Just a reminder, Maker Faire is this weekend at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. 10 am to 8 pm, Saturday. 10 am to 6 pm Sunday. $20 adult, $10 student (with valid id), $5 kids.
Schedule is packed. I’d recommend Trisian Shone, and the Raygun Gothic Spaceship, which just looks amazing.
I doubt I’m going to make it this year. Instead, I’ll be attending the SF Fine Art Fair.
In the original Sim City there were these scenarios that you could play. You were given a city and problem to solve. San Francisco 1906? Earthquake. (Remember, in the even of a major disaster, you may need to be self sufficient for up to 72 hours. Are you prepared? I’m not.) Tokyo 1961? Monster. You get the picture. They were all fairly straight forward, except one. Detroit 1972. Problem? Well… Detroit.
It’s become a contemporary American past time to bash Detroit. I’m not looking to do that. All I will say that I’ve been to Detroit, and it’s the only place I’ve been where the nightlife was in suburbs instead of the city, and peeking over the sound barriers on the freeway never revealed a nice part of town. It’s clearly a city that has seen better days, and has earned its distinction of being a “donut city.”
Its historic buildings are either falling apart, or are being looted for new development elsewhere.
Detroit’s population has steadily shrank since the 1970s, but it still rated as the 11th most populous city, just between San Jose and San Francisco. Unsurprisingly, the city hasn’t depopulated in a controlled manner, so there population is spread thin across the 139 square mile city. This means that Detroit has to maintain an infrastructure for the population 2 million, when less than a million actually use. 40% of the city is fallow. (Of course, this isn’t Detroit’s only problem.)
For years now, one proposed solution to this problem has been to shrink the city. Unoccupied buildings would be condemned, occupied ones bought, and the population relocated closer to downtown. A more controlled Devil’s Night, if you will. Surprisingly, the talk turned serious last year, with the mayor proposing to shrink the city by a fourth.
Today, they started.
Will it work? In 1961, Jane Jacobs described the city as being “largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.” If that’s true, then there’s no core to build around.
Good luck Detroit.
When I first saw the Pinball coffee table back in 2006, I thought it looked cool (colored lights shining up on people’s faces always brings a warmth to the heart of this scifi geek.), but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine actually having one.
A couple of years ago, I went to Shorty’s in Seattle. This bar has booths where the table has a lit pinball playfield in it, just like the pinball coffee table. (In fact, Shorty’s was the inspiration for the coffee table.) Suddenly, I thought that pinball coffee tables were actually feasible!
I talked to some friends about it, but they’re all against the idea. As Ming put it, “It would look like a kid’s room.” It’s hard to really argue with her, when you see Ed Cheung’s table in the living room.
I’m not criticizing the build, but I guess the idea. (Even though, I still kind of want one. Especially if it remained playable.) It’s a party piece, but not everyday piece. That’s what I’m saying.
So we got a real coffee table of Craigslist for free. It’s nice, much better than this thing. I still went ahead and made the table though. There was no real reason not to, since we can find something to use it for. I give it a C in high school shop. I talked to my dad, and put it together with pocket screws using a Kreg Jig Jr kit. I tried using the right angle clamp, but I never got it to work. Whenever I’d lock it down, it would pull out of the pocket hole just enough to slide down, destroying the flat inner surface so you couldn’t put it back in the same hole. (My dad gets the clamp to work, but I never did.) If I had to do it over again, I would have gotten just a normal corner clamp.
I don’t really like it, but I guess it’s okay for being made out of scraps. I just wish I paid more attention when put the pocket holes in.
It’s heavy, and it’s square. I’ll give it that.
A couple of months ago Ming and I decided redo the closet in the bedroom, since it was falling apart. We replaced the rod, and was going to replace the bent shelf with a new shelf long shelf, and then add some side shelves. So we went down to Home Depot and bought one of those crappy particle board covered in white melamine. Unfortunately, we had the guy cut the side shelves an inch too narrow, and left the long board way too wide. (Lesson: Always bring a ruler, and know exactly how big you’re talking about.)
While we were able to hack together something to use side shelves, we were left with three unused side shelves and long shelf. Since we need a better coffee table than the one we’re using, we decided to knock together one from the failed closet attempt. I think the only parts I’m going to need is a saw (probably will by a handsaw since this isn’t really worth buying a jig for), and probably a four half inch square by 18 inch long blocks so that I have something to screw into. Maybe, I’ll need another two solid blocks that are 23 inches long for the back as well. Maybe even four more 23.5 inches long to run along the top too.
While I like the idea of building a table, this is going to look so horrible, it’s not even funny. Wood screws right through the sides, chipped melamine, and peeling edge tape. It’s going to pretty embarrassing. So why am I posting about this? I don’t know. I’m stupid I guess.
Well, maybe it won’t look that bad.
Alex Schlegel‘s Day Table uses a photoresistor located in one corner, and eight ShiftBars (for a total of 24 channels) connected to an Arduino to play back the sunlight that fell on the table during the course of the day.
Macetech built this table to demo their shiftbrite RGB LEDs and a Seeeduino. It’s a 9 x 9 grid, but since each LED has its own controller, the cost quickly climbs.
While not a table, Dave Clausen‘s LED Cylinder is a good resource for discussing how to wire up set of addressable RGB LEDs, along with some good resources to parts and the like.
Recently I’ve been thinking about a LED displays. Originally, I was thinking about a full 640 x 480 display, but after doing the math, that idea quickly shrank to a more manageable 32 x 24 display. While part of me thinks that having one of these tables would be interesting, I can’t help but think that in reality they’d just be ugly and too bright.
I started to think about LED displays because my “coffee table” (It’s actually more an end table.) has a glass top and holes cut out in the back for electrical cables to pass through. What I really want is a multitouch display like either of these two guys are building. However, a multitouch is still pretty hacky and more DIY than I want right now. I like the idea of owning one of these tables, I just don’t want to build it.
The federal government is selling this Spring, the Diamond Shoals Light Station 13 miles off of Cape Hatteras, NC. Two floors. 5000 square feet of living space. 360 degree ocean views. Real fixer-up-er. All bids considered.
Clearly it’s seen better days. It’s billed as a “Texas Tower”, but it’s not an offshore radar station, and being inside territorial waters, you can’t even pull a Sealand.
I guess the only practical reason for buying this would be for salvage, but I do like the idea having one of these as an ultimate fort.
It’s that time of year again, where we (and by “we,” I mean “The Marin County Coroner’s Office”) tally up the number of jumpers from the World’s Leading Suicide Magnet, YOUR GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE!
A drumroll please….
If you chose 31, congratulations! You win a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni – The San Francisco Treat *ding* ding*. Yes, 31 successfully took the plunge in 2009 (That’s one every 11 days!), and another 77 managed to screw it up (like everything else in their miserable lives) and got stopped by staff. (Another year without a local Lai Jiansheng “helping” anyone.)
So what about the $50 million net that was approved back in aught-eight? Well, that’s still in limbo, since the Bridge District has forbid local money to be used for the nets, and now the Bridge Rail Foundation is trying to get federal funds.
Is 31 a lot? The Pro-Net folks would no doubt saying something vacuous like “Even a single jumper is one too many,” but let’s look the numbers. 31 is 72% more than then average since the bridge opened in 1937, but is that number really meaningful? The Bay Area’s population has been steadily increasing, so what about the “success” rate? There are over 7 million people in the Bay Area today. In 1940 there was less than 2 million. Perhaps if we want more informative numbers, we should look at this instead in terms of suicides per capita.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the number of jumpers per decade, but
the SF Examiner, provided a helpful table of the number of jumpers over the last eight years, that show that every year was “above average.”
UPDATE: Tue Jan 26 00:23:45 PST 2010
I realized that I did have the number of “splash hits” each year that the bridge opened, thanks to the Chron. The Chron’s count differs slightly from the Examiner’s, but not enough to matter. (The Chron counts one more in both 2002 and 2004.) Coupling this with Bay Area population stats, I calculated the GGB Suicides Per Capita.
While I haven’t bothered to do any sort of significance testing, it appears that for the last 30 years, the number of successful suicides has remained constant after controlling for population. In fact, it appears pretty much constant for 4 of the last 5 decades. So just as I suspected, the “above average” statement is a bit misleading.
If anyone wants to look at the numbers, I’m posting a CSV of the numbers.
With the Bay Bridge, seemingly always in the news*, the question is becoming, what to do with the old eastern span? (You remember the eastern span, don’t you?) Current plans are to simply demolish it, but architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello has proposed something different. They wants to convert it into a housing and a park.
He calls his proposal, “The Bay Line,” is a combination of the Florence’s Ponte Vecchio and New York’s High Line. The upper deck would be converted into a greenway, while the lower deck (originally designed for freight trains) would contain commercial and residential spaces. Since the deck can support much weight than a typical home, additional space can be hung directly underneath the bridge.
Rael’s graduate studio, have come up with other similar ideas, but they’re all essentially the same thing.
It’s an interesting idea, but I do have some concerns. First, there’s going to be another earthquake. There just will be. So why would you want to be suspended a couple of hundred feet above the water, in a box that has been bolted onto a structure that is over 70 years, that is literally falling apart. (Well at least it’s not as bad as the old Cape Girardeau bridge. Yet.) Rael points out most of the damage back in 1989 was on the approach, not the cantilevers, but I still have my doubts. My other concern is that it’s right next to new bridge. Which means, you’re living right next to a freeway, and that’s got to ruin your view.
But really, I’d just be happy if they name the eastern span the “Emperor Norton I Span”, but Oaklanders are such killjoys.
Kisa Kawakami has designed for the Japanese interior design store Yamagiwa, a ceiling lamp [Google Translate] that allows the owner to play with light and shadow by folding the gauze panels that surround the bulb.
I guess what attracted me to this design was the simple lines of each of the panels, the central lighting hood, and the idea that owner can easily play with light and shadow.
Because of the inherent dynamism of the wings I think it might be interesting if the wings slowly moved over the course of the night, causing the artificial light to move around the room, mimicking how sunlight moves around the room during the course of the day.
This lamp can be yours for only 93,500Â¥ ($1,014).
