notion parallax » geek

H+ Conference in Melbourne

Ben — Sun, 22 May 2011 08:12:47 +0000

I’m going to try to get down for this. It looks like it’ll be interesting!

SG2011

Ben — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:43:48 +0000

There is a lot of activity here in Copenhagen, I’ll update more about it soon when I’m a little less frazzled, but I think that this might well be the moment when the change in attitude towards real data that seems to have been building momentum in the industry actually forms into a ‘thing’!

kettle

Ben — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:53:40 +0000

This is something I’d meant to post a really long time ago but got distracted by having to, well, do stuff. We’ve got a pretty normal looking kettle, and when you fill it up it feels like you fill it for a pretty normal amount of time, but I was interested to see how much we were actually putting into it (I was reading Sustainable energy without the hot air at the time, so it all makes sense).

It turns out that we were putting about three times as much water as we needed to to make two mugs of tea. What this little experiment did show was that one of the jars that tomato paste comes in is just right for two mugs of tea, so the jar lives by the kettle now.

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.

SG2011 – Copenhagen!

Ben — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:17:02 +0000

Applications for Smart Geometry 2011 have opened but are only open for another week. This year has some pretty varied clusters, so head over to their site and have a look.

Smart geometry is an amazing experience, being locked up with 100 really smart people for 4 days can result in some incredible outcomes.

more normal than most

Ben — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:18:28 +0000

I was always a bit confused by one of the lyrics of Tricky’s Struglin’ – “I think I’m more normal than most”.

I’ve just finished the very short introduction to statistics, and now I get it!

So the X axis is something, like cleanliness or laziness, and the Y axis is how many people are that clean or lazy.

If the distribution looks like this, then if you are in the middle, then you are more normal than most!

smart geometry 2010 – in progress

Ben — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:50:23 +0000

It is all in full swing, but here are some amazing pictures from SG this year!

the picassa albums

Smart Geometry, TU Delft and Pirates

Ben — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:39:28 +0000

In November there was a Smart Geometry event at TU Delft. It was a really interesting event as it wasn’t platform specific, so people were hacking away on whatever they fancied (GC, Grasshopper, Processing, C#).

Rudi Stouffs (check out some of his work here) videoed some of the evening presentations.

There are some great talks in this bunch, Sam Joyce’s is particularly worth a go for a bit of a reflective view on structural engineering!

Mine is a dramatic speed up of the talk I gave at UTS last year. If you are interested, the slides are here.

Livescribe & Illustrator

Ben — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:25:10 +0000

I got a bit sleepy in a meeting the other day and I started drawing. It was one of those darkened room affairs with an impeding food coma, so i needed something to ease the pain.

It just so happened that I was drawing with my Livescribe pen. I’m going to post this now, but I’ll finish it off later.

Here’s a photo of the pen scribble in my book. It’s about 50mm across in real life.

The finished version is missing a lot of the feinter lines as the pressure sensor on the pen isn’t as responsive as something like a good wacom tablet.