When I read the Geekcon 2010 call for projects, I thought, what the hack — I’ll do it. Inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I decided to let creativity into my life, and start inventing things. I watched Sterling Johnson’s magnificent “Giant Stinson Beach Bubbles” clip on YouTube, and when I described it to […]
It might have been Robots of Saturn that first got my young brain thinking about building a mechanical man. In that obscure 1962 sci-fi adventure novel, Dig Allen and his fellow teenage space explorers transfer their thoughts into the bodies of teleoperated robots to mine Saturn’s dangerous rings for precious Methane-X. Using some of my […]
The first spectroscopes used glass prisms to split light into colors, but Fraunhofer found that an array of closely spaced wires had the same effect. Today we call these arrays of tiny slits diffraction gratings.
