The Real Paul Jones

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Robots and Radios

Just back from Legopalooza at the Morehead Science Center where Joe Meno of BrickJournal had a simple MindStorms robot running around a table. The robot has a sonar/ultrasound/bat-like radar sensor so that when it encountered an object it would reverse course and then turn in a random direction. The fun for kids of all ages was that we had to be the objects or the robot would run off the table. [It’s this one but without the camera part. So the NXT spy rover without the spying part.]
Yesterday Tucker helped build and put a second robot on the table. And today we returned with reinforcements, two other 13 year old boys, to create a third robot. One robot running around the table was amusing. Two on the table at once were hilarious. And three. That’s the right number for chaotic delight.

We left and then took the boys to WCOM where they began the Teen Spirit radio show with an in-studio interview with Django Haskins and Josh Starmer of the Old Ceremony. Django sang and played guitar while Josh played cello which led to some interesting sound engineering. The Old Ceremony is off for a couple of gigs opening for the Squirrel Nut Zippers and a trip to NYC.

Later in the show, the teens did a phone interview with electronic composer/musician Olspur who they discovered on LastFM.com.

Talk about different music and different interviews. Both went well and all seemed to have a great time. No known robots took part in the interviews.

Did you hear about the Gaelic-speaking Indian?

Actually I did. When I lived down between Laurinburg (formerly McLaurinburgh) and Aberdeen, NC, my neighbor (also a Newton. one married to a Munroe) told me that the Presbyterian church had had an endowment to bring a Gaelic speaking someone once a year up into the 1960s. They had some connection to a church on the Isle of Skye who would send a preacher to the little rural church.

Finally there was only one person in Scotland County that could understand the preacher from Skye. He was an elderly Lumbee Indian.

WHAT: “Did you hear about the Gaelic-speaking Indian?”: Geidhlig Folklore about Race in North America
WHO: Dr. Michael Newton
WHEN: Thursday, Feb 15th at 3:30
WHERE: Donovan Lounge in Greenlaw Hall at UNC-CH
ABSTRACT: In the mid-eighteenth century, Scottish Highlanders began to settle in North America and mingle with people distinctly different from themselves in appearance, especially people of Native American and African ancestry. Within a generation or two, due to social ties of several sorts, including slavery, many African Americans and Native Americans became fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic. Folklore recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relates to the shock of Highland emigrants, fresh from the boat, encountering these unfamiliar-looking Gaelic speakers. This talk will examine this folklore in its many variants, putting it in its wider context and exploring its meaning and purpose.

Let Us Ascertain You!

About 100 are bloggers (including me) were surprised by an eVite to a “Triangle Blogger Community Ascertainment” to be held at the incredibly inconvenient time of noon on a Monday. The host, a local TV station.

I’m sure you mean well, but geez TV guys — Geeks want drinks! And those start after 5. Doncha know, we bloggers are still in our PJs at noon? And the colors of the invite listing are white on light tan; we can’t read our buds’ names there. Yikes!

And we are assured that whilst we are being ascertained that “These meetings will not be taped. Notes will be taken by our staff. Tours of the station will be conducted.”

As of this writing, the eVite has 1 yes (from the organizer), 5 maybes (from folks complaining about the time), and 95 not yet replieds.

Greg Dekoenigsberg on One Laptop Per Child 2/8/07

WHO: Greg Dekoenigsberg (Community Development Manager for Red Hat)
WHAT: One Laptop Per Child
HOW: Live presentation at the TriLUG meeting
WHEN: Thursday, Feb 8, 2007 at 7pm.
WHERE: Red Hat HQ
ETC: This meeting (including the pizza) sponsored by InCentric Solutions. Open to the public.

At the February meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group, Greg Dekoenigsberg, Red Hat’s Community Development Manager, will be giving a presentation on One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a project started at the MIT Media Lab that will develop and market a $100 laptop to developing countries for use by children in educational settings. These laptops incorporate various innovations both to reduce cost and to make them appropriate for children in remote environments, including dual-mode screens that are readable in bright daylight, power via a hand crank, and ad-hoc wireless mesh networking. The laptops will run a Linux-based Operating System developed by Red Hat.

(Thanks to Cristobal Palmer for the alert)

The Present of Human Computer Interfaces

Christian Carlberg at the 2.5-D Table

Not the Future, but Now. You’ve seen some of touch screens in the recent iPhone announcement.

Here’s Jeff Han of NYU at the TED Conference showing a big broad touch screen with gestures in action.

And the Northrop Grumman/Applied Minds TouchTable (several video demos here)

Xeni has a write up of a visit to Applied Minds in Wired that talks about the 2.5 D Terraintable here.

2005 Newsweek story on Danny Hillis and Applied Minds here (from whence the picture at left comes).

I saw a demo of the TerrainTable in 2005 and was very very impressed.

The Eternal Optimism of Peots

Just received in email:

Date: Thu,  1 Feb 2007 06:48:33 -0500 (EST)
From: gabriel
To: Paul_Jones@XXXXXX
Subject: peoms for sale

cGood day,,
i am mr gabriel ,i am a peom writer based in africa.I WRITE peoms
based on any topic.i have peoms for sell with various topics so i
decided to contact you.
The topics are listed below,

(1)MERCY———–$2500
(2)TRUST———–$4500
(3)KNOWLEDGE——-$6000
(4)BEYOND THE WAVES-$7200
(5)THE NATURAL FEELINGS OF LOVE——–$7500
(6)THE IRONY OF LIFE————-$6500
(7)THE IRONY OF LIFE————-$6500

This peoms are peoms written by me and which have not been
posted out to the public and are peoms that has impact in peoples
life and can change people for the best in life.
please if interested,you can send me your,
NAME:
ADDRESS:
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ZIPCODE:
I will recieve my payment through western union money transfer
i will be expecting to hear from you soonest and the peom will be
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yours sincerely,

GABRIEL…

Cory Doctorow at UNC – Feb 22 at 2

Posters for Cory’s visit are available here.

2/22 at 2pm Cory Doctorow will be here visiting at Duke and dropping by UNC:

Who: Cory Doctorow

Quick on Cory: Boingboing editor, EFF, SciFi Writer, Disney-obsessed Copyfighter, Fulbright Chair at Annenberg UCSD

When: 2 pm Thursday February 22nd (aka 2/22 at 2)

Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center
3rd Floor, Carroll Hall

NOW in Wilson Library


UNC-Chapel Hill

Cory’s previous trip to UNC on Video

Sponsors: ibiblio.org, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Free Culture Carolina, School of Information and Library Science

More about Cory:

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. In that capacity, he worked to balance international treaties, polices and standards on copyright and related rights, advocating in the halls of governments, the United Nations, standards bodies, corporations, universities and non-profit. Presently, he serves as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. His novels are published by Tor Books and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, sold to OpenText, Inc in 2003, and presently serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc, Stikkit, Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, SiteShuffle, and Onion Networks, Inc. His latest novel is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

Cory will also be speaking at Duke that evening at 5 pm as part of the Provost Lecture Series.

Another nice version of the UNC announcement of Cory’s visit from the School of Information and Library Science.

Cory Doctorow

Allen and Son in LA Times

North Carolina’s best BBQ makes the LA Times. We await the streams of Hollywood visitors coming to taste the Nanner Puddin’.

Barbecue done in rare form. 

Selected snippet:

Allen tastes every batch of barbecue that comes off his chopping block. He seeks that biting, smoky flavor he says only a properly maintained hickory fire can impart over many hours of cooking.

“I think about barbecue like some people think about wine,” he said. “The good stuff? You know it when you taste it.”

Nature stories

Academic talk title of the week — Are you a man or a mollusk?:

We are pleased to announce a talk sponsored by the Department of English: William Stott will give a talk titled “Of Bivalves and Men: The Eastern Oyster as Fact and Symbol,” tomorrow (Wed., Jan. 31) at 1:00 pm in Donovan Lounge in Greenlaw Hall. Dr. Stott will discuss his research on the Carolina coast.

Pictures on the radio — Chapel Hill News’ Mark Schultz reports that WCHL’s Ron Stutts reports that Ron’s wife reports that she saw and photographed a white deer in their backyard.

The NandO blog, Orange Chat, features a picture of a white deer — not the picture that Ron reported tho.

Tonight: “Pressing the Hold-outs: The Desegregation Demonstrations of 1963-64”

Pickets in Chapel Hill 1963

Sally will be leading a panel at the Wilson Library on Tonight January 30: Discussion, 5:30-7 pm, Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library “Pressing the Hold-outs: The Desegregation Demonstrations of 1963-64”

On the panel will be:
Quinton Baker: Leader in the 1963-64 sit-ins; one of the protagonists of John Ehle’s book “The Free Men”
Karen Parker: Activist in the 1963-64 sit-ins; first black female to earn her undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill
Braxton Foushee: Activist in the sit-ins; graduate of Lincoln High School; later became a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen and the School Board
Erika Stallings: Current UNC-Chapel Hill student; active in Campus Y, Black Student Movement, and Student Government

Discussion at OrangePolitics (where Sally in a comment tells us of a previously unannounced guest of great importance)

Our farflung ibiblians

Mark McCarthy, now of the UN’s ReliefWeb and Jim Fullton, now of the World Intellectual Property Organization, just called from an Irish pub in Geneva, Switzerland. The Irish part appropriate for a McCarthy; the pub part predictable for a Fullton ;->

If the alphabet were geography, Dykki Settle, now with INTRAHealth, would be nearby (to Mark and Jim). He writes from Swaziland that he misses being there in Switzerland.

In the meantime, Beth “Icky” Lyons writes that she’s heading as far from Geneva as possible — to see summer in New Zealand whilst working on a Habitat home in Tauranga. You might be able to follow her adventures on her blog, Red Wagon.

Philip Lopez paintings at Tyndall Galleries

Philip Lopez is known to his friends as Tom. He’s an artist whose work is at once a reduction of three dimensions into two and a master of working textures in to his paintings by layers of overpainting and removal by a variety of means. Think of that you see out of the corner of your eye as you drive by a building then flattened and abstracted
We bought Little Crook which I learned was inspired by Tom aka Philip’s chicken house. That seems appropriate since I’ve started some of my better poems recently in a small building in a chickenyard out on Peter Kramer and Susan Gladen’s farm.

Michele Natale describes Philip aka Tom’s show this way:

Substantial abstract and semi-abstract paintings on wood panels display richly colored, highly worked surfaces, layered, squeegeed or abraded by sanding, then divided into compositional compartments by roughly gouged lines. Painted areas are sometimes contrasted with areas cut from metal plates, nailed into the panel. Ovoid forms reminiscent of eggs or pods, and even a vaguely floral motif find their way into the geometry of this intriguing body of work.

Watch this Space

Today was our space day.

It began with a trip to Raleigh to the Museum of Natural Sciences for Astronomy Day where Tucker and I took in the very cool Elumenati Dome, stumped the “Stump the Scientist” with a question about the size of the Radiosphere, asked “If the Sun were to be suddenly removed, how long would it be before the lack of solar gravity would be noticed on earth?” (and got no real answer — my own guess about 8 and 1/3 minutes, the time it takes for light from the sun to reach earth) and generally enjoyed visiting the exhibits.

We took a break for Odyssey of the Mind and a Neighborhood meeting, then watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tucker having read the book (more than once I might mention) had much more insight to the story than I had. And since he’d also read 2010, he had some other ideas about parts that were completely opaque to me.

Just had mail from Bora alerting us to the appearance of the Science Blogging Anthology at Daily Koz where a Science thread featuring some interesting objects in space are also noted. 

Fred-mania at EduCause

Fred Stutzman’s research and his blog are cited twice in the 2007 Horizon Report from EduCause.

How university administrators should approach the Facebook: Ten rules
(Fred Stutzman, Unit Structures, January 23, 2006)
This blog entry describes current trends around Facebook and recommends measures for university administrators.

And

social Networking: five sites You Need to Know
(Fred Stutzman, Unit Structures, June 14, 2006)
This blog entry gives an overview of five lesser known social networking sites and describes three emerging trends related to the use of such sites.

Desegregating Chapel Hill

Sally will be leading a panel at the Wilson Library on Tuesday January 30: Discussion, 5:30-7 pm, Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library “Pressing the Hold-outs: The Desegregation Demonstrations of 1963-64”

On the panel will be:

Quinton Baker: Leader in the 1963-64 sit-ins; one of the protagonists of John Ehle’s book “The Free Men”
Karen Parker: Activist in the 1963-64 sit-ins; first black female to earn her undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill
Braxton Foushee: Activist in the sit-ins; graduate of Lincoln High School; later became a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen and the School Board
Erika Stallings: Current UNC-Chapel Hill student; active in Campus Y, Black Student Movement, and Student Government

Discussion at OrangePolitics (where Sally in a comment tells us of a previously unannounced guest of great importance)

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