Stung Eye

Chemical Etching For Artists and Hackers

This Saturday (April 16th) I’ll be giving a talk on chemical etching at the 5th Skullspace Hack-a-thon.

Etching is the process of using corrosive chemicals to cut into the unprotected parts of an object’s surface.

Etching has both artistic and industrial uses. I have experience with both types of etching and I’ll be sharing my knowledge of:

• The History of Etching.
• Etched Copper and the Printing Press. (Printmaking)
• Etching Circuit Boards for Electronic Prototyping.

I’ll see you there.

In the meanwhile, check out the etchings of my father, Allan Geske.

TEDxManitoba Analogies

Last month I had the opportunity to attend TEDxManitoba, an independently organized TED event at the Park Theatre. It was a day of inspiration drawn from the various speakers and the conversations with fellow attendees.

During each of the seventeen talks I scribbled down my thoughts in a notepad. During the week that followed, I tried to distill each talk down to one compelling analogy. These seventeen analogies are presented below (in italics), along with links to each video (follow the arrows).

Some of the analogies are direct quotes, others are summaries of what I personally took away from a talk. Out of context these analogies may have little meaning, so watch the videos. I’ve marked my favourite talks with a star (★).

Len Brownlie

Helping the Swiftest Be Swifter ⇒

Luck as preparation plus opportunity.

Frank Plummer

Is There Natural Immunity to HIV? ⇒

Sleepy immune systems as HIV immunity.

Shaun Loney

Poverty, Crime & Greenhouse Gas Emissions ⇒ ★

Employment as transformative opportunity.

Phil Doucette

Between You, Me and Liberation ⇒

Forgiveness as freedom.

Rick Van Eck

How Video Games May Transform Education ⇒

Engagement as cognitive effort.

John Weigelt

Enabling Canada’s Economy Digitally ⇒

Prosperity gap as innovation gap.

Leslee Silverman and Columpa Bobb

The Moving Gallery @ the Edge of the Screen ⇒

Children as empathy glue.

Scott Stirton

Intelligent Buildings ⇒ ★

The Manitoba Hydro building as camel.

Hannah Taylor

A Cold Walk in Shoes Without a Home ⇒

Change as caring in action.

Terry MacLeod et al.

Finding Life Beyond the Gang ⇒ ★

Gang life as MPR (Money, Power and Respect).

Les Foltos

Peer Coaching: 21st Century Teacher Skills ⇒

Colleagues as co-learners.

Bernard McCoy

Social Entrepreneurism for the 21st Century ⇒

Love as seeking the good of others.

Terry Godwaldt

DeforestAction: Global Project Based Learning ⇒

Authentic tasks as education.

* * *

The following talks (the first four of the day) are not available due to an internet hiccup.

Robert Sawyer - Creating the Future ★

Consciousness as networked complexity.

Nicole Buckley - Canada Alive in Space

Space research as aging research.

Kerry Stevenson - How 3D Printing Will Change the Way You Think

3D printing as slow motion teleportation.

Karen Letourneau - A Breakthrough in Prenatal Ultrasound ★

Simplicity as the other side of complexity.

Stung Eye Year in Review

This weekend was nice. I have a new year’s tradition of re-reading my StungEye post from the previous year. I also re-read and update my resolutions. Here’s a recap of my 2010.

Doing Is Real; Being Is A Social Fiction^*

Most of my 2010 resolutions were about doing stuff, rather than thinking about doing stuff. ; )

As such, I:

• Presented a talk on Internet start-ups at the RRC Directions conference.
• Participated in the Google AI Tron Challenge.
• Completed three courses for my Certificate in Adult Education.
• Spent the summer working on various home renos.
• Helped create WinnipegElection.ca.
• Applied and was accepted to attend TEDx Manitoba.
• Started a new programming blog, CodeGlutton.

To increase my productivity (or better said, to decrease my procrastination) I’ve been experimenting with a simple To-Do system based on video game “achievement theory”. Some inspirations:

• Metagame and Containers
• Future of Games
• Ribbon Hero
• EpicWin
• SuperMe

WinnipegElection.ca

Our goal with WinnipegElection.ca was to increase citizen engagement in Winnipeg civic politics by creating an online information hub for voters, candidates and journalists. This past October we helped over 35 thousand Winnipeggers research their mayoral, council and school trustee candidates.

The site was inspired by openParliament.ca, which was inspired by howdTheyVote.ca and theyWorkForYou.com.

We will be announcing a new project later this month, built in collaboration with RRC Journalism students. We will continue to focus on organizing and sharing publicly available political data.

Intellectual Property and the Public Domain

Twenty-ten was the year I finally overcame my fear of the public domain.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” — Thomas Jefferson

Prior to this year I had been using a (fairly permissive) Creative Commons license for all my publicly available source-code, blog content and Flickr photos. After pondering the above-linked essay I no longer wished to force attribution or to place non-commercial-use restrictions on my works. I claim no ownership over the ideas I choose to share with others.

This year I released the following soure-code as public domain using the Unlicense:

• Three Processing Sketches
• glutton_lastfm
• glutton_ratelimit
• WinnipegElection.ca + 2010 Open Data
• Marvel Social Network

Also:

• Yesterday was Public Domain Day.
• The Unlicense: The First Year in Review
• Bill C32, the Canadian Copyright Moderization act is working it’s way through the House of Commons.
• My thoughts on Bill C32.