dorkbot!

[trochee]

Last 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.

Comments

[mythalethe.livejournal.com]

So how will they launch the elevator? Seems like it would be a bit hard to lower the nanotube ribbon from space and hit the ground site, and I can't imagine how you would bootstrap it from the ground without a serious tower of babel!

(I'll join you for the next one if you want company!)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

their crazy idea is to lower it from space. yes. I think the goal is to do it from geostationary orbit, slowly, (where "slowly" means only 200 mph) and then catch it at the bottom.

I found the whole thing quite marvelous if unlikely. It would be fun to have you come along -- I'll be sure to publicize the next one more.