both of us trying to paddle a surfboard.

Things started getting more serious as we realized we’d drifted kinda far, and the boat was sailing swiftly away from us.

Even more serious — paddling in earnest to catch up.

Teamwork!  Arrival!

 I’m going to take a moment and tell you the most awesome and useful thing I’ve learned this week – 

You can cat mp3s together!!

“Why is this so incredibly phenomenal?  cats?  what?!” — Hold on.  

1.  cat is a unix utility that lets you join files together.  So I casually mention to my computer,

“cat AwesomeSong1.mp3 AwesomeSong2.mp3 >> GREATESTSONG.mp3″

and then, bam!  I have a single mp3 file that plays with no gaps or breaks.  It’s so easy, it’s ridiculous!  It is perhaps the cheapest and fastest way to make a portable playlist or mix of music.  I’m elated to find that this works so well.

2. And what have you done with your knowledge?

In a massive gift-present from the universe that happened to be the same week as my birthday, I discovered Girl Talk (thanks, Xander!) — producers of incredibly catchy mashups.  I have been playing this album, Feed the Animals, on repeat, for almost 48 hours.  I can’t get enough!  And yes, I catted the album into one giant MEGA track, and have been listening to it that way.  Excellent!!

Addendum:

3. Or, if you’re the sort who listens to audiobooks, this means you can finally quickly and easily join up all those tracks labled “Chapter1.mp3, Chapter2.mp3″ etc. and not have to screw around with annoying shuffle features, gaps, crossfades, or anything like that.  One smooth listening experience.

This circuit diagram has just been brought to my attention as the “Best Circuit Diagram Ever”:

It is for a defibrillator — the machine that can restart your heart on a regular beat, if it has lost its rhythm.

[Thanks Dylan]

Hey, click to spot me in this video, just posted at the Intellectual Ventures Labs blog about the Making Of a sweet TED demo: