Street Tech

On the way home from the location I dare no longer speak about, I was “suitcase raped,” as my son dubbed it. TSA officials took an uncommon interest in me and my baggage. As I looked on in horror, they paraded the entire contents of my luggage in front of everyone, including my dirty underwear, painstakingly swabbing each and every item, right down to my toothbrush handle, looking for… what? Explosives residue, I assume. Anyway, it was seriously NOT fun, surprisingly humiliating, and really did feel like a personal violation which took me days to get over. (And yes, I understand that the word “rape” is an over-statement and probably ill-advised in this instance.)

As part of this ordeal, they went through my journal, notebooks, papers, etc., sometimes snickering at what they found there. They took particular interest in a COMIC BOOK called “Adventures in Synthetic Biology,” by Drew Endy, something I picked up at said unspeakable location.

Drew is a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and one of the people behind The BioBricks Foundation, a not-for-profit org of engineers and scientists from MIT, Harvard, UCSF, and elsewhere, “encouraging the development and responsible use of technologies based on the BioBrick standard of DNA parts that encode basic biological functions. You can read more about Drew’s work here, and more about BioBricks here. And if you want to see the comic book that entertained my new best pals at the TSA, an online version can be found here.

Yeah, I know. At this point you’re probably thinking Foo Camp/Schmoo Camp. I’ll stop with the Foo Camp postings soon. But not just yet…

I love when you’re at a conference, or otherwise meet someone, and then you go home, google them, and the true import of who you were talking to becomes apparent. Such was the case with Jeff Han. He and I got a lift from Camp to SF/SFO with Erin McKean (thanks for the lift, Erin!). We chatted about this and that over burgers and double-frieds at In-N-Out Burger. He said he was a multi-touch interface designer. He talked a little bit about the finer points of finer points (e.g. how multi-touch can also read degrees of pressure as an input variable). Nice guy, cool job, great lunch. And he was off. I got home and wanted to find out more. I ended up at this mesmerizing video and had my mind suitably blown. Yes, you’ve already seen this in Minority Report, but this is real-world tech (and there’s no need for the Michael Jackson glitter gloves). Coming soon to a Pre-Crime Sector Station near you (or hopefully some less ominous, more human-beneficial application). Also, check out Jeff’s TED presentation for a more nuts and bolts look at the tech involved.

Bill Gurstelle is someone associated with Make and the Maker community to whom, through various circumstances, I’m drawn ever-closer. Bill is the author of Backyard Ballistics and Whoosh, Boom, Splat. He is a mad genius, a scholar, and a gentleman (at least he’s gentlemanly enough to warn you that he’s about to tell you something dirty or disgusting before he proceeds to do so). I spent a bunch of time with him at Foo Camp and had a blast (and no, that’s not an attempt at bad pyro punnage).

Bill, seen above in a Brian Jepson photo, gave a talk on “Living Dangerously in a Risk-Obsessed World.” It was a fun, sort of think-out-loud session for his next book, which looks at risk and thrill-seeking and its role in human evolution.

Here, Eric Wilhelm (foreground), of Instructables, tells us about the time he boxed a kangaroo. No, seriously. Also in the photo (L to R): Charles Platt, moi, Mark Atwood (standing), Mark Frauenfelder (behind Eric), and Avi Geiger (by a nose).

Brian has a few other photos of Foo in his Flickr sets.

One of my favorite sessions at Foo Camp was run by Scott Berkun, author of Myths of Innovation (which is what his Foo Camp talk was about). On his blog, he’s composed a short, hysterical (and spot-on) glossary of real-world software development methodologies. Take “Asshole Driven Development:”

Asshole Driven Development (ADD) – Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may be rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway.

Or, what’s found in most corporate structures, regardless of what they do:

Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) – The driving force behind most individual efforts is to make sure than when the shit hits the fan, they are not to blame.

If you want to see a video clip of Scott’s “Myths of Innovation” talk (not from Foo Camp), here ya go.

The Leonardian Library in Vinci, Tuscany has released to the Web Leonardo’s Madrid Codices and the Codex Atlanticus, two of his meatiest collections of scientific and technical drawings. The collections are called e-Leo and contain hi-res scans of some 3,000 pages. The goal is to eventually scan 12,000 pages worth of Da Vinci goodness, all searchable, all free. This’ll clearly be a boon to both amateur inventor-types and scholars alike.

[Via Wired]