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trocheeLast night I went to Seattle Dorkbot's 24th meeting (my first!) and had a blast.
I arrived late to CoCA, but they were still introducing the night's events. The announcer plugged the beer upstairs, and as she wrapped up the introduction and minor announcements, I grabbed a beer and settled in for the talks.
These talks were really entertaining -- a kooky idea for using speech as a source for MIDI melody design; a collection of bizarro ideas out of the warped mind of Bill Beaty, and a company trying --seriously!-- to build a space elevator.
All this was followed by "Open Dork" -- basically, show and tell -- which included discussion of Seattle Mind Camp, some guy's theory of why the earth has a magnetic field (um, "the air has charge", more or less), various cool tools (universal joints -- in Lego!) and Dave (last name unknown) presenting his attempt to reconstruct his hippie dad's psychedelic light machine, which involves incandescent light, polarizing filters, and differentially-polarizing cellophane cylinders on turntables.
Fun. So nice to spend some time with geeks who love their thing and aren't afraid of it -- just playing, and without a sense of competition. I'm going back.
I arrived late to CoCA, but they were still introducing the night's events. The announcer plugged the beer upstairs, and as she wrapped up the introduction and minor announcements, I grabbed a beer and settled in for the talks.
These talks were really entertaining -- a kooky idea for using speech as a source for MIDI melody design; a collection of bizarro ideas out of the warped mind of Bill Beaty, and a company trying --seriously!-- to build a space elevator.
All this was followed by "Open Dork" -- basically, show and tell -- which included discussion of Seattle Mind Camp, some guy's theory of why the earth has a magnetic field (um, "the air has charge", more or less), various cool tools (universal joints -- in Lego!) and Dave (last name unknown) presenting his attempt to reconstruct his hippie dad's psychedelic light machine, which involves incandescent light, polarizing filters, and differentially-polarizing cellophane cylinders on turntables.
Fun. So nice to spend some time with geeks who love their thing and aren't afraid of it -- just playing, and without a sense of competition. I'm going back.
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Date: 2005-12-08 08:14 pm (UTC)Electric Universe, maaan!
And did you actually get to see Bill Beaty? If so, does he seem sane, or out there? It's really hard to tell from his webpages. I have a lot of respect for him, he designed the static electricity motor i used for a science fair project one year. To power it, i used his TV static collection technique, which hurts like a motherfucker. Still a really fun idea, though. I should try making one again, now that i'm old enough to do a decent job of it.
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Date: 2005-12-08 08:24 pm (UTC)no, I don't think he's crazy -- just a little intense. He's certainly a serious hacker, but in the physical domain not the digital one.
Actually, I really liked him. I talked to him for a little while afterwards.