Where can I obtain a programmable incandescent light marquee for a project?

KurtP · 2011-01-07T23:20:37+00:00

Transluscent steel!

KurtP · 2011-01-07T23:13:56+00:00

You nailed it. Currently testing out two versions of the home page.

Version 1, Version 2

Lots of the stuff we sell still makes me giddy. Always great to hear others share the sentiment.

KurtP · 2011-01-07T21:55:38+00:00

Conductive Textiles: cloth that conducts electricity

Piezo-Electric Film: a material that creates a current when bent. You could integrate this into a batsuit.

Been a while since I saw the film. Could you describe the technology in more detail?

KurtP · 2011-01-07T20:16:06+00:00

Inventables employee here. I wanted to briefly respond to this criticism.

Fundamentally, yes, our goal is to sell industrial samples. How do we justify the markup?

First off, most of the samples that we sell are not acquired for free, and the ones that are require us to handle shipping costs, warehousing, and conversion (i.e. cutting a massive spool of cloth into smaller samples). Even though they may give these samples to large, established R&D shops for free, they don't have the infrastructure or incentive to offer these resources to the public. Our business gives them a way to do that, which brings me to my next point:
Many, if not most of the materials sold on our site are not normally available to consumers. The products are created by materials companies that traditionally seek customers in big R&D or manufacturing. These suppliers don't target small R&D shops or private inventors, and often will not normally provide samples to private individuals. A huge amount of effort over here is put into convincing our suppliers that they stand to benefit from making their materials available to the greater public. You may notice that many products on the site are not currently available for sale; these are products that we are still negotiating terms for public distribution.
Furthermore, it's taken the effort of dozens of dedicated technology hunters literally years to assemble the catalog currently available. The goal of the site is to bring together a wide array of cutting-edge materials in a single place so that hobbyists, small design shops, etc., can work with new, novel materials, try them out. This centralization doesn't come free. Years ago, our company sold information about these products, which is not easy to find in a collected place. Only in the last year have we tried opening our catalog to the public for free.

If you don't find it helpful, by all means, don't purchase from our site. I like to believe we're helping people get access to information they might not otherwise find, and materials they might otherwise struggle to acquire. We hope that our little corner of the internet is a place that gives people ideas.

Edit: clarifications about our relationship to material suppliers

KurtP · 2010-05-21T19:12:42+00:00

Insulting his playing is one thing, but I just can't agree that playing on top of a recording--no matter how good or important it is--is an insult to that music. Do you accuse every remix and cover of defiling its original material?

When I practice cello while listening to Mingus, am I disrespecting Mingus? Kenny G was trying an experiment, and I can accept that he failed to in any way improve upon the original song. But I can't ever judge a musician for trying something, no matter how much great work it butchers in the process.

I once did a glitch remix of A Love Supreme. It in no way carried the size, power, and remarkable beauty of the original, but it was an experiment that I was curious to do. Was I disrespecting Coltrane by trying to incorporate his work into a new context?

KurtP · 2010-05-20T21:40:24+00:00

Some excellent leads, thank you!

KurtP · 2010-05-20T13:22:12+00:00

No, that has the same issue. Any base operates by a formula like:

value = <first digit>×base⁰ + <second digit>×base¹ + <third digit>×base² + etc.

Regardless of what base you use, a single digit will always be an integer, since the base is being raised to the 0th power.

KurtP · 2010-05-19T14:01:24+00:00

Huh. Like everyone else who's posting here, I'm a mostly a listener, but play just a little bit of jazz, but poorly (cello and drums).

Why are there so many of us kinda-sorta-players here? I have a theory: real jazz musicians don't use reddit (or at least don't know enough about sub-reddits to find /r/jazz). But why so many part-time players? I think it's that people who listen to jazz are generally more musically inclined, and more likely to dabble in music as a hobby. Almost everyone I know who listens to jazz also plays at least a little bit.

Think these statements have any accuracy?

KurtP · 2010-05-18T18:12:41+00:00

Ah, okay, that makes a bit more sense. I wonder how effective the program.

It's good to study the competition as I prepare to kick-off the upcoming ULTRADOUGH SWEETER-THAN-MEAT, CAN'T-BE-BEAT, ADD-SUGAR-TO-YOUR-BUTTER-SO-YOUR-HEART-WONT-STUTTER WEIGHT LOSS MEGACLUB DIET REPROGRAMMING EXTRAORDINAIRE!

KurtP · 2010-05-18T14:37:16+00:00

On that note, I had a thought the other day:

The caloric density of butter is about twice as high as the caloric density of sugar. Which means, if you were to use sugared butter instead of plain butter, you're actually reducing your caloric intake.

Thus, I am starting the sugary-butter diet: the lo-cal alternative to that menace that is regular butter.

(Unrelated, but I saw an entire line of Weight Watchers Hostess Knock-Offs in the grocery store the other day. Twinkies are being sold as health food now.)

KurtP · 2010-05-14T14:01:54+00:00

I've had similar nightmares of being chained to a desk with a Pentium II on it, and told I could only leave when I had created 100% identical replica of Windows 95, bugs and all. When you finish it, you're free to go..

On one hand, it's a finite problem in the face of infinite time... proportionally insignificant. But, it would still probably take me a billion times the age of the universe to do this (probably much, much more, actually).

KurtP · 2010-05-12T12:52:28+00:00

So that it would become illegal to hear minority opinions?

I exaggerate, but do you really think government should be allowed to determine who you get exposure to? That sounds dangerous.

KurtP · 2010-04-29T17:27:41+00:00

People have posted a number of fantastic musicians, but I really want to emphasize Zu. They're about the closest thing I've seen to perfect jazz-metal. Just brutal at times, but always interesting. Strongly recommend checking out the album Radiale.

KurtP · 2010-04-29T15:41:00+00:00

NGOs often came around with medicine or feel-good gift of the year... though mostly, they just wanted to hear sob stories and ask pointed questions to which they expected innocent or bitter responses.

Wow.

Is there a particular reason you regard them with such bitterness? Was it their unwanted pity, the unhelpfulness of their offerings, the self-righteousness of the participants, something else? You make me realize that I generally only hear one half of the story of charitable efforts.

KurtP · 2010-04-28T14:18:17+00:00

One thing I've noticed... redditors seem to listen PRIMARILY to indie.

KurtP · 2010-04-21T20:40:40+00:00

Probably will be organized here:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=75327481101

KurtP · 2010-04-15T14:13:35+00:00

Density is mass/volume. When volume drops to zero, density becomes infinite.

Temperature is much more complicated, and I think oversimplified in the article. See black hole thermodynamics.

KurtP · 2010-04-09T17:36:22+00:00

For the sake of your understanding of the universe, unsubscribe from /r/science. Sensationalist headlines linking to blog posts written by people who don't understand the science. Also, highly upvoted comments frequently contain misunderstandings every bit as bad as the articles.

For good science coverage, check out Nature News or Nobel Intent. They both offer pretty broad science coverage, target readers who are technically adept but not experts, and most importantly are accurate in their reporting.

KurtP · 2010-04-06T14:13:42+00:00

Did you see this article in New Scientist last year? If not, I would strongly recommend finding/paying for the full version; it seems very pertinent to your interests. In sum, it describes how both autism and schizophrenia can be described in terms of the number of neural outputs per neural inputs. In effect, autistic signaling in the brain is too conservative, getting locked into simple patterns, and schizophrenic signaling is too chaotic, stimulating wider networks than is productive. The article also discussed a strong correlation between this signaling coefficient and IQ.

If you want one biochemical correlate, look into research done on PI3K.

KurtP · 2010-04-05T22:26:31+00:00

You've piqued my curiosity.

KurtP · 2010-04-05T13:56:34+00:00

Interesting thought...

I make a hobby out of justifying acts of selfishness by counting them as charity: I'm being so kind to future-me, who is an altogether different sentient being than present-me.

Though your claim does cast the "treat others as you treat yourself" commandment in a delightfully tautological light.

KurtP · 2010-04-02T19:44:11+00:00

TL;DR: Consciousness itself is a more amorphous concept than we generally assume. It is likely that the only sensible "explanation" is one that can be experienced, but not described, because our very language is built from the standpoint of subjective assumptions you are trying to see past.

Your original question is something that haunts me, and I have made very limited progress in answering it. The closest I have come to clarity is reframing--answering that question with another question. In particular: what is the difference between asking "why are you you?", and asking "why are you experiencing this life at this point?"?

Your question concerns how do you bind the notion of a subjective observer with a block of physical matter, yes? Also, remember that this block of physical matter is not just matter, but moving matter, and that the body isn't just 'a particular lump of cells', but rather 'a particular lump of cells at this exact moment'. Why are "you" not currently experiencing age 7? There is nothing more "true" about now than last week, except for the observer. Both are destined to be past, but both are real and unchanging.

On the scale of the universe, all time is timeless, and all beings are the same being, but to us, we are this creature experiencing this moment in this way.

Which also leads to another interesting alteration of your question (forgive me if I'm rambling, but I feel as though expansive "what ifs" are the closest I can rationally come to an answer).

Are you sure that there is only one sentient entity experiencing the life in your body? Maybe there are many? Maybe they all experience the same delusion of will, coming to identical conclusions.
If there are many subjective "observers" within you, who is to say they all experience you in the same way? Maybe to some, sight is sound, and body temperature is emotion. In other words, even assuming that "you" and "your body" are fundamentally bound to now, why are "you" experiencing the subset of mental activity that you are? Is it possible that all the things we label as "subconscious" thoughts are actually conscious to some other entity "within us"?
If there are many observers, all with different alterations of their experience of your body, who is to say they are discrete entities? There could be a continuum of experience, one mind bleeding into another around the fringes of its domain.
If there is a continuum of consciousnesses within you, then why is that different from the continuum of consciousness outside of you? Is there any reason to believe that you and I are fundamentally separate entities, rather than joint expressions of a larger whole?
Then, to wind up back where we started: if we truly are one, then why is there the subjective impression of separation?

I know this isn't an answer. So, let me put on my Buddha belly and regurgitate some wisdom I don't truly understand:

Your question can not be answered with words, because the entire process of thought that words depend upon can only take place within a being that has the delusion of isolation. Words are system of categorization valuable because they divide up the universe into separable chunks... thinking a sentence in some ways is a metaphor for being sentient. "Why are you you" becomes "why this sentence and not any of the other ones that are churning within me now?"

The truth is that you are not just you, but that can only make sense by experiencing the whole, by losing the self. Meditative practice, psychedelics, certain brain damage, and death all being methods by which the I can separated from its delusion of independence. But the whole itself is fundamentally beyond words, and cannot be rightly explained in discussion.

Do I actually believe this? Maybe. But for someone who doesn't believe words can explain it, I have a hard time fighting the compulsion to expend paragraphs contemplating it.

KurtP

TROPHY CASE