An interesting application of statistical thinking used to estimate the number of tanks Germany was producing during WW2.
Tufting – Making Rugs
This has been our reference video for how to make rugs.
Wooden Spoons (and other Cutlery)
Of the trees that were blown over in March’s storm, one was a beautiful old cedar, which, based on the ring count, was over 60 years old. The team clearing the downed wood and brush were kind enough to help secure some of the wood for the Makerspace.
One afternoon, a couple weeks ago, we lost wifi, and it just so happened that I’d recently found a set of small carving chisels on sale, so I suggested to a couple of the bereft students wondering around the lab that maybe they’d like to try doing something purely by hand–like carving spoons. To my utter amazement they were all in. And it snowballed from there. Right now I think 75% of my students are making some type of spoon or wooden cutlery.
It helps that the cedar wood has the characteristic gorgeous red and white banding.
Most of the spoons and spatulas thus far have been hand carved. Seeing the students’ sustained interest in woodworking, I decided to pick up a nice set of carving tools that included a hook for excavating the bowls of spoons.
I have to thank Mr. Seddon for his advice on tools and working with wood that has not been fully dried, aka green woodworking. I had not even heard of green woodworking before, but it has a long history, and a little research directed me on to things like the fully manual pole lathe (I’ve been wanting a lathe in the Makerspace for a while, so I may try to build one this summer).
Woodworking with green wood and hand tools requires close attention to the shape and structure of the wood. Chiseling with the grain is much easier than working against it. Knots can provide elegant features in the handle or bowl of a spoon, but are hard, and much more challenging to carve. Thus certain artistic choices did lead to discussions about woodcarving and metaphors for life.
While most of the work has been done by hand, it would not have been the Makerspace if we hadn’t experimented with some of the computer-controlled machines. One student used the CNC to cut spoon blanks of their own digital design. They were able to just do the outlines of the blanks, since we’re still trying to figure out how to carve objects with three-dimensional relief on our machine. Coach Lancaster suggested we use the laser to etch a tornado on all the pieces as a hat-tip to their provenance, so I’m trying to get a student to make us a simple design.
We do have other plans for the rest of the wood that we salvaged. For one thing, I’ve been cutting slabs using a chainsaw. It still has a lot of moisture, and will take some time to dry (a few years it we leave it to air dry), but that will be necessary for some of our bigger, future projects. However, it has been nice to be able to start putting the unfortunate felling of the trees to good use.
Marxism?
Damien Walter makes a cogent argument that the Andor TV series is a Marxist allegory. In doing so, he explains a lot of the language and history of Marxism in a quite entertaining and accessible way.
What is Style?
Style or taste is knowing who you are and knowing what you like, and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you, that makes you feel like you are who you are or that you can incorporate into your mindset and worldview.
Kyle Chayka during an interview on the Ezra Klein Show
I mean, it’s a process of collection, almost. Like you’re grabbing on to the little voices and artists and touchstones that make you who you are and give you your sense of self. You’re drawn to something without knowing why.
I did not expect to find this interview as fascinating as I did. It starts with the idea that taste/style is a personal feeling–intrinsic not extrinsic–that resonates with you, then explores how the internet has made for more niches of styles but shared those niches globally so we are, perhaps, loosing some of those fascinating hyper-local niches. Both increased diversity globally, but still some genericization as the algorithmically generated recommendations, of search engines and the like, help direct us towards the niches we like yet blinker us to discovery of others.
[A] feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier or more to your liking, you’re never going to sit with the thing that’s in front of you. You’re never going to be forced to have the patience, or the fortitude maybe, or the kind of willpower to fight through something and figure out if you truly like it or not.
Kyle Chayka during an interview on the Ezra Klein Show
Whereas, I think fighting that generic quality and figuring out at least one thing that brings you joy and you’re passionate about and that makes that change happen in your brain makes you have this encounter that you never expected. That’s the only thing that’s worth doing in life, kind of. Or at least in the field of culture, why would you want to have the generic experience? Why would you want the lowest common denominator result of recommendation?
AI Antibiotic Drug Discovery
A recently published article, about using AI to help discover a new class of chemical antibiotics, is likely one of the first of a wave of applications of artificial intelligence techniques to solving scientific problems.
The Hard Fork podcast has an excellent interview with one of the researchers involved in the study. They do a great job describing the problem (the search for antibiotics to deal with drug resistant bacteria) and overviewing how the AI was combined with physical experiments to do the research.
Making Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs)
It turns out that it’s pretty easy (and relatively cheap) to design and order printed circuit boards (PCBs).
I’ve used Fritzing to design them. It’s simple to use with their PCB view window. They have a lot of parts available (such as the 3pin connectors), though I did have to get the fritzing part for the Raspberry Pi Pico off the Raspberry Pi website. Fritzing is very commonly used for circuit diagrams on the web, so it’s fairly easy to find parts you’re looking for. The current version (>1.0) requires a small donation, but the older version (0.9+) is free, and I’ve used both successfully.
The board above is used to connect a Raspberry Pi Pico to pairs of LEDs and touch sensors. In this case only one pair is in use to make a light box that can be turned on and off by touching the sides.
There are a number of companies that will take the exported Gerber files and make you a PCB. In fact, there’s even an option within Fritzing to place an order. I’ve used PCBWay (this is my PCBWay referrer link that gets me a discount if you use it), which, as of this writing, costs about $5 for a batch of 5 PCBs (that’s the minimum order), plus about $10 for 15 day shipping to the US. The only change I made to their standard settings is to use the Lead-free solder.
I’d like to have my physics and/or computer science students design and make their own starting next year.
Spray Paint Planets
One of my students really got into spray-paint art this year, especially planets. By the time she was done she’d completed over two dozen pieces; some on paper, some on wood, some on clear plastic or acetate, and some of which we backlit with LED’s. Her paintings are all over the Makerspace, which generates a lot of interest.
However, now that this student has graduated, we’ve had to find another way to teach the process. I’m using the above video as a quick introduction to the process (note: it starts at 36 seconds because the author uses a single rude word in her preamble).
