“That’s the problem these days,” 2K says. “Nobody wants to do work hard. Everybody wants easy. In my days, we knew what heavy lifting was. I had to carry rocks to my cave in the office. We carried rocks to write on. We wrote our code with a hammer and a chisel. That’s not software kid. That’s hardware.”
The series, which gains inspiration from Apple’s popular “Mac versus PC” series and the old “2,000 Year Old Man” skit by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, pits 2K as the force of legacy against Auto-ID’s power of moder. 2K, the highly endearing, yet vertically challenged funny-man, who may resemble some (as yet un-mummified) RPG or COBOL coders in your shop.
“Skull is in the game zone, right now. And you don’t want to mess with him when he is in the game zone. He once played for 4 days straight on 1 quarter, a gallon of chocolate milk and an adult diaper.”
There is a pattern of successful technological innovations I can summarize the following way: there is a nerd engineer who actually invents something and builds the first functional prototype, and there is a geeky enough yo who recognizes the value of the prototype and makes the bigger money/fame/other beneficiaries out of it by turning it into a commercial product: the archetypal nerd/geek pair in this respect is Wozniak/Jobs. In case of the wiki software the programmer/inventor was WardCunningham, while Jimmy Wales became the official Mr. Wiki due to Wikipedia.
Recently I discovered Cunningham on Twitter and I learnt that for coding he takes inspiration from life’s processes ranging from cell signaling to cultural evolution. His coming speech: Read the rest of this entry »
Building and using low budget but high tech devices at home is a main motivation behind hacking. A Harvard Chemistry Research Group now created a microchannel producing device using a Hewlett Packard 7550A Graphics Plotter (see some eBay prices) to perform a diagnostic protein assay with it amongst others. /See my SciFoo microfluidics coverage./
“The system works like this. By replica moulding, the pens of the plotter are replaced with PDMS versions that can deliver various types of ‘ink’. The purpose of the ink, when cured, is to create channels in a filter-paper substrate, and after experimenting with the possibilities Bruzewicz et al. found that a syrupy mixture of 3:1 PDMS:hexane did just fine. Having chosen the appropriate paper, the trick then is to use the plotter to draw channel shapes, with the PDMS syrup penetrating the full depth of the paper to create water-tight chambers in various patterns.”
Computer.
• Computer: Dell Dimension 4100, Pentium III Processor (1 GHz)
• Plotter: Hewlett Packard 7550A Graphics Plotter
• Operating System: OpenSuSE Linux 10.1, Novell Corporation. Available for free download
• Additional Software:
1. Inkscape – vector drawing program, for design of channels. Included in OpenSuSE, also available for free.
I’ve always loved the following scene from LOTR, but I’ve always imagined that they are the words of a man who is in a healthy physiological condition due to a robust life extension technology and not due to a mystical ring:
Bilbo: “Today is my one hundred and eleventh birthday!”
Hobbits: “Happy birthday!”
Bilbo: “Alas, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits.” [cheers abound.] “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
Larry Page is 35 years old today and it’s really easy to consider him as a representative man of his/our generation (I am 33 years old) including his future prospects. A company with an unlimited potential was built on Page’s unfinished PhD. research project.
In the last couple of weeks I became heavily interested in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology probably because the dangerous idea of all pervasive computing and the opportunities to build sg from the bottom-up. So here is a how-to to my first installed low frequency, read-only RFID system hopefully followed by a more juicy stuff in the ultra high frequency range up to 9 meters.
Code in C programming language for using the Arduino with the Parallax RFID reader but in order to upload it to the Arduino board and make it actually work I had to put the reader activator line:
The idea of doing biological experiments with current biotechnological methods and conducting research projects at home is quite new. There are already many names in use referring to the same concept: bioDIY, home biology, biotech DIY, garage biology.
We have a detailed case example which can be considered as the first registered, high profile biotech DIY activity starting the era of useful garage biology: Recently Hugh Rienhoff amplified his daughter’s DNA at home to help doctors figure out her genetic disorder. From the Nature cover article:
“So he bought a used PCR machine, a microcentrifuge, some small-volume pipettes and a brand new gel box. All told, the equipment cost him about $2,000. With these simple tools and some sequence-specific DNA primers of his own design, he could pick the relevant genes out of his daughter’s genome and amplify them enough for sequencing. Freezing the samples and packing the tiny tubes on ice, Rienhoff sent them off for sequencing at about $3.50 a pop. He prepared upwards of 200.”
In my coming series I’d like to examine the following conditions of a mass biotech DIY movement: acquiring skills, affordable kits, tools, hardware, motivations, business opportunities and impact.
acquiring the how to skills:
- good education tools, protocols, videos, howto-s on the web
- short intensive academic or industrial lab courses available for every citizen
- cheap kits: based on the Rienhoff example, a very basic home lab can be set up out of 2-3000 dollars, which is the price of a good laptop.
says Mr. Rienhoff in an email: I bought all the equipment used from a local vendor who buys equipment at auction and from universities. All the gear is at least ten years old so it was very used and low throughput. But given that my project was incredibly focused I did not need the more sophisticated equipment.
Finally back from my Bay Area trip, the workshop I participated turned out to be very stimulating in terms of people and ideas. Also visiting The Blood Knot performance at the American Conservatory Theater and having a drink with Monya&Dan were absolutely delightful. I missed my flight on Saturday, so I slept in LA (and missed my wife) and discovered the city to the amount of a Taco Bell dinner near to the La Quinta Hotel. Also I did a little geek tourism and visited the South Park area in San Francisco (but forgot to check the Wired headquarters) which was so nicely described in Aaron Swartz’s unfortunately unfinished (but not unfinishable) Bubble city:
Downtown San Francisco is a world of carefully-gridded streets and looming skyscrapers, but hidden behind a gas station on Third is a place that almost looks like another world. The sun shines brightly upon a park with green grass and tall shady trees and vibrant swings with children. The park is an oval and the perimeter is lined with small, pastel-colored buildings. Here and there are a smattering of small cafes and restaurants. And the other buildings are filled with startups. Twitter here. Adaptive Path there. Even Yahoo, when it wanted to encourage its employees to be more startup-y, opened up an office in the neighborhood. Sit on the grass and chances are you’ll sit near a friend from another company or bump into them in line at a cafe. The place crawls with companies and back on the street, surveying the scene with a distant but watchful eye, lie the journalists, whose publications cover with awe the rumblings of those below. It was here that Newsflip made its home.
What’s the best thing to do if Google wants track you down and you are“a geek, the kind of person who searched Google every time a thought passed through his head”. Well, Aaron Swartz’s nervous nerd novel, Bubble City (I summarize my thoughts on it in the next post) has a geeky algorithm to play with in Chapter 9:
Thus, to be sure Google can’t track you, you need to do at least three things: never long in, never accept tracking cookies, and use some kind of anonymization of your IP address (like Scroogle or Tor). And that’s just for the Web.
At least I know what I will read on the plane over at the Atlantic tomorrow back to old Europe: Bubble City by Aaron Swartz. What by who? Bubble city is a blog tech novel with chapters as posts. The story takes place in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley around a startup called Newsflip going deep into current web techniques, startup happenings, Google trends & types and tokens of people with the tools of fiction. It is well written, it is witty, I’ve just started but quickly became excited about it due to its experimental character and the insider angle of the writer behind. Bubble City is the brainchild of Aaron Swartz Reddit cofounder, who is an extremely talented 20 year old American programmer, hacker (think of George Hotz or young SaulKripke tinkering with modal logics), although in his blog Raw Thought (long time blogroll guest of Pimm) he usually writes like an old central European, highbrow human intellectual with the necessary cultural references. And that makes him a very interesting phenomenon, one that is almost missing in the American tech-web scene: an intellectual with a broad spectrum of interests and arguments. I met Aaron at the last seconds of the SciFoo Camp at the Googleplex (he writes a lot about the Number One Plex) and really liked his celebrity focused gossip liveblogging account on the event with people like Tim O’ Reilly and Henry Gee explaining themselves in the comment section.
Hopefully Aaron will be able to finish Bubble City by excluding or neutralizing or properly incorporating outworld reflexion (like this and that of Blogoscoped) into it. Finishing a novel and completing a code are not the same though and epic talent has the bad habit not to let young writers reach perfection in their early trials.
Here are 2 sections from Bubble city and the links to the 11 chapters so far (it is not aggregated as far as I know and you always have to change the numbers at the end of the URL):
He popped open the recording software, making sure he got his nose squarely in its frame, his face so close that spittle would land on the lens. In a world where every teenage kid could stream a live feed of himself having sex to millions, only the most aggressive vlogcasters survived. Wayne was no dummy. He didn’t get to be the number seven blog in the TechnoScene rankings by sitting back
at home is a main motivation behind hacking. A Harvard Chemistry Research Group now 
In the last couple of weeks I became heavily interested in 
At least I know what I will read on the plane over at the Atlantic tomorrow back to old Europe: Bubble City by Aaron Swartz. What by who? Bubble city is a blog tech novel with chapters as posts. The story takes place in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley around a startup called Newsflip going deep into current web techniques, startup happenings, Google trends & types and tokens of people with the tools of fiction. It is well written, it is witty, I’ve just started but quickly became excited about it due to its experimental character and the insider angle of the writer behind. Bubble City is the brainchild of Aaron Swartz 