Let the House-cleaning continue!

More specifically, the Maker Faire pretty closely mirrors the ambition and aesthetic behind the "big projects" flavor of ScavHunt item. Tell me, if you can, which of these are ScavHunt items and which are Maker Faire exhibits in this list:

• A home-forged sword
• Go-carts that look like cupcakes
• Drag racers out of Mario Kart
• Combat robots battle to the death
• A Victorian mansion on wheels
• A steam-powered electric guitar
• Combat Zorbs battle to the death
• A theramin...
• ...powered by a Tesla coil

I could go on for a while like that. In fact, there are a number of Maker Faire exhibits that I'd be delighted to see as ScavHunt items (and don't think the judges aren't aware of it -- there are a few items I'm pretty sure they found by reading MAKE or someplace similar). However, the whole affair seems a bit empty without all those other flavors of ScavHunt item -- the ridiculous stunts, the unexpected performance art, the actual art. Somehow the tar-and-feather gun means a little less if there isn't also the Egon painting hanging there as well.

Item 258: A tar gun. A feather gun.

Item 181: Egon Spengler, painted in the style of Egon Schiele.

Tags: Scav08

There is now a whole blog devoted to things younger than John McCain.

A large chunk of chaos on Judgment Day had relatively little to do with the end of the Hunt, in fact. Instead, a storm blew through that morning. Not terribly heavy, but quite windy. Especially in certain places where the campus buildings seem to channel the wind. Much like the site where we located our Tent Headquarters.

In the end nobody was hurt; I'll say that up front. But sometime overnight while I was away working on a Zeusaphone, the apex rope started to give and the roof began to collect water. It was a bit of a shock to walk in and find a small swimming pool suspended before me (and a few sleeping teammates) at eye level -- keep in mind that originally the tent roof was about twelve feet high -- and the frame creaking and sagging under the weight. Not as shocked as the person asleep under said pool once we woke him up, though. Thankfully we happened to have a bunch of PVC pipe on hand, so I was able to very quickly jury-rig some drainage and empty the roof. (I did get some horrified looks when, facing hundreds of gallons of rainwater suspended in a tarp above our heads, I got set to slash it open. But it did work! And I did wait until after we'd cut the power, just in case.)

We at first tried to bolt the frame back together; here SPH has just about given up on that and decided to manually hold up the wall until we got everything out.

The damage was already done, though, and shortly thereafter joints started giving way to the wind. We held things together as best we could while we evacuated stuff in rough order of risk: people, computers, items to be judged, power tools, personal effects, etc. A couple of truckloads later (thank heavens for the Moomers pickup) we decided that everything left was either worthless or could fend for itself and abandoned ship.

That being said, we still had a blast this year; the tent thing is now just a particularly awesome story to tell (the capstone to the tale of how we're so hardcore that we ran a Scavhunt team out of a TENT) and proof that when we fail, we only ever do so spectacularly.

In the end, we took 7th place this year (results at the Judges' site). That's a step down from our usual slot as perennial third, but we don't mind, because that was getting boring and one of the FIST's core motives is to shake things up. We were pleased to see the Burton-Judson team, a long-running underdog, really step up their game this year and take 3rd place for themselves. We were also beaten by the GASH, a new coalition of grad students, alumni, and others, but we don't mind that either, because we like them. Many once played for the FIST. When I stopped into their headquarters (a rented abandoned storefront -- also totally sweet) they were as sorry to see me go as anyone on my own team.

What was left of Tent-HQ when we got back from Judgment, after we pulled back the tarp.

Tags: Scav08

Incidentally, the Judges are also blogging the Hunt. The site was created a few days ago, but only got interesting once the Hunt started.

I think the coolest thing I'm going to be directly involved with is going to be the "Zeusaphone" (although ours will be significantly less precise and more jury-rigged than the one in the video). Tesla coils always make for a fun project. We're starting by replicating the coil I built for Scavhunt 2006, which turned out not visually very impressive, but to be the World's Loudest (-ish) Thing. It also had a knack for punching holes in glass insulators and incinerating the things you were trying to wirelessly power with it. Ah, technology!

However, the item that's got everybody worked up at the moment is more of a show-and-tell.

Judge Jess in front of the GASH's effort.

Apparently sometime this year, the Judges were all out on the road and saw one of these driving on the highway beside them, and collectively lost it. So they made a bet that the Scavvies couldn't bring them one. Thus, item 51: a De Lorean.

The FIST's effort: the De Lorean we found didn't have any plates. Thus unroadworthy, we instead went to the car. Notice the banner of the Ill-Advised Potato. This dates back to 2003, when we were named "Deleuzean Potato" and managed to capture this banner from some University event and modify it to our needs. Not visible: the Chinese lettering on the back that reads "Bad-idea potato".

Tags: Scav08

FIST Tent-HQ from afar -- that's a pretty good-sized tent for duct tape, tarp, and PVC.

As far as actual scavenging goes, it seems like we got off to a slow start but we're ramping up pretty quickly. Things are in motion for most of the events, from human Pac-Man in the stacks in a few hours, to initial planning for the big cooking items on Saturday. While we have the skills to pull off most of the big engineering projects (guitar maglev, sword forging, Zeusaphone, etc.) we need to figure out which ones we actually have the manpower to pull off.

The view from inside. It's like a TARDIS in here. Also, apparently we like art.

Tags: Scav08

The tent-headquarters project is coming along, despite the soggy conditions today. I don't know if it will be inhabitable in time for list release, but it's going to be a tremendously impressive thing. We're talking 400 or so square feet of workspace, with power, heat, reasonably impermeable roof and walls, probably wood flooring. Since we're situated not in some building but in a relatively open structure in the middle of a heavily-trafficked quad, the judges were concerned and issued threats of dire consequence should ne'er-do-wells sabotage our exposed workings. We issued a counter-message: come one, come all, rival teams and bystanders alike, and see how a real ScavHunt team works.

A long standing pre-ScavHunt tradition is to completely clog up official lines of communication by inundating the mailing list used by Judges and team captains with trash talk.

This year the FIST's enthusiastic trash talker SPH started mixing things up a bit by posting a limerick, and thus Tuesday's theme was established. Many limericks followed, of generally high creativity, extremely low taste, and variable adherence to the usual forms. My favorite post, a honest-to-goodness trash talk villanelle, comes from McFall, also of the FIST. Thankfully, unlike much of the poetry posted so far, it in insufficiently vulgar to prevent me from sharing it here.

By way of background, FIST, GASH, Snitchcock, and Palevskites all refer to teams (my own, the Graduate/Alumni ScavHunt team, and the dorm teams of Snell-Hitchcock and Max Palevsky halls).

Run, hide, and pray! The FIST comes fiercely smashing:
Preceded by its awesome furry guts,
Heroic clerics strike, shuriken flashing.

Inferior teams bewail the coming thrashing,
And wish their mothers weren't all such huge sluts.
Run, hide, and pray! The FIST comes fiercely smashing.

Defying monied whores and faithless GASHing,
Eschewing Snitchcock's blind and cliquish ruts,
Heroic clerics strike, shuriken flashing.

Palevskites, helpless first-years cruelly lashing
With studded whips that leave red oozing cuts:
Run, hide, and pray! The FIST comes fiercely smashing.

Explosions bloom like helicopters crashing
As the valiant FIST in wreaths of glory struts;
Heroic clerics strike, shuriken flashing.

Behold the way its sleepless eyes are flashing,
See with what strength its fearsome forebrain juts:
Run, hide, and pray! the FIST comes fiercely smashing;
Heroic clerics strike, shuriken flashing.

Not from a FIST author, but still pretty cool, is JPL's "Scav Sonnet 1, or Ode to Max Big Projects". Named are a few more teams (Big Projects being the Max team's, er, engineering division) and a couple of supposedly notorious judges:

There once were some scavvies, Big Projects no less
Who had a slight problem, I will now confess
Since the were Max, they had gumption and skill
But lacked only tools, no hammer, no drill.

But casting about they found some quite soon
Two feigning judgeship, but really buffoons
Jfunk Williams and his partner Will Dietz
Who cared not for scav but only mad beats

And looking but further, they saw a tooly MacPiercer
Whose zeal for good rhymes was a tiny bit fiercer**
And finally they found, the crown of their set
The grad student FISTy, the tooliest yet

Thus well equipped, their toolbox o’erflowing
They picked up their list and swiftly got going
With no strandbeest to make, they easily triumphed
Hmm. Nothing really rhymes with triumphed

**One last thing, afore I forget.
I didn’t steal your rhyme, I scavenged it.

Ladies and gentlemen, for the next few days I will be in Chicago engaging in the general merriment and mayham known as the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt. The list will be released midnight Thursday morning (and should appear at the official site soon afterwards, replacing the parody placeholder list currently there), but Wednesday will be pretty busy. For one thing, my team (the Lush Puppies mark VIII: FIST point Set:...:Heroic Furry Gut Monks -- the name just keeps on growing) is still working out where it will be headquartered, among other things. The presently leading option is to erect a giant tent on one of the University quads. I don't mean this facetiously, either -- this is actually the option we are currently most likely to take.

Obviously, this is going to be awesome. Time permitting, I'm going to try and bring you all along for the ride.

We're likely to get our first thunderstorm of the season in the next few days, which is a prospect that I'm relishing. (The thunder-snow we had a couple of weeks ago, while neat, isn't quite the same thing.) So with the thaw basically complete, and spring about to pounce into green any day now, let's recall the long winter just past with a tree.

Good accompanying reading: around the time I took this picture, I spent an entire evening engrossed by Wikipedia's List of Notable Trees.

A knarled tree tops a snowy knoll on campus in early February, reaching upwards into a cold sky. Not cloudy exactly, but the high cirrus do obscure the stars and throw back enough city light to create a noticeable sky glow.

And since the advisor has been in Israel for the holiday, you'd think this would have been a slow week. Not so much. I'm actually having an astonishingly busy spring, which isn't terribly surprising if you consider that we have to pack up our experiment and leave for the field in something under three months. This has been annoying to a number of people, as my tight and shifting schedule has made it hard to commit to things very far in advance.

In other news, contact lenses are curious things.

See, I have at last gotten fed up with my ancient, battered, scratched, pitted, and soldered-back-together glasses, so various activities are in process to remedy this situation. One of these is that I am wearing an evaluation pair of contact lenses. Ignore for a moment the trick that was suppressing my finely honed reflexes enough to literally stick my finger in my eye without blinking. Optically, they basically work by reshaping the cornea, which is a totally different mechanism than the pre-eye correction done by glasses. Overall I think the vision correction isn't as precise as what good glasses can achieve (I also have new glasses coming in the mail any day, so I'll soon be able to directly test this assertion). On the other hand, for as long as I can remember I've been plagued by some subtle visual artifacts, like chromatic abberation caused by thick lenses (I can tilt my head and be a human spectrograph!), and ghost images around high-contrast borders (e.g. I see double or triple images of stars, which as you can imagine is extremely annoying to me as an astronomer) due I think to some asymmetric abberation of my cornea. Both are now gone, which is awesome and totally bizzare. While I wouldn't wear contacts all the time by any means, I'm really looking forward to trying a public observing night with these things.

And since I've been kind of delinquent in posting photos, here's a sunset from February:

In early February, steam from the power plant immediately condenses into a thick fog in the subzero air. 10 February 2008

America began perverting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message in the spring of 1963. Truthfully, you could put the date just about anywhere along the earlier timeline of his brief public life, too. But I mark it at the Birmingham movement's climax, right about when Northern whites needed a more distant, less personally threatening change-maker to juxtapose with the black rabble rousers clambering into their own backyards. That's when Time politely dubbed him the "Negroes' inspirational leader," as Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff point out in their excellent book Race Beat.

Up until then, King had been eyed as a hasty radical out to push Southern communities past their breaking point -- which was a far more accurate understanding of the man's mission. His "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is in fact a blunt rejection of letting the establishment set the terms of social change. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he wrote, later adding, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

Story is, I've been a bit occupied with the whole grad school thing of late (more so than usual, that is), and side projects (like blogging, e.g.) have taken a hit. One thing is that on my experiment, we've reached the point where the subsystems I develop have suddenly become crucial for day-to-day life around here, and now I'm supporting considerably more users than before. Let's see, what else? Oh! I've been accepted to attend and speak at this workshop, so I get to visit Montreal at the end of the month. My attempt to give a 20-minute practice talk today turned into a two hour debate about the correct philosophy and strategy to use in approaching this audience. But I also got some good tips on my presentation.

Also: I have a minion now. Just a freshman undergrad, who requires enough babysitting that I'm not sure he's a net gain yet, in terms of productivity, but he seems to be a pretty quick study.

I'm enough of a politics/news junkie that I've read an enormous number of things since last time I posted. I'll just highlight two. One is an actual book: just after the invasion of Iraq Dahr Jamail declared himself an independent journalist and headed there to try and report what the embedded media wasn't. He wound up spending large chunks of 2003 - 2005 there, living and reporting from among the Iraqis, until it simply became too dangerous for a westerner to do that anymore. Now he's written a book: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. It is not an especially easy read, especially if you're American (and thus, by extension, largely responsible for this mess). The writing reflects the Iraqis', and Jamail's own, evolution over the three-ish years chronicled in the book: at the start optimistic, if dismayed by the ongoing chaos and evidently poor planning, with time the mood grows darker and, yes, angrier. On the ground the occupation is seen first as bungling and ineffectual, then progresses to arrogant, dangerous, and finally malevolent and tyrannical. By the time Jamail left for the last time, the Iraqis with whom he interacted were mostly of the opinion that things were better under Saddam Hussein's regime. According to the afterward, most of the people he knew there have either fled Iraq or are dead.

Beyond the Green Zone, I should note, isn't a political text, and doesn't purport to explain why things turned out as they did, nor does it even try to describe in any systematic fashion what exactly happened. In fact, it reads like a diary: often scattered or hastily written, moving simply forward in time the reader is mostly allowed to discover things as Jamail did. Great literature it isn't, but if you don't read Arabic it's probably the best source out there to learn what the Iraq war looked like from the outside of a Humvee.

The other: Jack Hedin is the farmer who runs Featherstone Farm, to which my house subscribes through a CSA membership. (We're still finishing off the enormous amount of assorted greens pesto I froze last summer.) Anyway, Jack had an op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks ago on the farm bill and a problem for supporters of local agriculture: in some cases, it's illegal to plant those watermellons! In particular, there's an obscure provision of the farm subsidy rules, jealously protected by the California growers in particular, that effectively bans planting fruits and vegetables on land that used to be used to grow staple crops like corn or cotton. Which is, basically, all farmland around here. Funny, that.

I had to stitch three pictures to get this shot, which also let me fake the apparently high dynamic range here: I took the sky from a 1/800 second exposure, but the buildings and ground come from 1/160 second shots. Click to super-size.

It's generally likely that last weekend's cold snap was our last dose of seriously Arctic air, and we won't see the negative double-digits until next winter. But they said that three weeks ago, too. They also keep predicting snow that fails to materialize. The river is still too warm to maintain it's ice.

Anyway, it's official -- my experiment's test flight has been pushed back to the fall. NASA (technically, the CSBF) is still trying to qualify their largest balloon for the weight class we were planning to use. Evidently fully inflating a 37-million-cubic-foot helium balloon poses some engineering challenges. (Here's what it looks like for our (smaller) sister experiment, BLAST.) So CSBF will do another qualifying flight in the spring, and with any luck we'll be first in line to use it when the winds turn back around in September or so.

In fact, this is a pretty handy delay. Not just because it was going to be a real scramble to get the payload ready to launch by May. I mean handy for perfectly selfish reasons: I probably won't have to miss the ScavHunt, and won't be flying in from the field for my sister's wedding.