dan’s blog

frooot

what are these things!  several “native” fruits from hawaii i got at a fruit stand (i’m in Kona this week for my cousin’s wedding).  i’m not sure which if any are truly native (ie, before the polynesian colonization around AD1000).  anyway, the top left is a large mango for scale.  top right is a dragonfruit, have not eaten one yet.  middle left is a cashew.  the cashew fruit tastes sweet but also a little peppery, and the nut part can’t be eaten in the raw form.  the green apple-looking thing is a ‘the’ i think?  have not eaten that one yet.  then is an avocado, normal type but all the ones i have seen here are gigantic, this one is bigger than a large mango but i’ve seen much bigger ones here.  bottom row left is a loquat, then a ’snakefruit’?  the snakefruit tastes a bit like when you mush up every type of starburst and eat them at once, but with the look and consistency of a raw garlic clove.  then is the passionfruit and i forgot what the one on the bottom right is.

fogginess

yesterday i went on a long and hilly (and fun!) ride with my friend christina and her friend anna. we biked through the city, over the golden gate and into the fog of the NoCal coastline. this is the bridge from the city side:

here is a funny seed-pod thing i found along the ride. what is it! and why is it! it is large, about 6cm diameter. the spikey bits are confusing because they are too soft to cause any hurtfulness if i was to try and eat it, and this area is very humid and rainy so i dont think they could be for grabbing dew like a cactus. and it is way too big to stick to my socks and get carried to a new better place like a burr. perhaps it is a newly evolved lifeform that is trying to make me so curious about it that i will pick it, take it home to look it up on the interwebs, and then sooner or later tire of it and toss it in my backyard where it will take root and spawn millions of new spiny brain-plants awaiting the careless drunken wanderings of my hapless reveling guests at a future gathering. or perhaps it will not await at all, but will take things into its own hands while i am passed out on the couch! i dub it: ‘the spiny brain plant of death’

on the way back over the bridge there was a big ship passing by. they put so much stuff on these things! each box is known as a container, and is the size of an 18-wheeler truck. this ship is carrying about 700 of them on the deck alone. i costed these out for a project last year, it costs about $2,000 to ship a loaded container from hong kong to san francisco, and takes about 2 weeks. this ship is taking all the empty’s back to hong kong for a refill. the containers seem stacked pretty high, it makes the ship look pretty top-heavy but i’m sure they know what they are doing. i wonder how many container-fulls it takes to supply one ikea or wal-mart for a year?

and here we are biking up a hill:

rose-walled fortress ][

yesterday i took the interns and we went and fixed up the sculpture in its new location:

squid salon IV

last night we held the IV’th squid salon - our ’show and tell for nerds’ event. turnout was around 100, with about 25 3-minute presentations. as usual the presentations ranged from ‘exploding stuff in microwave oven’ (actually that was last time) to ‘a novel method for inexpensive parallelized microchemistry experiments’ with quite a varienty of stops in between. things went quite smoothly this time due to the banning of powerpoint. there was an interesting presentation by a friend of ours who designed perhaps the most massive sculpture at burning man last year (at 50+ feet high and 50+ tons), he was seeking some help in resolving a slight problem they experienced with shearing of support bolts in their structure… there was not one but two novel devices for crimping pipes (for medical applications i think), a demo of a candle-powered toy boat from bangladesh, two different sound-responsive lasers (one like a kazoo and one for a drum), a funny program for your mac laptop that listens to the on-board accelerometer (which is normally used to detect when you’ve dropped the laptop) and lets you bonk the side of the laptop with your hand to switch between programs. the squid labs interns (yes, we are livin’ large, or at least in utter chaos, this summer) showed a couple of things they’ve been doing - a paint-ball cannon made from a pvc pipe and a shop-vac, and a kevlar laptop-case. i’m sure i’ve forgotten at least half the good stuff…
Jesse from the Open Prosthetics Project showed a lego-model of a novel prosthetic device they have developed:

the artist known as “dog” shows off his EL-Wire shorts, certainly one of the most skilled uses of el-wire that i have seen:

dog_elwire_shorts_video

some very nice led-based fire-dancer type devices were shown (conveniently on our trampoline):

a convenient paper-less music holder for bandies playing in heavy wind:

my friend rocky tries out a pair of goggles which blinks in a very simple way, but when you close your eyes your brain causes you to see very complex patterns that aren’t really there:

the rose-walled fortress

after some unfortunate logistical difficulties with the local museums, we’ve finally placed our sculpture into its new home - conveniently just 3 blocks down the street! yes, our animated friends behind the impregnable wall of roses will be showing the piece in their foyer for the foreseeable future.

leaving the lab:

entering the new home:

the wall of roses was in full bloom about two weeks ago:

musical fun

i’ve been touring about england for a week, here’s one fun thing i found:

http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/A9C2790645781029AC23001143E7E506

isle of wight

i kind of liked last month’s self-shot-film biking around france, so today i’ve made a similar one while biking across a ridge on the isle of wight:

video: biking the isle of wight

here’s a view from high up on the same ridge. if you click it you can see little white dots in the field on the left - they are sheep! the english channel is in the distance.