Closet, bathroom, and bedroom

Bruce delivered the major pieces of my closet drawers and shelves today! Hooray, storage! We use the same CNC web-based box builder as before -- "Top Drawer Components" -- just love the results from them. Every box is dove-tailed, perfectly square, and already polyed at very reasonable prices. For the drawers I'll eventually put on drawer plates that will hide the slider hardware.



For some bathroom storage we ordered two different sizes of box and screwed them together for this nice effect. (There's several more bathroom fixtures yet to be installed.)


Meanwhile, last week we started on the "tree" element that spans out between then bathroom and the the bedroom. There's a lot more pieces to add to this, but all the heavy stuff is done.

Fountain pumps

It's taken years to get around to, but the fountain by my back door finally pumps water. Still lots of details to clean up -- hiding the plumbing and finishing the brickwork, but progress nevertheless!

Meanwhile, I've commissioned a bas-relief sculpture of the nerd-martyrdom of Hypatia from my friend Holly Melear that will go on the top back along the wall.

Found art - child's game map

I found this awesome playful game map laying carefully folded up in the park this morning. No doubt left by one of the neighborhood children, a game designer at heart. Game industry friends -- give this kid a job before school beats this wonderful playful world out of him/her! :-)

Camera ethernet

One or the combination of drugs I'm on (buproprion and celexa) induce very vivid dreams. The other night I dreamed about allowing laptop computers, which now often have built-in cameras, to communicate with each other by flashing their screens at each other. If the 640x480 cameras ran at 30 fps at, say, 50% efficiency then you might be able to achieve 30*(640*480)/4*8/2 = 9 Mbits/sec which is about the bandwidth of first generation Ethernet. (Although realistically I'd be impressed if you got 1 Mbps.) Implementing this might be a fun student programming assignment.

(Yes, it's true, I have super nerdy dreams! What did you expect?)

Lego the idea vs. Lego the product

Not Lego
(Absurdly custom modern Lego part from lego.com)

In engineering circles (such as the molecular programming conference where I am today), the word "Lego" is commonly used as a synonym for "an elegant and simple basis set whose parts can be arranged to assemble anything." The Lego company should be proud of the fact that their product has inspired at least three generations of engineers to the point where their name is evoked as the gold-standard of an elegant functional basis set.

However, the irony is that while engineers have adopted Lego as representing platonic perfection of elegant engineering, the Lego company itself has apparently abandoned the idea. Lego's current sets are monstrosities of custom non-interchangeable parts as shown in the picture above. The engineering-driven ethos that encouraged creativity to emerge from the arrangement of simple blocks has been replaced by a marketing-driven ethos of product tie-ins and creativity-free model building. At best, today's Lego users are encouraged to build their super-specific models where practically every piece is custom and then tear them down to reuse some of the pieces in non-intended ways. But, this is a far cry from starting from a bucket of rectangular bricks and then dreaming up one's own creations. As a result, Lego might make more profit, but new generations of engineers will not be inspired in the same way as before.

Other toys, such as the supremely well-designed K*Nex, have tried to fill Lego's lost role but the marketing people there have also apparently taken over the company and have infected K*Nex with the same kind of absurd non-generic parts as demonstrated by this Sesame St. tie I found on their site.


Not K*Nex
(Absurdly specific product tie in from knex.com)

The evolution of these toy companies from pure-nerd-vision to marketing-tie-in-sell-out is a perfect demonstration of how nerd-culture and marketing-culture will forever be in a violent struggle. As far as toys go, we're losing.

Full scale automaton

British automaton
From Ray Bate's reconstruction


Torre dell’Orologio, Venice
From flickr user kukudrulu

Last night I had a beautiful dream where I was in a huge building that was full of an elaborate automaton -- gears, levers, etc. Part of the machine had real people acting like the characters of a traditional automaton in old costumes such as might have been worn by the little figurines decorating an medieval automaton church clock. I think it would be a beautiful piece of theater to make a set like this where the participants come in, explore the space, flip levers and knobs causing the the actors to animate -- perhaps interacting in a full-scale puzzle game where there's some sort of order-of-operations problem to be solved by the group.

Star Trek and Vitalism

I've been watching all of the original series of Star Trek on CBS classics recently. Star Trek is full of conceptual contrivances for the sake of the plot. The list is almost unbounded. Faster than light travel, "humanoids" on every planet, universal English, teleportation, gravity control, etc. I'm willing to forgive most of these as stagecraft -- they either help advance the plot or are needed for obvious production reasons. There's also plenty of just plain silliness such as in Trouble with Tribbles when it is said "Odors can not travel through the vacuum of space" (of course they can) while we hear explosions from blasted space ships (which, of course, you can't).

However, one theme that annoys me constantly, and most certainly is not needed for plot advancement is the incessant evocation of Vitalism.

Vitalism is the idea that there's some sort of "elan vital" that animates the living. The idea seems obvious: living things are so different form non-living things that, surely, there must be some unseen force that defines the state of life. It is a wonderfully intuitive idea; it suffers only from the small problem that it's completely wrong as has been known now for more than a century.

The falsification of Vitalism and the unraveling of the molecular basis of life is certainly the most significant outcome of centuries of biological research. As counter-intuitive as it seems, everything we call living is "merely" chemistry -- made of the same material as dead stuff. We have explored all the way down to the bottom of the phenomenological stack and all that's there is molecules acting like molecules. There's no magic juju, there's no vital essence, there's no "spark" that separates the living from the dead. That said, just because life is made of "mere" molecules, that doesn't make it any less amazing or mysterious. Indeed, to me it makes it much more awesome and magical. I've talked to some people who seem to think that this deconstruction of biology into "mere" chemistry somehow lessens the magic. To me this is as nonsensical as saying that the transcription of poetry into "mere" letters lessens it's emotional impact.

Unfortunately, the news of the great accomplishments of the biological sciences have not infiltrated the consciousness of even the most well-educated. The ideas of Vitalism are just too intuitive to be undone by facts and thus it is still very much alive and well as demonstrated by its casual usage in "science" fiction such Star Trek.

A common example from the bridge of the Enterprise is that Spock will look into his scanner and announce authoritatively that there's only "one life form" on the planet. Inevitably they beam down and the planet is covered in alien plants. Apparently plants are not "life forms".

A more egregious example of Vitalism in Star Trek is the conflation of energy, life, and emotion. In Wolf in the Fold Spock says, "deriving sustenance from emotion is not unknown in the galaxy..." and later adds, "It's consciousness may survive consisting of billions of separate bits of energy floating forever in space, powerless." to which Kirk adds "But it will die, finally". This idea that emotion is some sort of expression of the vital animating spirit is at least as old as ancient Greece and Egypt. So too are the deistic explanations for the presence of this supposed force. And this too infects Star Trek. In Metamorphsis, Spock says to a nebulous "energy" creature called The Companion: "You do not have the ability to create life." and The Companion replies: "That is for the maker of all things." to which everyone seems to agree.

This lack of biological perspective is hardly unique to Star Trek. Pervasive in common knowledge is the idea that only things with "emotion" are "alive". If you ask people to name life forms on Earth, you'll typically get a list of big-eyed mammals. If you push hard you might get a bird. Only upon noting that things also live in the sea will most people remember fish. Forget invertebrates, nobody notices them except when whacking them with a fly swatter. And the most common life on the planet, micro-organisms, are only considered, if ever, under the heading of "nuisance" despite our total dependency on them for, well, basically everything.

Star Trek's lack of biological perspective is a real let down. Its unquestioning and casual acquiescence to Vitalism isn't a forward-looking intellectual challenge like anti-matter engines, teleportation, or sentient robots but rather is a backwards-looking reversion to pre-scientific superstitions.