Lee.org

This weekend Charlotte and I went to the Chabot Gun Club. We shot a total of about 60 rounds through my new Beretta M9 pistol. We both had quite a lot of fun. And it was a beautiful drive. Now it sits, safely locked in a Gun Vault next to the bed.

I’m disappointed that I never got to fire the Keltec SU-16CA or the Bushmaster AR-15 I had previously owned. A few things conspired to make that happen.

• When moving to CA, I got the Keltec though I really wanted something smaller. Just as I was moving here, San Francisco was voting on, passing and then having struck down a handgun prohibition. I was interested in getting a handgun but decided on the Keltec in the interim. I almost got the Ruger Mini 14 but… didn’t.
• NJ has a ban on “assault weapons” so I couldn’t very well bring the AR-15 to the range when I lived there. It sat in storage for several years.
• In Boston I never felt a need to practice with the AR-15. Having it was enough insurance for me. I went to a range once and fired (one of) Trav’s AR-15s and confirmed that it is a very easy gun to navigate. I recall vividly at the indoor range that I kept hitting tight groups 1 1/2 inches below the bullseye. Eventually I figured it out. It’s an indoor range only about 50 yards long. The sight is 1 1/2 inches above the barrel. I was hitting -exactly- what I was aiming at. Had my target been at 200 or 300 yards, I would have put holes right in the center of the paper, but at 20 and 50 yards, the bullet is still rising. Of course I could eventually do better but 1 1/2 inches is plenty close enough for a start.

(PS. I photoshopped the serial # off my Beretta in the photo)

At Maker Faire, Mark Pauline mentioned that he likes Hiller Pulse Jets.

From wikipedia, “Pulsejet engines are characterized by extreme simplicity, low cost of construction, poor fuel economy and very high noise levels”

I gotta build me one of those…

Phew. That was a lot of work.

The letter below from Chicken John is being circulated widely. Wide-eyed libertarian tendencies aside, I express skepticism that this situation can be resolved rationally given the part I highlighted below. That’s not to say Jim can’t pull something out of his sleeve. Heck, he’s been doing it for 5 years and rationality doesn’t have to enter into it because, after all, this is Berkeley.

(note, it’s long)

(more…)

I never even frigging made it over to The Shipyard.

Berkeley Shuts Down Amazing Art Space The Shipyard 

There was talk, just a little murmur, that the outside should be spray painted, “Berkeley Kills More Art” and that people should weld all the doors shut and sit naked in the center of the space with some heavy weaponry. This is partially in reference to how Berkeley kicked The Crucible out of town. So they moved to neighboring Oakland and have prospered, being the envy of the local industrial art scene. Berkeley wants The Crucible back but they can’t have them. And damit, in 12 months, Berkeley will want The Shipyard back but that won’t happen either.

“Man, we just want to work on our shit in piece.”

Could turn out to be an interesting turn for Burning Man…

Note the deadline is soon so talk to your industry friends today. Normally, people end up having crazy stories to tell after a trade show but this… imagine sending Bob from the dog and pony show, road-warrior sales team to Burning Man..

Environmental Solutions to be On Display at Burning Man 2007 Artists and Inventors Invited to Showcase Emerging Technologies

This summer, Burning Man will hold its twenty-second annual event in the vast and remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Forty thousand participants from around the world, including more than 100 journalists, will attend this celebration of creativity. The year’s theme, “The Green Man”, explores the human relationship to nature, in particular our collective response to global warming, and sets the stage for an unprecedented informational exchange.

In recognition of this unique opportunity, Burning Man is inviting artists, manufacturers, developers, scientists, and inventors, to showcase their emerging environmental technologies at this year’s eight day event, Aug. 27th -Sept 3rd.

At the center of Black Rock City, home to Burning Man, will be the Green Man Pavilion, 30,000 square feet of shaded exhibition space for the display of interactive artistic, scientific and educational models, a “World’s Fair” of cutting edge technologies. Director of Burning Man, Larry Harvey said “Our goal is to create a space where breakthrough ideas and proven technologies addressing environmental issues such as energy production, solid waste management, and remediation of toxic substances, can be displayed and interacted with, against the backdrop of the world’s largest participant-created event. In fact, we believe this exposition may well be the only place in the world where such a wide range of technologies and solutions will be on display in an interactive environment.”

Burning Man has long been recognized as a nexus of ideas, information, and culture, a physical collection of human nodes for interactivity and information exchange. It is a place where artists, innovators, and the media share ideas and network like nowhere else on Earth.

In addition to directly reaching participants and through extensive media coverage, Burning Man will be opened to the world through a unique collaboration with Google, in a virtual 3D version of event called “Burning Man Earth”, which will allow a global audience to experience the Green Man Pavilion.

View full invite at: http://burningman.com/environment/pavilion_invitation.html

For information on how to propose a contribution to the Green Man Pavilion, please email: greenman-exposition@burNOSPAMningman.com

Deadline for proposals – July 1, 2007

Tomas McCabe
Burning Man - Green Man
Environmental Education Coordinator
510.290.8883 (mobile)

I want new sensory organs for my birthday (via).

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, “I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.”

On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake. [...]

When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the sysadmin who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had remapped in expectation of the new input. “Sometimes I would even get a phantom buzzing.” He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances at obsessively. One woman was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two post-feelSpace days that her colleagues wanted to send her home from work. “My living space shrank quickly,” says König. “The world appeared smaller and more chaotic.”

Some brainstorming should be able to come up with other new senses for people… yes?

magnetic compass - as seen above :-)

X-Ray vision - If you can’t turn it off, you’d have to be careful not to walk into walls. And giving all your friends radiation sickness isn’t cool.

Thermal imaging

GPS

eyes in the back of your head

What else?

I want a Methane Powered Rocket for Christmas.

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Hell, I’d settle for the soundtrack.

Original (higher res) .WMV

There’s Digg article about SWARM. Digg us if you like it.

Geeks Build Autonomous Swarming Orbs Covered with Steel Blades

You don’t want to run into ten of these in a dark alley. A bunch of geeks are building “art” consisting of plasma-cut steel blades wrapped around a spherical autonomous robot. Think “blades of a hand-push lawn mower, shaped into a giant hamster ball of doom”. Scroll down for videos. It’s open source so build your own!

Every couple weeks I receive in the mail yet another weighty book from one of the stocks that I own. And every couple weeks, I spend the time to rip it open, flip through it, wonder how much of my money it cost to produce this full-color glossy advertisement for a company that I already own. I then find the nearest person, show them some token shiny pictures, charts and graphs and hurumph to them, “This book here, it tells me that ‘we are going to try and make as much money for you as we can’.” Then it goes straight into the trash.

Last year I bought some Berkshire Hathaway stock. A couple weeks ago I got the Annual Report in the mail. I flipped through it. It’s different. It’s wonderful. It’s useful. It’s educational. It’s smart. The first 24 pages contains Warren Buffett’s Chairman’s Letter. Read the Berkshire Hathaway 2006 Annual Report for yourself.

Previous years reports