hello.

In the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, a one-car train of the R142/142A generation of NYC subway cars starts up at approximately 33rd st. on the Lexington line.  It’s carrying 16 people.  With the throttle rigged to full-speed, it is routed towards Coney Island.  One stop before Coney Island, it’s clocked at 62mph. It trips on a red signal at that station, and decelerates to a stop at Coney.

a) Is there a route from Lex & 33 to Coney Island?
b) How far does the train travel?
c) assuming a constant acceleration at the train’s maximum possible, how long does it take to reach its top speed at the station before Coney Island?
d) Is any of this possible?

Refer to the following, and any other resources you have, in your answer:

http://www.nycsubway.org/maps/track.html
http://www.nycsubway.org/cars/r142.html

Nick West passed away yesterday after fighting cancer for about two years now. Nick was a major influence on me when I was a student at ITP, and a good friend, so I want to write down some of my impressions of him, in hopes that I’ll be able to carry on what I admire about him.

Nick was the principal investigator on the Yorb interactive television project at ITP when I met him. The project had been started some years earlier by Dan O’Sullivan, and Nick was running the project and teaching the Yorb class when I came to ITP as a student. The class didn’t always produce successful TV moments. Nick was as enthusiastic about the disasters as he was about the successes, though.  More than anyone I’ve ever met, Nick could embrace failure and pull something positive out of it. We talk about this a lot at ITP; Nick showed me how to do it gleefully.

In my second year as a student, I worked as Nick’s research assistant. We were given a mandate to come up with a new research agenda, and to leave interactive TV behind. We experimented with location-based media, tying a GPS receiver to a series of Quicktime VR panoramas mapped to the map of Greenwich Village. In order to demonstrate it, we had to carry a laptop running Director, a handheld GPS receiver, and assorted equipment — it was no iPhone, for sure. The demos were a mess, but we learned a lot in making them.  It was an incredibly valuable experience for me, getting to spend the whole year working with Nick.  He was  relentlessly curious about everything, so we tried out all kinds of chat systems, virtual environments, navigation systems, and other tools that I would never have explored on my own.  He had a way of blending his interest in politics and cultural theory into what we were doing in an offhand way, so I’d get a larger perspective on the project without realizing it.

What I remember most vividly about Nick is his constant enthusiasm for new subjects, his love for the absurd, and his relentlessly positive attitude. When presented with an obstacle, he did everything be could to see it in a positive light. Our last conversation is perhaps the best example. He was really excited about some of the new cancer treatments he was trying out, and he talked about them with the same geeky enthusiasm he had for everything else he got interested in. “I’m only going to talk about cancer for another 45 minutes, I promise,” he said.  I told him that was fine, he managed to make it into a fascinating story.  “It’d be a lot more fascinating if it weren’t also killing me, I gotta admit,” he said, then launched into a detailed technical explanation of the treatment. We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about a wide variety of subjects, making bad puns, and enjoying the sunshine.  It was Nick at his best.

I don’t have a lot of pictures of him, unfortunately.  This one is from November of ‘96; not sure whose the Carmen Miranda hat is, probably Santiago Echeverry’s.  I like this shot, though. It makes me smile, something he was good at.

So long, Nick.  It was good to know you.  I’ll miss hearing you walk into a room and say, “Hi guys!  How’s it goin’?”

Given how pervasive the idea of planned obsolescence is, I’m always on the lookout for counterexamples — cases where a company actually wants you to fix what you bought from them, and keep it longer, rather than just replacing it wholesale. Nicolas Villar from Microsoft Research (and co-chair of this year’s recent TEI conference) sent me the example below, a PDF of instructions on a toy helicopter he bought that actually explains how to repair it. Granted, many of the instructions involve “spare part kit available separately,” but even that is a small step forward.  Let’s see more like this:

Repair instructions

Thanks to Nic for the link.

I’m on the jury for SIGGRAPH Asia’s Emerging Tech this year, thanks to Lars Erik Holmquist. Looking forward to seeing some great submissions, so submit! Here’s the CfP:

Call for participation:

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: ADAPTATION

SIGGRAPHA ASIA 2009
Pacifico Yokohama, Yokohama, Japan
16-19 December 2009
/www.siggraph.org/asia2009/

SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 welcomes contributors and volunteers to participate in the 2nd edition of the annual SIGGRAPH Asia Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

ACM SIGGRAPH is now presenting two conferences each year.  The first SIGGRAPH Asia, in December in Singapore, quickly established SIGGRAPH’s new event in Asia as one of the world’s two leading annual showcases for the next wave of interactive technologies.  In Yokohama, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 will present technological innovations that will change the way we work, live, and play. Let your work be experienced by thousands of attendees from throughout the world!

Emerging Technologies shares an overall theme with the Art Gallery: Adaptation. For SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, we are seeking works that show how digital technology adapts, or can help us adapt, to a world in flux. Adaptation can have many meanings, from machines that repair themselves under stress to technologies that help humans survive in adverse conditions. Adaptations can also be unexpected or unwanted. We are particularly interested in seeing examples of how computer graphics and interactive techniques are evolving to adapt to new conditions: technical, social, environmental, or something else entirely.

We are looking for creative, innovative technologies and applications in many fields, including:

• Audio
• Biotech and biologically inspired technology
• Computer graphics and animation
• Context-aware applications
• Design
• Displays
• Games
• High-speed networking
• Interaction technology
• Mobile technology
• Physical computing
• Robots
• Ubiquitous computing
• Virtual and mixed reality

Feel free to submit even if your work is not covered by the above list! If it is new, cool, and exciting, we want to see it at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009!

The main form of presentation at Emerging Technologies is live, working, hands-on demonstrations. It is essential that your work can be effectively demonstrated by the time the conference opens in December. To ensure this, the submission process requires all submitters to provide extensive technical, logistical, and practical documentation. Running an Emerging Technologies demo is hard work, but it is also very rewarding. Your work will be experienced by thousands of people, and thousands more will learn about it in international media reports.

We invite submissions from academic institutions, corporations, and individuals. All submissions will be reviewed by experts in relevant fields, and the final selections will be made by a jury. In addition to submitted works, a portion of the exhibition will be curated; please contact the Emerging Technologies Chair if you have suggestions for curated works! Juried and curated works will be clearly distinguished in the conference program.

The members of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Emerging Technologies Jury are:

• Mark Billinghurst, HIT Lab New Zealand
• Cynthia Breazeal, MIT Media Lab
• Paul Debevec, USC Institute for Creative Technologies
• Tom Igoe, New York University
• Jun Rekimoto, The University of Tokyo
• Kimiko Ryokai, University of California, Berkeley
• Albrecht Schmidt, University of Duisburg-Essen
• Annika Waern, Interactive Institute

Accepted Emerging Technologies works will be presented as on-going demonstrations throughout SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in Yokohama. Technical support will be provided to make the most of each demo. If your work is accepted, you will have the opportunity to give a technical presentation, advertised in the conference program. Press tours and other media outreach will be organized to further increase awareness and publicity. A promotional video will be widely distributed, and a description of each exhibit will be published online and in a printed catalog. Additionally, we will seek to offer selected works the opportunity to be published as peer-reviewed papers in an edited special issue of an academic journal.

The submission deadline is 5 June, 23:59 UTC/GMT. The jury’s decisions will be announced in early August.
Full submission details can be found at: /www.siggraph.org/asia2009/for_presenters/etech/index.php

We look forward to seeing your submission for SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Emerging Technologies!

Lars Erik Holmquist
Emerging Technologies Chair
Swedish Institute of Computer Science and Södertörn University

I’ve been collecting notes and ideas on open source hardware (and open fabrication in general) and sustainable technology development for awhile now, and over the next few weeks I’ll finally get a chance to try them out in a couple of presentations. In February I’ll be presenting at the Tangible and Embedded Interaction conference in Cambridge, UK. Looks like there’s a good lineup of other presenters there too, including Ayah Bdeir, Leah Buechley, Durrell Bishop, Timo Arnall, and Einar Martinussen, among others.

Following TEI is a trip to Shenzen, China, hosted by Bunnie Huang of Chumby. He’s bringing a few of us who are working on open hardware/open fabrication projects to see the factories and markets they work with there.  I’m eager to get a sense of what it’s actually like there.

After Shenzen I’m going to Japan for a symposium on ubiquitous content and smart cities and environment, hosted by Keio University’s new Graduate School of Media Design.

Following Tokyo is San Jose, CA, for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. I’ve been going to Etech for several years, and I always have a great time there. This year I’m really excited, they’ve gathered a great group.  I’m doing a hands-on RFID workshop, as well as a talk called Open Fabrication and the Environment, or Taking Spime Apart. There’s a ton of other great talks at Etech this year, from folks like the aforementioned Leah Buechley (we seem to be following each other around the world), Jennifer Magnolfi of Herman Miller on Programmable Work Environments, Raffi Krikorian on Wattzon, Drew Endy on open source biology, and a whole lot more.

After that, home for a bit, I hope.

This weekend I went down to Austin, Texas for Maker Faire Austin, the 2008 edition.  ITP resident researchers Rory Nugent and Hyeki Min went with me, as did recent alums So-Young Park and Young-Hyun Chung.   Between us, we took eight ITP projects: Young-Hyun’s Digital Wheel Art, So-Young’s  Music & Fashion Coordinator, Tom Gerhardt’s FireLight, Christian Cerrito’s Brushbots, Che-Wei Wang and Kristin O’Friel’s Momo, Rory’s Square Band, Alex Reeder’s Butterfly Dress,and Eric Rosenthal’s Liquid ID Spectrometer. It was exhausting showing work for two days straight, but a lot of fun as well.

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Thanks to Selcuk Artut at Sabanci University, I had the opportunity to go to Istanbul last month to give a workshop based on Making Things Talk. It was a really great trip. The workshop blog contains links to the parts used, and a resource blog for interaction designers in Turkish.

Istanbul is an incredible city, large, energetic, dense, sprawling, and beautiful. Well worth seeing. My touristy pics are online on Flickr. I was particularly struck by the large number of cats all around the city. The workshop attendees were wonderful. They were energetic, patient with the loads of material I threw at them, and creative in their use of the stuff. I had a really great time working and visiting with them all. There were a number of great project ideas that came out of the three days we spent together.

I also got to hear some of Selcuk’s band, Replikas, which I highly recommend. Been stuck in my iPod since I got back. Sadly, they weren’t playing any gigs while I was there, so I’ll have to go back.

A few other links from the trip:

Newspaperbox, a project from Selcuk’s department is a news aggregator that uses tree maps in an interesting way to suggest a newspaper layout, but give information about the length and import of the stories in a useful way.

Yeni (New), a performance piece by Genco Gülan, that we saw on my last night there. It was visually stunning, pix on the flickr site above.

Overall, a wonderful trip and one I hope to repeat someday. Belated thanks to Selcuk and Sila for their incredible hospitality, Mustafa and Osman for showing me around Sabanci and the city, and everyone else who I met on the trip.

I wasn’t able to keep up with the ITP residents during 7 in 7, but I got a couple of projects done.

Twitter sign

For a long time, I’ve had some pretty little LED displays on my desk from Avago, the HCMS-297x 1×8 display. I made a Twitter reader with them and an Arduino and a serial to ethernet module. Here it is on video:

It was useful for two reasons: I worked out how to read a twitter feed using an arduino, and I worked out the basics of a library for the Avago displays, thanks to Pascal Stang’s font5×7 library. I’ll document it properly sometime soon.

Physical Computing Workshop
Circuit boards for Lumens

I missed the last three days of 7 in 7 to go to Adams, MA, to give a physical computing workshop at Greylock Arts. It was good fun. I also helped artists Matthew Belanger, Venn Voisey and Sean Riley put together 30 or so Arduino-based circuit boards for Lumens, a piece they are working on that opens in July.

Here are the circuit boards. They took us two days:

Sadly, that’s all I got done!

In a couple of weeks, I’m off to Innsbruck and Berlin. I’m excited, since I’ve never been to Austria or Germany, so that alone will be worth the trip. In Innsbruck, I’ll be attending the 9th annual conference on ubiquitous computing (aka ubicomp). I’ll only be there for the Sunday, to co-host a workshop on ubiquitous sustainability with Jen Mankoff from CMU, and Allison Woodruff and Jay Hasbrouck of Intel Research. In Berlin (Potsdam, really), I’ll be attending a fritzing workshop run by Prof. Reto Wettach and André Knörig of the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany. Should be a good time. Anyone I know in Berlin who’s got time to visit, let me know.

Technorati Tags: conferences & workshops, personal

Ants – The MIT micro robot site

Technorati Tags: electronics, robotics