The user can play musical tunes simply by touching a row of spoons sitting on a table, with a fork added in for good measure. A microcontroller is used to detect changes in capacitance caused by a finger pressing against the metal, which are then sent to a computer using the MIDI protocol.
Rodney Brooks (born December 30, 1954, in Adelaide, Australia) has had an impact on robotics and AI matched by few. And there is probably no one who’s had a bigger impact on viable commercial robotics. In the 1970s, when everybody else was obsessed with complex AI-driven, map-building robots, Brooks shocked the AI community by creating […]
Stewart Brand changed my life. Several times. When I was 16 years old, I got a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog and I was never the same. Through it, I discovered Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, whole systems thinking, nomadics, and the general, revolutionary notion (now commonplace in our wired info-age) that an individual could […]
Most people probably think of William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) as a slightly whack-a-doodle British poet and painter. But he was so much more than that. He was a slightly whack-a-doodle British craftsman, inventor, engraver, printer, and self-publisher, among many other things. Blake believed that every human being had a “poetic […]
Today marks the first anniversary of the birth of Polish-born, Franco-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot since his death on October 14. Mandelbrot worked in a variety of mathematical disciplines, but is best known as the “Father of Fractal Geometry.” He was well eulogized by the New York Times, and, more personally, by Rudy Rucker. Today he would’ve been 86.
Although many of us bloggers grimaced to read your comments when these posts first went up, time heals all wounds, and we’ve been having a great time on the mailing list bandying about our memories of our best/worst “ouch” moments from Make: Online and CRAFT. I’ve compiled a list of the top/bottom 10 best/worst posts from our trip down memory lane, and have included the best/worst outraged comment, from each, to summarize. Enjoy!
NYC Resistor’s “barbot” under construction Manhattan-based radio reporter Jon Kalish emailed me to let us know that he has a two-part piece on hackerspaces airing on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, starting this Sunday. The first piece includes visits to NYC Resistor in Brooklyn and Hive 76 in Philadelphia. Frequent MAKE contributor and hackerspace evangelist Mitch […]
