Sometimes Simple Solutions are Better

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

The inevitable avalanche of iPad related cases (my wife already has two), stands, docks and everything else has begun. But as this video reminds us, sometimes you just can't beat the classics. Velcro and the iPad are the new chocolate and peanut butter.

Yup, I'm building an outrigger canoe with my 7 year old daughter.

My daughter is 7, and loves to make stuff.  I figured now was the time to do something ambitious but doable with her while she still wants to hang out with her Dad and play with tools.  So why not build a boat.

We need a boat.  I used to timeshare a boat big enough to tackle the bay, but it was hard to find enough crew with time in their busy schedule.  Plus I also want to go sailing places that are mild and fun--where my daughter can learn to sail.  And capsize!  Boy, it'd be nice to have a boat you could paddle too.  Who makes such a beast?  We do, of course.

I have been following the amazing work of Gary Dierking for over 10 years.  He has done as much as anyone alive to translate pacific canoes into modern materials.  His canoes are human scale--you can drag them into the water yourself.  Not hoists or trailers.  They paddle and sail.  They are swift, not by packing more sail area and righting moment than other boats, but by just being small, narrow and light.  

I bought plans for his Wa'apa design.  For ease of building, storage and transportation, the main hull is built in 8 foot lengths.  Two ends bolted together makes a 16 footer, add a middle section, and you have a 24 foot canoe.  We're building a 16 footer.

As boats go, its pretty easy to build.  But I made it even easier by having all the plywood and foam parts machined.  In a way, I've made it into a kit.

And look how far we got in just two weekends.  And not particularly hard working weekends at that.  The first one, my regular partner in crime, Jon Carver (and his dog Nigel) came to lend a hand.  Last weekend, my brother, Pete, came all the way from Phoenix to play.  Its been fun a blast already.  And we haven't even gotten to the water.

All the plywood parts laid out.

D with two halves of the main ama.  Tusky!

Sawing.

Marking.

Jon in his apron.

Weekend 1's bounty, 4 sides and 4 bulkheads.

Nigel, wondering when we are going to stop hammering!

Pete and D, hamming it up.

Yup, it looks like a boat.

A Rather Literal Turing Machine

Alan Turing was a hell of a guy.  He didn't quite invent the computer, but pretty close.  He proved that a simple language of zeros and ones, a bunch of address locations,  a writer, a reader and an eraser could calculate any computable function.  The idea that the instructions to manipulate data, and the data itself could be all jumbled together as long as you kept track of the addresses are at the heart of the thing I'm typing on right now.


Back when I was a wide eyed undergraduate taking Daniel Dennett's Philosophy of Mind class, I got introduced to the idea of the Universal Turing Machine.  It was a machine so powerful, it might be capable of intelligence or even consciousness.  And yet it was profoundly knowable.  For a Cognitive Science major, that was pretty mind blowing, since the minds we are all used to interacting with are profoundly difficult to understand.  Alan even came up with a criteria for measuring artificial intelligence, the Turing Test.  Oh yeah, he also pretty much won World War II, but that's another story.  


It was only after reading Alan's biography that I realized just how persecuted he was for being gay.  He was, in fact, found guilty, in a court of law, of being homosexual, and was chemically castrated.  He took his own life two years later, at the age of 41.  It was so egregious that last year Gordon Brown publicly apologized, 55 years after his tragic death.  


But his story started with a roll of tape, two characters, a pen, an eraser and an eye.  And it was weirdly moving for me to see the machine in person, after seeing it my minds eye all these years.

Got Thermolene?

I wrote about the abject insanity, and delirious optimism of home-made rocket cars in my entry Turbines, Hot Rods and the Optimism of the Space Age.  There seemed to be a lot of similarity between the engines in the different vehicles.  What were those cool ribbed spheres?  How the heck did they work?


And then I learned about Turbonique.  


"But there is one name that stands alone at the apex of the daredevilry supply industry: the Turbonique Company of Orlando, Florida.

Though the company no longer exists, mere mention of the name "Turbonique" still inspires a shudder of awe among drag racing enthusiast, the company's principle target market.

Even in the Wild West atmosphere of 1960s drag racing, Its products represented the zenith of no-compromise, crazyass crazy.

Recall Acme, that enigmatic mail order purveyor of catapults and jet skates to cartoon coyotes? Pikers, compared to Turbonique."

Turbonique made, among other things  "thrust engines"...

Turbine powered "drag axles"....

and, of course, turbine powered "liquid driven superchargers."
All of these lovely devices were powered by a rocket fuel called Thermolene.  As if pushing your car with a bomb, with a nozzle on it, was not crazy enough, they made superchargers, powered by nozzle bombs that are likely to also make your engine explode.  That's two great explosions for the price of one.  Thermolene indeed.

But that gave me an idea.  I've been thinking about how to make a hot rod for 24 Hours of Lemons.  Maybe this self powered turbocharger thing might work, only without the Thermolene, thank you very much.  Why couldn't we build a leaf blower powered supercharger.  

Looks like I'm not the first person to have this idea.

Pattern, Paper Folding and Me.

A3 Animal B from michael schoner on Vimeo.
You know what they say about hammers. They think everything is a nail. I'm not sure what that makes me, but pattern and folded paper seem to appear somewhere in most of the projects I work on. There's something visceral, almost approachable about the topology of folded paper. Add pattern, and that topology starts to take on a life of its own.

I love the feeling of simultaneous form and flatness in these masks by Neterlands architect Michael Schoner. And there's something cool about doing work that is vaguely representational with such a thorough abstraction. But then again, maybe I just see nails

24 Hours of Lemons

Talk about a liability waiver.  The 24 Hours of Lemons is a race for $500 cars on real racetracks.  As you can see, its quite a cool mix of sillyness, shade tree engineering and actual near death experiences.  

Its real racing.  And like all racing, its about cheating.   Do you expect us to believe that sweet MR2 cost $500? And the austin mini with something crazy under the hood?  Not a chance.  At first I thought the same thing about the Jag XJS that was out there, but how broken does an XJS have to be to be worthless.  Perhaps that's a retorical question.

That said many of the cars you'd think would be crawlers went well.  Shout outs to the blue jeep cherokee and wienermobile toyota tercel.  There was some nice driving out there.  

Now we just have to figure out what we should run next year.  Any suggestions?

Joy Riding

Joy Rides! from Chris Luomanen on Vimeo.

Here's a blast from the past. These are projects I did for my graduate thesis at Stanford.

These Joy Rides are a series of objects that create unexpected, funny, thrilling, perplexing or scary (but benign) experiences when you play with them. Centipede Board is a skateboard that you turn by leaning forwards and back, not just side to side. The Devil's Shopping Cart is an uncontrollable vehicle. The more you try to control it, the more it goes out of control. The Human Catapult is designed to build nervous anticipation without real danger. And Palindrome is a land proa--a craft that is symetrical from front to back, not side to side. So instead of tacking through the wind, you just stop, reverse the rig and take off in reverse--always sitting on the windward side. Its my 21st century walap.

I couldn't show a couple of the other projects I did, because I tested them on preschoolers. So my bouncing disc shaped teeter totter and jump powered orange juicer are still back in the archives. Damned videography agreements.