Travelogue: First Day in Doha

//Doha//Monday//WISE2009//Day One

Life in a hotel is simple for conference attendees. You wake up knowing what you will wear, where you will eat (but not what), and what you are doing the rest of the day.

I find serendipity only in the face-to-face encounters with other attendees. I have animated discussions with educators and policy-makers from Camaroon, Bangledesh, South Africa, Australia, Ghana, Mali, Bahrain, France, England, Belgium, Berkeley, Davis, and Washington, DC. Later, during our conversation over dinner we discover that no one at the table has yet met a Qatari citizen.

There are over a million people living in Qatar. Of that, approximately one hundred thousand are Qatari citizens. Citizenship comes with an eighty thousand dollar per year allowance tax-free from the Sheikh. Needless to say, no foreigners are ever granted citizenship. An unknown percentage of the citizens are away collecting degrees at universities around the world, which further reduces the native head count. So it is a common experience for visitors to Qatar to spend a month here on business and never meet a citizen.

Jaded business people describe the Qatari as detached and aloof. I have the romantic notion that this could be a nation of Bruce Waynes, building their bat-caves around the world and springing to action when the time comes.

At breakfast I eavesdrop on a Japanese representative from a shipping company as he interviews a potential captain for a fully loaded oil tanker lying dormant in the Persian Gulf. The shipping company is losing a thousand dollars an hour while the ship sits still. The conversation is formal and reserved until he and the captain, a sun-beaten man with a scar that runs through his left eyebrow, discover that they both were in Burma during the coup, hiding in the same town. By the time I sign my bill, they are laughing and gesturing wildly with their cutlery.

The waters of the Persian Gulf appear to be about as turbulent as a swimming pool, only warmer. Waves lap at the manmade shorelines only when the occasional speedboat passes. Beneath the surface, silver and black fish drift about, looking for morsels of food on the sand covered rocks.

Despite the temperature difference between the shore and sea, no wind comes to stir the palm trees. Doha sits in a pool of it’s own exhaled breath, dirty with construction dust and diesel exhaust. It’s partially constructed skyline of whimsical architecture fades into the murky distance.

Travelogue: From There to Here – Doha

//Saturday//East-bound

We are flying east, across the top of the Atlantic, racing toward daylight. Our flight-path creates a mechanical compression of time, collapsing 12 hours of night into 5 elapsed hours.

We lose the normal advantages of economy of scale in these long-haul flights. Fourteen hours in the air, requires enormous fuel reserves, and the math begins to erode the efficiency of big airplanes. We will burn more fuel to carry the fuel than to carry the people and the plane. To combat this, we climb to the edge of the stratosphere, cruising at 37,000 feet, sleeking thin air to reduce the friction on the plane.

I find sleep difficult to hold onto, alternating between creative flashes that force me to dig out my notebook in order to catch them, and an empty-headedness that reminds me of misspent hours watching junk on television.

Without dreams, I replay recent memories. Watching the tarmac baggage handlers load cargo boxes into the belly of the plane, suddenly noticing that they are all wearing ties. The toilet in terminal B where someone has written "Don’t Concentrate". Flight attendants wearing sky-caps and winged-oryx lapel pins.

The sleep mask traps heat against my eyelids, and I invent solutions involving overlapping Venetian blinds, working out how they will be sewn. Dim light, rosy with the dawn, leaks under the window shades. I will need my sunglasses soon – my sleep-deprived eyes and addled brain too susceptible to migraine to risk looking out the window.

I work out new ways to describe the point of Tinkering School. Soon, I’ll be talking about education, pedagogies, policy-making – I don’t use the right terms, refer to the proper research, or know the important names of pioneers in this field. I think of Basquiat, madly scribbling away only to end up standing around dumbfounded in galleries where art critics described his work in terms that sounded like nonsense. Looking for a label to put on it, these educated people call it "experiential learning" and I clamp down on my knee jerk reaction to say "yes, but it’s more than that…" and provide an amusing anecdote instead.

According to the live map, we have crossed into France. I will attempt a nap again, in hopes that I can be awake as we cross Afghanistan.

//Sunday//Arrival

I awaken at 6:15pm, 18:15 according to the flight data on the display built into the back of the seat in front of me.

We are greeted by young women holding WISE2009 signs, and directed to board the bus that everyone else is boarding. The bus ride takes us through a living museum of international war planes and helicopters. A retired Navy colonel, now school administrator, points out interesting details that our untrained eyes do not notice; a helicopter equipped with rocket launchers and heavy machine guns, an unmarked C5 troop carrier ("not one of our birds"), a squad of combat-trained men standing at attention under the wing of the C5.

"This was a tough trip for me," he says to another attendee, "I have to clear all of my travel with the State Department, and they weren’t sure it was a good idea for me to come to Doha."
"Oh?"
"Well, I know things," he adds cryptically, and turns to look out the window, memories of past "ops" flooding through his mind. All of those meetings with mysterious men under dubious circumstances, and the years spent doing things he can never tell anyone about – not even his wife. It was the not-telling that drove him to school administration. His father had been a principle at the other high school in town – there being a family edict that the kids would never go to the same school that dad worked at. "There can be no hint of impropriety," dad said whenever the subject of why the kids had to go to the school that didn’t have a pool or a jungle gym was raised.

We are herded from one waiting area to another by flocks of young women with signs. A system that seems like it could be very efficient, but isn’t. Our luggage arrives, and we collectively discover that all of the zippers have been opened and the contents rifled. A town-car takes us to the Sheraton, and I, not having exchanged any money yet leave the matter of tipping to my ride-mate, a woman who creates new schools in bombed-out villages in Afghanistan. I feel like a cad. Later, I have dinner with the Dean of the University of Virginia. We talk about how much fun it is to climb trees.

I am awake again at 2am.

//Monday//Morning

Midway through dressing, I discover that my shaver has been partly dismantled and put away on. A practical joke from the team at customs inspection? Needless to say, the rechargeable batteries are completely dead. The front desk sends up the world’s worst twin-blade shaver and I dutifully nick and gouge my face until it is somewhat smooth. Now, to breakfast.

Beyond E-waste: A Manifesto For Reprogrammability

I had occasion recently, to deconstruct an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier. As the parts came off the machine, I carefully separated them into piles; screws and springs, gears and wheels, optical components, switches and sensors, and e-waste. I stacked up the impressively cost-engineered multi-layer circuit boards, pausing to wonder at the computational power of the custom surface-mount devices, and was struck by the irony that the sensors and switches were now going to be attached to an Arduino – a device with a tiny fraction of the compute power. What a waste…

If manufacturers design their devices for re-use and re-purposing, than we could create a special category for extended life recycling, with a lower recycling tax base. The first step is to define a minimal reprogramming USB protocol, which automatically burns out a read fuse to prevent access to the proprietary ROM data on first use – functionally turning your printer into an Arduino-like object the first time you plug your USB cable directly into the circuit board.

Is there an e-book reader sleeping inside your old printer? How long would these devices last in new incarnations? How many more students around the world could create innovative derivative products based on obsolete down-cycled hardware?

We demand universal access to the compute resources we purchase. If it lasts forever, let us make it work forever. Require reprogrammability.

Giraffstronaut

The response to this little doodle that I did with my nephew Mori has been amazing. Can a doodle spark a revolution? Is there a little Giraffstronaut in all of us trying to get out?

Get your t-shirt at the Pivotorium (kids, men’s and women’s sizes/shapes).

Can anyone recommend a better place to make one-off t-shirts than Cafepress? Just wondering…

How Flyable Was 2008 (at the Dump)?

Using data collected by the weather station known as KDALCTY1, I threw together a little bit of processing code to try to get an idea of just what portion of a year is flyable. In this visualization, every row represents one day, and every day is sampled every 20 minutes. If you look closely, way over on the left are the dates. Noon is the center-line of the image.

I used 270 (due west) as an optimal wind direction, and 14mph as the optimal wind speed. A big green ball represents the sweet spot of these two parameters. Everything else is worse to some degree or another. If no ball is drawn, then the conditions are not considered flyable (too light, too strong, wrong direction). No accounting for humidity is taken.

Click the closeup to see full size. Your browser may re-size the image since it’s 3660 pixels tall, so you may have to click on the image once it loads to actually see it full size.

The next step is to create a comparison with 2007…

Toys for Learning – a visit to the d.school at Stanford

Since co-producing the Plerkshop (a day-long workshop examining the meaning and value of play in the workplace) with Scott Klemmer, and Bill Verplank of the d.school at Stanford University, I’ve become fascinated by some of the work going on there and have had the privilege of being invited back on many occasions.

Recently Bill and Terry Winograd invited me to have a look at the results of a quarter-long student project to develop and explore toy design in a class they called “Toys for Learning” (the nested self-referential aspects of the title were not lost on me).

Rather than write a lengthy posting today, I offer these scans of the notes that I took during some of the presentations. Clicking on the thumbnail images will take you to Flickr where you can see much larger versions.

note: the top of this page is largely my exploration of the glass-bottom boat project for Tinkering School this year.

I was, in general, impressed with the projects. There seemed to be an overriding opinion that the hardware integrations were the source of most of the problems, and I find it surprising that this is still the case 30 years after I started fooling around with electronics and computers. Shouldn’t this be easier now? The littlebits project looks like a step in right direction.

Students at Stanford are forced to balance the demands of multiple simultaneous courses (as was evidenced by team members who could not be present at the presentation due to finals) and I left wondering what they could have accomplished if they had been given two solid weeks with no other interruptions.

In any case, I found things to like about every project and have talked about the Toonables marionette and the SeaMe virtual aquarium with multiple people since Monday night.

In particular, with Toonables, while watching a couple of kids make an animation, I was struck by how they had a tendency to focus on the animation of just one limb of the marionette. The end result almost always looked like a frozen person kicking at a soccer ball with one thawed led. I started wondering how the conception of the end result, despite the immediate feedback of the system, was not fully realized by the child operators – they were happy to see the animated leg, not disappointed to see the frozen, lifeless body it was attached to.

Canada Syndrome

While freeing up some space on my laptop, I found this amusing little experiment. My intention was to create a complete document of an entire vacation as a single comic book. To my current way of thinking, it’s far better to put these half-finished things out than to sit on them indefinitely.

This story unfolds during a 2006 paragliding trip to the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia.

Also available as hi-res PDF for your printer.

Cardboard and Christmas Present Camera

The Experiment that Started the Experiment Holding a piece of scrap-paper in one hand, the ball resting on a table, and snapping a picture I suddenly become interested in spherical lenses. I remember that some of the earliest microscopes (from the 1600’s, I think) were made with polished balls of glass. I decide not to look anything up on the internet until after I try building a camera using this ball as a lens.

First Sketch Ball, box, viewscreen, and a hole to put the camera lens through.

Second Sketch Putting the parts in relation to each other helps me think through the construction and builds a more detailed model in my head.

Precision Layout I mark and cut crude holes on both ends of the box. Later I will put more precisely cut pieces of cardboard over these holes.

Making the Imaging Screen After trying various materials readily at hand, I settle on tissue-paper (which keeps the Christmas theme going). The cardboard frame is cut slightly wider than the box so that it will make a gentle arc when it presses against the sides – this will (hopefully) more closely match the focal arc of the ball and keep the screen in place.

Assemblage Putting all the parts together (using mostly gravity), the camera starts to take shape. The ball is so much heavier than the box, I had to hot-glue a piece of plywood to the box to create a sturdy support.

First Image I neglected to account for the minimum focal distance of the camera, as a result the camera must be outside the box in order to actually focus. But, as we can see from the upside-down image of my yard, the ball is working as a lens. Notes for next iteration: longer box, put the ball inside the box to reduce intrusion of light from the sides, different viewscreen material (possibly sanded plastic from discarded packaging).

Algorithmic Brushing

Using only information in the image, is it possible to algorithmically choose angles for brush strokes? I started fooling around with this idea back in 1988, and have been resurrecting it off and on over the years – this version runs in Processing.

Get the source here.

Strange Things Around the Eyes This has always been the problem with this approach – no attention to the anatomical details. I wonder if facial-recognition data could be used to scale the strokes around and on the eyes to preserve some detail?

More Facial Distortion I like the treatment of the ceiling in this one, but the distortion of the facial features is disturbing again.

Sleeping Dog, Window Swung the laptop towards the window and caught Kai sleeping. Stroke direction on Kai just happens to coincide with fur.

Un-natural Directional Choices Vertical strokes on the hand? Feels like those should follow the vectors of the fingers…. Might try reducing image to a few colors, creating a polygonal representation, and then use a vector field (seeded with the lines from the polygons) to determine brush angles.

Self Portrait – Eyes Closed Looking for good angular distinctions between areas of similar brightness but different hues.

Monochrome Brushing Ignoring the color information to see the angular details more clearly.

(added 3.jan.09)
Interesting to note what kind of traffic you get from posting to the Exhibition section on processing.org:

I posted to processing.org on Christmas day (25.dec.08) and then get an almost perfect decay curve in blog traffic.

Holiday Card – Work in Progress

I am making a card (yes, it’s late), using the laser-cutter of course, and stepped away from the computer for a moment. When I sat back down I had a sudden appreciation for the composition of this random moment in Illustrator.