Enzymind Labs

Doug Heiken and I took some video and still photos of forest land near the Blue River Resevoir, OR, that will be thinned, with the intention of re-photography after the thin. These are related notes and materials.

A 90 year old forest of mostly Douglas fir that was naturally established after fire about 90 years ago. This area will be thinned as part of the Bridge Thin timber sale, probably in late 2008 or 2009. The prescription is 17 foot "designation by description." Unit 82 and part of unit 80 are included in the polygon (see below).

This guy is documenting the process of building a giant robot. The thing I like about it is that he discusses that his documentary is not specifically about building a robot, but rather it demonstrates how one might build anything that has never been built before, which is a component of the ethic of enzymind. The link above is to the 11th segment where he touches upon this philosophy, but the entire series starting at segment 1 can be found in the you tube side bar. 

Listening to an audiobook of HD Thoreau's Walden. He is a, if not thee, master of simplified living and I have been duly inspired by him. The recording is particularly well read.

Had a difficult week and a half, felt sick most of the time and it was hard to concentrate. One productive project got done, a tesselation with a "universal tile pair" -- any square tiling with the related pair results in smooth contours. I also reworked a brain animation as part of a demo for a possible public display commision.

Various curiosities:

PBS program 'judgment day' on the dover trial of intelligent design. I do not like intelligent design and believe its ultimately destructive but its a necessary topic of science-relevant discussion since the majority of Americans believe in a god.

Here's a nice Scientific American robotics review of encouraging advances, particularly in autonomous control. Also an article about a 3 cm wingspan robotic fly with a video link of it actually flying: they hope to ultimately use on-board batteries and autonomous cooperative control. This fly is primitive compared to the miracles a real fly can do.

Asus finally released their low cost all solid state ultraportable eee laptop pc. Might be worth ~$300 as internet pc. Someone has already figured out how to hack in a touchscreen.

An all internet pc would probably motivate me to expand enzymind functionality with more sophisticated file storage tools.

2007-12-24 23:28:12

A nice video collection of pretty apophysis/fractal flame ifs fractals:

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=r4n1ow4kch

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2007-12-24 22:45:45

Google tech talk: The next 50 years of science

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=e91gql4y1e

"it will be about the structuring of information and knoweldge".