This second part of the lab was pretty straight forward. It was essentially about setting up serial and parallel switches.  I also did some tinning of the 9v adapter so that it would be easier to attach to the board. The pictures are below:

This is a short video of my 3rd PhysComp lab involving a voltage regulator and setting some LED’s in series and parallel.

Homer: Will this episode be going to air live? June: No Homer, very few cartoons go to air live. It’s a tremendous strain on the animator’s wrist. The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show, Season 8, Episode 14 Walter Benjamin’s 1935 piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is almost overwhelming in its [...]

A nifty installation of an automated tossing of ping pong balls back and forth through a pair of whirling disks.

This was put together in 30 minutes as part of the CommLab 30 Minute Film Festival. I’m the big guy in the Green Lantern T-Shirt. My partners are the geniuses.

The entire purpose of advertising, endorsements, reviews and in fact, most of mass media is to convince that we like things that we may or may not actually like. We’ve surrendered our decision making to others. But GUESS WHAT?!?! Now, with the Think-a-Tron 10,000, you can actually use your own BRAIN to help you decide [...]

This was a great learning lab, but required some playing and some reading. I think I understand tying the analog input to ground using a resistor as otherwise you have no “reference” point to set to 0. The voltage divider circuit I think I also understand, but I need to read further on it. The second [...]

I realized that I didn’t fully post the first Lab for physical computing with the alternating LED’s and the switch. The setup was relatively straight-forward, although it did look like the ground-ground 5v+ to 5v+ changes from this image to this image. Beyond that, playing with the circuit showed some bounce, so I played with the [...]

It occurred to me after my first posting on E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops that it would be easy to apply the notion of the Machine to the current notion of a Technology Singularity discussed by scientists such as Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, computer scientists/popular authors such as Vernor Vinge and former computer scientists/current popular [...]

I’m embarrassed to say that this is the first time I’ve read E.M Forster’s “The Machine Stops“. It was a wonderful dystopian cautionary tale, ostensibly about the threat of over-reliance on technology. However, although it’s tempting to point to the technology in the tale as the risk or the culprit, I believe that The Machine [...]

Personally, I wish I had the opportunity to do this walk around the downtown area near the former site of the World Trade Center. I lived down in Battery Park City for 20 years and between the (eventual) placement of air quality sensors and the video “ring of steel” that’s been put in over the [...]

I consider myself something of an agnostic. Not about religion. That’s really nobody’s business but whomever I’ll have to explain things to at (hopefully) a much much later date. No, I’m referring to technology agnosticism. I have no fundamental belief that Mac’s or PC’s or Linux or anything else is somehow better than any other. [...]