Science Comedian

Zoe Keating Performs at ETech 2009

March 14th, 2009

One of the many high­lights of the Emerg­ing Tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence was the Wednes­day evening per­for­mance of Zoe Keat­ing: “Using a 17th Cen­tury Instru­ment to Cre­ate the Music of the 21st Century.”

Zoe uses a cello and a lap­top to make beau­ti­ful mul­ti­lay­ered music. She plays with her­self.  It’s loopy.  Very cool.

Excuse the rough cam­era work up front – it was shot on a tiny Flip cam­era – and it gets much bet­ter a cou­ple min­utes in when I get to the closeups.

Link:  http://www.zoekeating.com/

Siftables – Cookie Scale Computing

March 11th, 2009

A cou­ple weeks ago I saw this very cool short TED video about Sifta­bles, a project com­ing out of the MIT Media Lab and Taco Lab in San Fran­cisco.  So, for my first ETech ses­sion this morn­ing, I’m check­ing out Cookie Scale Com­put­ing with Jee­van Kalanithi and David Mer­rill.  The brief pro­gram descrip­tion is:

Cookie Scale Com­put­ing: Human-Computer Inter­faces as Piles of Ges­ture Sen­si­tive Dis­plays
David Mer­rill (MIT Media Lab) et al

We’ve built a new type of inter­face that brings com­pu­ta­tion into our phys­i­cal and ges­tural world: a set of cookie-sized, ges­tu­rally aware, neigh­bor detect­ing wire­less dis­plays that act together as one inter­face. We call them Sifta­bles. Peo­ple live in and know about the phys­i­cal world. Com­put­ers should too.

Sifta­bles are cookie-sized com­put­ers that are inter­ac­tive, show graph­ics and can be manip­u­lated phys­i­cally in inter­est­ing ways – they can sense their neigh­bors and com­mu­ni­cate wire­lessly.  They work together to form a sin­gle inter­face.

They demon­strated a bunch of inter­est­ing uses – check out the web­site and the TED video for exam­ples and numer­ous news stories.

Link:  Sifta­bles and Taco Lab

Real Hackers Program DNA

March 10th, 2009

Inter­est­ing ETech ses­sion this morn­ing about hack­ing DNA led by Reshma Shetty and Barry Can­ton of Ginkgo BioWorks.

They brought some kits for the audi­ence to play with.  “Play” con­sisted of insert­ing some for­eign DNA into e. coli for one of three effects:  you could either make it turn red, smell like a banana, or, the most pop­u­lar option, make it glow in the dark.

Took us through the first easy steps but it takes a cou­ple days to observe effects.

Reg­istry of Stan­dard Bio­log­i­cal Parts

DIY­Bio