Whelp, I’ve put it off until it can be put off no more. So, to my dearest internet friends who have not yet heard, here’s what’s happening, the short version:
This afternoon, I’m getting on a plane, flying to LA, Fiji, Auckland, and finally arriving in Christchurch, New Zealand, two days from now, having skipped over the 1st of February entirely.
There is a bike waiting for me near the airport. I’ll bus and bike south, to Clinton. In Clinton I’m working on an Organic Farm, in exchange for room and board.
After a few weeks, I’ll move on to another work-for-shelter exchange.
The goal is to return, in one year, having lost only the money spent on plane tickets.
FAQ:
Why New Zealand? Because they offer a working holiday visa to US citizens. The other options were South Korea and Ireland.
How do you find people willing to host you? Help Exchange.
Are you taking your computer? Nope! I’m taking a keyboard kindle, which has free 3G. If you need to tell me something, email it. My intention, though, is to avoid the internet for a few months, and do a little thinking for myself.
What about pictures? And blog posts? I’m taking my sketchbook, and a teeny watercolor set. You’ll get to hear, and see, all about it when I get back.
What will you do when you get back? I have no idea.
Why are you doing such a silly irresponsible thing?
“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.” Herman Hesse
“The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.” Joseph Campbell
“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” Rene Daumal
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people” Mark Twain
Or maybe I’m just running away.
Love you all, and see you in a few months. -S
I am, once again, struck by the fact that I’m living in the future. Here’s how I prototyped a product in 14 days, while away visiting my family.
I. Find a problem.
On the 15th, I stepped on my Kindle, and cracked the screen. It’s the second time I’ve had a kindle with a broken screen.
II. Try to Buy Solutions (“Research the Competition”)
I replaced the broken Kindle immediately, but then I went on the hunt. I wanted a hard-sided kindle case —- something that could survive being stepped on getting out of bed. I’ll be darned if I couldn’t find one. Even Otterbox, saviour of iPhones across the globe, didn’t make a case that would protect the kindle’s screen.
III. Design Solutions
I’m leaving the country on the 31st, so I actually designed two cases: my ideal case, and a case that could be made before I left. Here’s my sketchbook:
Keep in mind, not more than 16 hours have passed since I broke my kindle; I doodled these things in my sketchbook before I slept that night. (What else could I do? The novel I was reading was… indisposed.)
IV. Measure (twice)
I popped open Inkscape; CAD is way overboard for such a simple task.
Then I grabbed a ruler. As it turns out, the Keyboard Kindle is 1/10 of an inch wider than the published specs suggest. Always measure.
Flat-pack design is easy to do and cheap to manufacture at short notice. Here’s the SVG I made the next morning. There are three different shapes; 6, 4, and 2 of each respectively made for 12 parts.
V. Get a quote
I knew Pololu did one-off laser-cutting runs, and that they had a fine variety of materials already at hand (of which I picked the cheapest). I had not used their services before this, but I had heard good things.
I sent in my SVG, and a query about time —- I had only 15 days before I left this half of the planet.
VI. Approve; Pay
24 hours later, I had a PDF of the final pattern ready for my approval, and a recommendation for expedited shipping.
I printed out the pdf, cut out the parts, and test-fit. It looked good.
For $38, they’d cut the parts —- well inside the range of kindle cases I’d considered two days before. (I did, alas, need to pay FedEx handsomely; the total was just under $50).
This was on the afternoon of the 17th, 2 days after I broke my kindle. The new one hadn’t yet arrived.
V. Laze About
I proceded to hike, watch movies, read, paint, draw, and generally carouse for the next 10 days, while my work was done for me.
I also picked up a bottle of superglue and a yard of elastic.
VI. Assemble
Gluing the parts together took all of 20 minutes. The result? A close-fitting, hard-sided, clear acrylic kindle case, produced days before the deadline and on budget:
Are there things I would change? Sure! I designed it in one morning, and so I forgot some obvious amenities: you can’t charge the kindle while it’s in the case, for instance. But I’m happy with it, and I’m confident it will protect my kindle while I traipse around New Zealand.
Please comment and discuss on HN!
I have a friend who asked for some thoughts about his drawings. It was gonna be pretty public anyway, so once I realized that I needed half a dozen pictures to make my point, I asked if I could put my reply here.
I am qualified to say things about drawing because I am mediocre. Being mediocre is the best qualification, because it means I’ve had to really work to learn to make a nice drawing. Naturally talented people make poor teachers, because they haven’t made all the mistakes. I’ve made plenty of them, and I’ll make plenty more, but I am slowly mapping the minefield. I’m gonna skip basics, ‘cause you’ve heard them. (If you haven’t, try reading Andrew Loomis: Drawing the Head and Hands, and Figure Drawing for All Its Worth; and Betty Edwards: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The first two are free online.) Rather than say the same thing that every drawing book says, I wanna say the things that no one ever told me. I’m also gonna skip the complement sandwich —- you’re doing fine. Your instincts are good. You don’t need my praise. These drawings don’t contain your heart and soul, I hope —- they contain some brawny guy you’ve never met.
So the very first thing you can do is to fix two things about your bio-mechanics.
Number one is super-easy: make certain that your line of sight is orthogonal to the page. There are lots of ways for that to go wrong: if you slouch, or if you’re using a horizontal desk, or whatever; I can’t say why you’re not directly facing the page, but I can see in the drawings, particularly the portraits, that your head is considerably below and to the left of center — probably even below the left corner of the page (that makes me suspect you’re a righty, yes?). Because your eye has that steep angle to the page, the whole drawing has a sheared effect — your circles aren’t round, verticals are off-plumb, and so on. To prevent that anamorphic distortion, you’ve got to put your eye right where you want your viewer’s eye (or the camera’s lens, or whatever), and keep it there. Here are your heads:
See how everything sort of leans to the right? This effect can work in your favor, once you know it’s there — see Pozzo’s ceiling in St. Ignatius. It’s also fun to wander around museums, trying to decide where the artist stood while they painted, given these distortions.
Number two is harder, but: you’ve got to use your whole arm. Before you start drawing, draw some big, flat arcs, rotating from the shoulder, then from the elbow, then from the wrist. Shoulder arcs move near-to-far from your body; elbow arcs move side to side; wrist arcs halfway between those two. They’ll also get progressively shorter as you move down your arm. Finger strokes are damn hard to make longer than a centimeter or two; so the more you move the pen with your fingers, the more you get uncertain, fussy lines. I find my eye accepts a confident line, in the wrong place, far more easily than a tentative line, even if perfectly placed. Using your whole arm will mean making much bigger drawings, but you’ll also be able to go much faster; 10 minutes will be time enough to start working on fine detail.
You said:
"...if I try drawing a face with "core shapes"
first, it turns out ugly. (As I am not practiced
in the method) However, if I go with my
'normal' technique draw shadows in relation to
each other, while ignoring the 'core' shapes --
the end product is much better. I guess you
could say that I try to draw the shapes of the
shadows. "
That’s a problem that plagued me for, like, 4 or 5 years. I bet you can fix it in two days.
Today, I like to use a ball-and-plane construction for the head, but the method isn’t too important. The mistake that I made (and still make sometimes) was to plaster features straight onto the simple shapes. The marks you make for construction don’t go around the details; they’re just layout, like a grid. Then, on top of that grid, you do exactly what you said worked well: draw the shadows. The layout just makes sure the shadows are in the right place, and (importantly) appear to have depth. If you don’t draw the light and shadows, it will look ugly. If you don’t use the constructions, it will look flat.
On the left, plastering features straight onto basic shapes. On the right, drawing shadows on top of a basic-shapes layout.
When I trace the two primary lines of the face, on your ‘constructed’ versions, they curve, like they have 3D form. They’re not as face-like, but they do have depth. The shadows-only version is flat. (Personally, I’d guess you cheated a teensy bit on these — perhaps the first two sketches were drawn from life, and the last one was drawn from the photo you showed me? If so, naughty naughty. It makes them hard to compare :). If they were all from the same photo, read Loomis pages 15-29, at least).
Here are your gesture drawings. Someone else made the comment that the torso doesn’t seem to join in on the motion, and you replied that there isn’t really much motion — the model was static. True — the model wasn’t moving. That doesn’t mean there was no tension in the torso, though.
Here’s an annotated version of the figure reference you were using:
Most readings, when they talk about gesture drawings, tell you to start with the so-called action line of the figure, which I’ve marked here in blue. It is, more or less, the spine of the model. I think the action line is hard to see, and sometimes lies. If you want to make an extremely rhythmic drawing — say, of a nude woman dancing ballet — then damn, you better use an action line. If you want to draw something more solidly constructed, I recommend the lines I’ve traced in red. They have some big advantages: their height and acuteness help divide male from female torsos. They are visible — action lines are guesses; these are right there to be observed. They’ll eventually be drawn anyway; action lines convey a lot of useful information, but they have to eventually be concealed, or left as visible signs of construction. Get those two angles right, and then you’ll probably properly place the ribcage and the hips. Build out the limbs in terms relative to those angles, and you have an excellent layout to start drawing in light and shadow. Then, 5-10 minutes puts you here:
A perfect thing of beauty? Naw. Not even — I drew his shoulders very broad, which lost me the telling arc of his neck :( Still, it is a pretty firm record of what the model was doing; if I wanted to use this gesture later, I have everything I need.
The Church of Interruption
Sometimes I am startled to realize, in the middle of a discussion, that I have offended or hurt some of the people I’m talking with.
First, know and accept this: I have a friend who is a wizard. He is an ancient and wise wizard, and we have tea together. One teatime, I mentioned my talking troubles to my friend, and he said this:
“Yes, Sam, I’ll bet it is hard for you — holding controversial religious beliefs, I mean.” *
Now, I am not a religious person; and my friend is aware of that. Not knowing where he was headed, I nodded for him to continue.
That Guy Syndrome
Hi, doc. How are you?
:::
That’s good. I’m well, I’m okay, I guess.
:::
Yes, it’s a professional call, but I don’t really need a diagnosis. I already know what I’ve got. It’s That Guy Syndrome, doc. I’ve got TGS, and I’m scared.
Shakespeare Authorship Haiku Challenge
My entry:
Ah -- speak, seer!
Name him, whose pen pulled
bluebottles from blank pages --
spontaneous life!
But don’t worry, you should enter even if you’re not the ULTIMATE UNIVERSAL POETRY GENIUS, like me.
On Hyper Volumes
Kartik Agaram was kind enough to point me to this fascinating article on the volume of hyperspheres: http://bit-player.org/2011/the-n-ball-game
I’m going to use this as an example of why I dislike using equations in introducing an idea. Looking at that graph, and accepting that equation, I get the immediate sens of shrinking spheres. As you increase the number of dimensions, the spheres get smaller, right?
Then I have a tiny doubt. That graph, it’s comparing n-dimensional volume to n+1 dimensional volume. I’m not sure what it means to ask about the relationship between a number of unit cubes and a number of unit squares. The article kindly mentions that he’s doing this, but I still don’t know what it means.
So instead of accepting the equation, I’m going to reject it, and try and picture what’s happening. Imagine, first, a unit square inside a unit circle.
On Murakami
I’m reading the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, getting myself ready for 1Q84. Haruki Murakami writes books that, I will always hold, are the greatest works of contemporary fiction. I love them, but they frustrate me.
They are lyrical, dreamlike, mythic, and familiar.
What’s frustrating is that I can’t understand them technically. I’m happy to dissect modern or classic lit; Joyce or Hardy, Shakespeare or O’Nolan. I know my way around stories and the way they’re told, and words and the way they’re used.
How I Described my Programming Job to Biochemists
or How I Described my Biochemistry Job to Programmers
Hi. I write computer programs for the lab. Some of what I write gets run here, on our machines. Some of it is run on a supercomputer — really, a whole lot of computers like the ones in our lab, all working together. Because some of you are more experienced with chemistry and others more with programming, bear with me as I touch on the basics of each.
Broadly, my focus for the past year and a half has been this problem: if we know the sequence of a bit of RNA, how do we guess the shape it makes? When I am programming, an RNA sequence is a specific, linear pattern of letters — people who write programs call that a string. Rather than say “the A that’s 25 bases from the 3’ end,” I number them, starting with 0, from the 5’ end (that’s the left).
A secondary structure is a set of pairs of letters — that’s a set, the mathematical entity; I usually imagine it as a bag that can hold as much as I like, but only unique things (you can’t pack two pairs of socks). It’s a set of pairs — like, the A at 25, and the U at 12. It’s common to write a set with curly braces, like this: ‘{}’ and a pair with parens, like this: ‘(12, 25)’.
There are, as you all know, some extra restrictions on what pairs are allowed. I can’t put an ‘(A, A)’ in my bag. AU GC GU; that’s it. I also can’t have pairs that are too close together: ‘(44, 46)’. Those are restrictions that nature has given us — some of those restrictions we do see — but it’s so rare that we disallow them to make the problem simpler.
There are other restrictions on my secondary-structure bag that are purely for simplicity. I can’t put these two pairs in the same bag: {(12, 25), (19, 44)}. I can’t use them both because they make a pseudoknot — one half of each pair is between the opposing pair, and the other half is outside. When both sides of on pair are between the halves of another pair, we call that nesting, and it fits in my bag; it’s OK if they’re both outside, too — that’s allowed in the bag. Pseudoknots do happen in nature, but they’re barred from my bag, because they make my task very very difficult.
So, out of curiosity, make a guess as to how many different ways there are to fill my bag — that is, how many different secondary structures — there are on average, if the sequence is 14 bases long?
The Burlington Cartoon
I’m sure I’ve said it before, but why not say it again? There are thousands and thousands of miraculously executed drawings in the world, but this is the most beautiful drawing in existence.
And it’s not because it is a work of genius. The Burlington cartoon doesn’t have the flourishes of mere talent. There are no elegant contours drawn in a single unhesitating stroke, no clever indications that the mind fills in. Leonardo thought and rethought every surface. Look at Mary’s right foot, on the far left, and you can see the first thought, and the second, and, firmly, the third. They’re not corrections, as such —- he obviously understands the foot, and is capable of drawing a foot —- but he’s considering it.
