The Neuron Chamber — Lightwave Prep — High Voltage Manifold

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

I’ve started fabricating the additions to the Neuron Chamber for our upcoming show in Ireland.

One of the most important additions is the High Voltage Manifold, that will house the high voltage wires running from the neon sign transformers to the axons.

For the last installation we ran the wire through soft, black, rubber tube. This was a bit of a last second addition, with the original plan called for sold piping, but we never got to it.

So, what I’m making here are two manifolds, one for each side, that will be mounted on the chamber belly. Between them I’ll run solid pipe. On each end the manifolds will have flexible, metal sheaths that connect to the hemispheres.

Here are the parts for the first manifold. They are each ~3.5′x1.5″. One has a set of large holes for the pipe. One has a set of small holes for the flexible sheath. These will be become pentagons.

Here are two of the above pieces jig’ed up and ready to be tac’ed.

Put five together and look, ohhhh, a pentagon.

And repeat.

The cover is next. We went with perforated steel because we are going to mount a light inside. First I cut a pentagon about an inc greater, and then I notch it.

Then, I “break” the edges.

Break each edge, checking the fit as you go, to insure a snug fit.

At this point I’ve welded on the solid back, and added the mounting tabs.

Here is one of the manifolds mounted on the belly.

Here both are mounted and the pipe is welded in. You can also see the brass nipples (*titter*) that will connect to the flexible hose.

And now it’s done.

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Heart Gears

Friday, November 14, 2008

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Almost Scientific’s New Header

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Look up there, see the new header? Like it? I’ll likely be changing it over the next few days. Let me know if there is a version you like most by leaving a comment.

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Chalk Boards

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Whenever my graduate thesis adviser once told me “as soon as you start drawing lines in the air no one knows what they hell you are talking about.”

This was typically in response to someone in the lab elaborating a point by drawing an imaginary graph in the air with their fingers.

If you ever tried to do this while talking to him he would usually chuck a dry-erase marker or a chunk of chalk at you, and make you go up to the board and draw your graph properly.

This is also something I try to encourage in the shop. Whenever someone starts drawing in the air or using their finger as parts I always hand them a sharpie and something to write on.

Those simple graphs, figures, or diagrams often become beautiful, palimpsestic drawings conveying both the idea itself, and the beauty of the underlying thought process behind it.

If you are as interested in chalk-board drawings as I am, check out Bye bye blackboard, a website showing some of the chalk board drawings on display in the Special Exhibitions Gallery at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.

Here is one I really liked:

Sir Martin Rees

Astronomer Royal

‘Some of us suspect that there is more to physical reality than what we’ve traditionally called ‘our universe’ — the aftermath of ‘our big bang’. Moreover, other big bangs could give rise to cosmoses that behave very differently — with more structure or less; with galaxies that are bigger, smaller, or nonexistent. These diagrams consider what the aftermath of the big bang would have been like if two particular parameters were different from the values in our actual big bang: the quantity Q that measures how smooth the universe is, and Einstein’s cosmological constant ‘Lambda’. The shading delineates regions where galaxies could form.’

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Street with a view

Monday, November 10, 2008

Ever wish you knew exactaly when those google map cars were going to be driving down your street so you could run outside in a yeti costume while juggling a lamp, a bottle of katsup and a hard-boild egg?

Well, that migh jsut be my vision. But check out the Street With a View project out of CMU:

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

Check out this video where the artist talks a bit about how it all went down:

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The Neuron Chamber to appear at Lightwave 2009!

Friday, November 7, 2008

Another big announcement!

The Neuron Chamber has been invited to Dublin, Ireland, this winter to participate in Lightwave 2009.

Lightwave is a event at the Science Gallery, which is a science and art space, associated with Trinity College.

Check out some of the fantastic work that was featured at Lightwave last year.

You can see a portion of the application we submitted here.

More info to come

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EgoPHobia interview with Sean O about the Steampunk Treehouse

Friday, November 7, 2008

Romanian culture magazine EgoPhobia recently did a long interview with my shop-mate and Treehouse collaborator Sean Orlando about the Steampunk Treehouse and the ideas behind Steampunk.

Click this to read the interview, which features some photos by Almost Scientific!

Sean give an extended response to the hub-bub about the death of steampunk that went down in Design Observer a few months ago.

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Almost Scientific now fully scientific

Friday, November 7, 2008

Hello all –

Almost Scientific has now officially emerged from hiatus. Thank’s for sticking around!

And yes, I passed my PhD thesis defense, and my thesis adviser was quick to point out that I’m now “Fully Scientific.”

But, Almost Scientific never had anything to do with my scientific work. The name actually applies specifically to my style of producing art. The name came about one afternoon when I was working on the etchings for the Triaparator and someone said “Wow, your work process is so scientific.” To that I said “No, trust me, the way I work in the shop is not scientific … well, really, it’s almost scientific.” And the name stuck.

Well, stay tuned for more links, more fantastic fabrication photos, and more mind-blowing, science-related art!

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Decision and Elections

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Okay — I know I said I was on hiatus so I could focus on completing my thesis but this was too much to pass up.

I came across this op-ed piece in the New York Times today: Your Brains Secrete Ballot.

Here is a little snippet:

Neuroscientists have begun to tease out the brain systems that make decisions. Even when it takes no more than a second, decision-making is thought to involve two parts, gathering evidence and committing to a choice. In tasks as simple as deciding whether a shifting pattern of dots is moving to the left or to the right, brain activity in the parietal cortex rises as evidence is gathered, eventually reaching a tipping point (though it’s not yet known which brain regions drive the final choice).

Guess what. I’m one of those neuroscientists. My research uses the exact same “sifting pattern of dots is moving to the left or to the right” to determine how reward information biases what direction of motion you report seeing, and how the parietal cortex combines this information.

In fact, here is a draft of the forward to my thesis, where I also connect my research to the election:

This dissertation is about decisions. Specifically, it is about how individual factors combine to generate choice. While I write this dissertation, the people of the United States of America is deliberating a momentous decision, one widely believed to be one of the most significant in contemporary history: who will be the next President. At few other points in history have so many people been asked to integrate such a vast amount of varied information to make a single decision.

Ultimately, the decision is based upon information which predisposes or biases voter to one or the other candidate. For example, one is from the Democratic party, one is from the Republican party; one is young, one is old; one is pale-skinned, one is dark-skinned; one has a military background, one an academic background. As powerful and as useful as these biases can be when making decisions, we know that to make an optimal decision, we should not be unduly influenced by our biases. Instead, we should wisely integrate them with the current information we have about the state of this country. For example, a voter may inherently prefer an academically trained candidate but in war time might choose the militarily trained one. Another voter might be biased against the younger candidate but choose him as a symbol of change.

Our capacity to incorporate multiple sources of information permits dynamic decisions, in which prior experience is integrated with the current situation. Without this capacity, our choices would calcify with history’s deposition or slavishly meander with the moment. Understanding the biological foundation and limitation of this capacity ultimately elucidates how people resolve complex decisions into the choices, political and otherwise, which define our behavior and shape our world.

Now I’m going back to work on the rest … I’ll be back soon

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Almost Scientific on short hiatus

Monday, October 27, 2008

Hey folks –

You many have noticed that posts have gotten bit sporadic lately. Well, for the past few week I’ve been hunkered down preparing my PhD dissertation for my defense, which is on Nov 5th. So, at least until then, Almost Scientific will officially be on hiatus. When I return, I suppose I’ll really be — Fully Scientific.

See you then!

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Lovely

Friday, October 24, 2008

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The Origami-Inspired Folding Bamboo House

Thursday, October 23, 2008

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Who is Batman?

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

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The Machine

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Untitled from mudlevel on Vimeo.

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Village Pet Store And Charcoal Grill

Thursday, October 9, 2008

The world famous (and very cool) mysterious-man of art Banksy has opened a pet shop in NYC.

Located at 89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street and operating till October 31st (Halloween), Banksy’s pet store is officially open each and every daily from 10am until midnight.

If you live in or near NYC and you don’t go check this out you should ask yourself “Do I really need to live in a cutural epicenter like NYC if I don’t go check out some of the cool stuff that goes on in this city?”

Get more of the lowdown from Wooster Collective:

Once inside Banksy’s pet store, you discover such things as breaded fish that swim in a large round bowl while hot dogs are living the high life under heat lamps in cages near the cash register.

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The Lumbering Contraption — Video

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Nick Winterhalter got this great video by attaching a camera to one of the spokes of The Lumbering Contraption at the race. I love the water bottle.

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Treehouse Sighted On The Worlds Web Nets

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

While scrolling though Boing-Boing today I came across a post to a Steampunk article that mentioned our Steampunk Treehouse.

This time the article is in the latest edition of the IEEE. The IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

I get a kick when I see my art featured in the tehcnical journals that I usualy assoicate wieht my life as a scientist.

The IEEE peice also mentions my friend Tom Sepe and Colabrators KSW.

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The Baikonur Cosmodrome — A Russian Rocket City

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Follow the link below to some large and gorgeous photos of the Russian Rocket City in Kazakstan.

When NASA’s last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is an entire Kazakh city, rented and administered by Russia. The Cosmodrome was founded in 1955, making it one of the oldest space launch facilites still in operation. Here are collected some photographs of manned and unmanned launches from Baikonur over the past several years.

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The Lumbering Contraption — photos from the race

Monday, September 29, 2008

The race was fantastic. So much fun. We were not the fastest there (shocking), in fact, I don’t even remember any of our times.

We did win a lovely trophy for Best Engineering.

Number of “official” runs = 2

Number of injures = 1

Severity of injury = “minor”

Below are some of the photos I took. Click here to check out the full gallery.

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PLAF — Autonomous Mechanisms by Eltono And Momo

Monday, September 29, 2008

I just came across the simple, tide-powered kinetic sculptures created by Eltono and Momo, two NYC artists and found them really inspiring.

Their work is being fatured at the Anonymous Gallery (locaed on Broome St in NYC — I once lived on Broome st.) where they have the following statement:

Plaf is a word for splash in both Spanish and French and relates to the on-going project that features kinetic sculptures that have been placed and fastened in several locations in the New York Waterways. Constructed from used materials, the work will be left to the elements as a way to explore the force and power of water that goes unused and unnoticed in New York City. Using the rivers water, wind, tides, and currents, the sculptures will shift and decay, leaving the work just as it is without comment on form or representation.

Here is a video of their most recent project. Other can be found on their webpage.

PLAF - Hallet’s Cove from MOMO on Vimeo.

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Christoper Pearson’s Digital Reliefs

Friday, September 26, 2008

Projecting high-pass filtered animations on stone walls to create animated reliefs … Nifty.

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The Lumbering Contraption — Front Car

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Here are some of the latest shots of the hot-rod hamster-wheel of death (a.k.a - The Lumbering Contraption).

Let me ask you … does this look like something you would want picking your nose?

There were a bunch of people shooting video tonight as we gave it a test run down the track out front Louise Street Labs so hopefully they will get them on the lying interwebs soon.

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The Internet Tells Lies

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

My last post on the Lumbering Contraption was featured on the Make blog where they noted that our Railcar was much like The Disgusting Spectacle ( a gloriously absurd work of art built by friends at NIMBY ). While it is true that they are both human powered and both involve a large metal wheel it is not true that our Railcar in any way picks noses of any sort, as the internet would have you believe.

I found this on Gizmowatch (emphasis mine):

We aren’t very sure if we have come across giant-sized “breathing” noses, but are certainly curious to know how the Lumbering Contraption powers some weird devices that in turn drive a nose-picking machine. Basically a monstrously big 10×10-foot hamster ball, the Lumbering Contraption is an entry at the Handcar Regatta competition.

What’s Innovative: It isn’t every day that you come across metal hamster balls that can make you puke after a few rolls. And weird still is the fact that the end purpose of this giant hollow sphere is to pick noses.

Watch This: We are yet to come to terms with what we feel about this giant-sized contraption. Yet, we believe it stands a good chance at the Handcar Regatta.

Gizmowatch refers their link and “information” to Gearfuse:

In light of this coming Sunday’s Handcar Regatta, a race of human-powered rail-track creations, the team over at Almost Scientific have created a ginormous 10 feet tall 10 feet wide hamster wheel they’re calling the Lumbering Contraption. What purpose does it serve? Well, it controls a slew of doohickeys that mobilize a giant nose picking machine. Weird, right? If only we could use human-sized hamster wheels.

At least Gearfuse actually references my original link but got their information from Daily DIY, who basically reposted the entire, original Make post.

Yet another reason to not believe anything you find on the internets … except here at Almost Scientific … we would never tell you a lie.

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The Lumbering Contraption

Monday, September 22, 2008

Ummmmmm — why are we building a 10′ tall 10′ wide hamster wheel call the Lumbering Contraption?

(Not to pick noses, as the Internets would have you believe.)

Well, this Sunday, September 28th, 2008, is the great Handcar Regatta — a race of human-powered rail-track creations.

We have been hard at work in the Louise St. Lab these past few weeks and now I’m here to fill you all in. These are some photos I’ve been taking as we went along and as we finish her up this week I’ll post some final updates. You can see more photos taken by Contraption Crew member Nick Winterhalter here. Be sure to check out the video he posted of the wheel in action. Also, check out Tom Sepe’s photos here.

Enjoy these for now and check back this week for the final updates.

See you at the race!

UPDATES: Check out the front car!

Here is world famous Jo Slota with our original, technical drawing of the Contraption as drawn on the back of a napkin from the Tamale Lady and an inspiring image

The first some-what-to-scale model

Building the main rail-riders from rolled angle iron.

It was around this time that we started to realize how big it really was going to be

Yeah, it’s big.

And it moves.

The plan is to have three runners on the inside and one person in the front

Here it is in it’s almost final stage. All we have left to add on is the front seat and the cow catcher!

Sweet!

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smash

Thursday, September 18, 2008

SMASH

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You know … for your ears — Vol.2

Monday, September 15, 2008

Let me introduce you to Buck 65. I’m not even sure what to say about this guy. He has made some of the best music I’ve heard in years. Brilliant, clever lyrics, deep melody, a poetic, hip-hop flow as smooth as it is gritty — as if J Cash were born again today in Detroit. Except, Buck 65 is from Canada. I’m sure I’ll play some more for ya’all at some point.