notion parallax » australia

ideas speed dating

Ben — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 06:13:42 +0000

This is a bit of a UTS architecture classic, I think I first heard about it from Adrian Lahoud and Tarsha Finney a few years ago, and Friday’s class was the first chance I’ve had to really try it out.

The format is simple, split the class in half, and sit the two halves facing each other. Then get them to talk about their ideas for 4 minutes. I had everyone sitting pretty close together – it gets pretty noisy but it seems to pump up the endergy a bit. Once the 4 minutes is up you get one side of the group to rotate. Then start again.

It got good feedback from the class. It's almost too easy, it feels a bit like cheating! Because of the short time and high energy the ideas seem to flow so quickly. There is a bit of a problem with how to rearange the group so that the static ones get to talk to each other too, but I'd imagine that once I get around to reading group theory in the bedroom I'll have a way to fix that.

I had an odd number so I popped the odd one off the end and gave them a 4 minute write up session so that they could capture their ideas.

Canyon pics

Ben — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 11:50:44 +0000

Canyon pics, posted with vodpod

Here’s some pics from the trip to the Blue Mountains.

I had an earlyish start, I decided at about 3:30 that the 10 to 4 train was far too early. The 10 to 7 was still full of partied out kids on their way home. I got a puncture on the way to the canyon carpark, so walked my bike a few km, and then dived into the bushes. The walk in really explained why the canyon was only ‘discovered’ in the 60s, there’s some dense bush, followed by a trickle of water. That then becomes a slimy fall/ wet cliff, and it’s only once you’ve got down past that that the canyon proper starts.

As far as I can tell canyoning is really about getting down a tight gorge with water flowing down it, whilst staying as dry as possible and avoiding getting dunked at the end of abseils.

I didn’t actually do the grand canyon as I got onto the way out trail by mistake, and was out before I’d noticed!

It’s the normal, obvious type of claustrophobic, and it doesn’t seem to lend itself to having big or introspective thoughts, but it is fun. I’d imagine that it’d be much more fun as a group.

Both sides of the story

Ben — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 03:46:08 +0000

I’m setting a reading list for a debate amongst my students about Australian energy policy. It’s likely to be relatively abstract discussion as none of us has access to, or expertise in, the specific data.

I’ve already got

and

	WHY vs WHY Nuclear Power Barry Brook (YES) vs Ian Lowe (NO)
and
	Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, David JC MacKay

as the main texts for the debate. The first book is specifically Australian, but the second is UK focused (but only really from a data point of view). I’d like to include some contrarian texts too, the two that come to mind are

	The False Promise of Green Energy, by Andrew Morriss, William T. Bogart and Roger E. Meiners
and
	The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley

but I haven’t read either of them, and I’d be interested to hear what other people recommend, and what they think of the books mentioned.

The current motion for the debate is: “this house believes that Australia’s energy supply mix is doing just fine the way it is” and I’m a bit worried that nobody will come to support the motion with any enthusiasm.

I’ll be posting more studio related bits as it gets going, but I’d love some suggestions.

solo canyoning

Ben — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:27:50 +0000

Tomorrow I’m going to go nice and early to the blue mountains to do a pair of canyons, Jugglers and the Grand Canyon. I’ll be solo, so it should be relatively fast, but even so, it’ll be a fairly long day. I’m going to try for the Blue Mountains train Dep: 3:48am Sydney Terminal Platform 7 Arr: 5:50am Katoomba Station Platform 2, then cycle to near the start of the canyon (here). Assuming a worst case scenario for time, I’d say that the latest that I’ll be out of the canyon and back to the bike will be 6pm. I’ll update with a comment here to say that I’m back safely.

I’ve got a new camera, so there will be photos!

Navigation Project explanation

Ben — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:34:04 +0000

Last Friday we presented the work that Dan & Bin have been doing as a part of the Summer Scholarship that we (BVN) have got going with the Sydney Uni computer science department. I videoed it because I’m narcissistic, so if you are interested in what we’ve been up to then here it is.

compDesGrp

Ben — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:57:35 +0000

I knew there was something else that I’d been working on, but I forgot to put it into the first post back. It is basically a rip off of the London design computing community. It’s a meeting every 6 weeks or so to talk about what people have been up to, and what problems they’ve been running into. The talks are really short, with a lot of emphasis on discussion.

compDesGrp.org

We’ve had 3 sessions in Sydney, 1 in Melbourne and 1 in Auckland – with another one in each coming up in the very near future. I’ve been trying to film some of the sessions, so once I get around to doing the video editing I’ll post them all on the site.

I’m back, I’ll try not to go away again.

Ben — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:15:06 +0000

In the dying months of my Major Study I pretty much stopped posting. I blame too much time alone in my shed!

As you might imagine, in 8 months quite a lot has happened, and I’ve had quite a lot of thoughts that need to be written down and explored. I’m going to make an effort to get some of them down here over the next few weeks. I’m now living in Sydney, working for BVN Architecture as their computational designer, although I have a wonderful amount of freedom to define what that actually means. I’ve been blogging some of the projects internally and I’ll try and get some of them publicly visible as soon as I can. In the meantime here’s a project that I’ve been working on with two computer scientists at the University of Sydney: http://blog.bvn-usyd.com/ . It has some pretty heavy duty posts in there, but even if you just look at the pictures you might well learn something! (I certainly am!)

hand to mouth video

Ben — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:40:25 +0000

This is a five minute documentary video of first Hand to Mouth event. June 29th, 2008, Meat Market, Melbourne.
It was organised by Boo Chapple and Adele Varcoe, and when I get a bit longer to gush about how amazing it was, i’ll tell more. In the meantime, look here!

mushroom carpark

Ben — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:16:21 +0000

I just found a piece of my work published on the VEIL website!

It’s a proposal to reuse multistory carparks as mushroom farms until they are demolished and replaced with something more usefull than inner city parking.

There is more detail on the VEIL site about the project.

“The Mushroom Carpark” – Ben Doherty
This exploration offers an innovative approach to redesigning car parking stations into transitionary resources which could be used for mushroom production. Ben suggests that in the short-term future there will be reduced car use due to high fuel prices and the subsequent uptake of car-sharing schemes and cycling. The ensuing reduction of car use will provide a new wasted space – car parks.

Genetic algorithms lecture

Ben — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:14:57 +0000

Here are the slides from my talk at UTS last Thursday at the generative components university program show case, about genetic algorithms. The slides don’t make a huge amount of sense on their own, but if you were there, it might jog your memory.

The talk was filmed, and I’ve been promised that it’ll show up on Google video at some point in the future if you want to see what I have to say about blind darts playing pirates and their relevance to heuristic algorithms.

Acrobat butchered some of the text when I exported, but otherwise it’s all fine. There are 2 live demos that aren’t in there, but they’ll show up in the video and I’ll publish the code soon.