transitlab

Kiwi Fruit Dna Isolation 30/365

Originally uploaded by sctv
recipe here www.york.ac.uk/res/sots/activities/diydna.htm

For the ptechnic lab(http://ptechnic.org/ecologies/b-ecologies/index.html), I showed a DNA extraction from kiwifruit, they have buckets of DNA.
Simple recipe, mash up kiwifruit in a100ml of detergent/sal solution ( 70ml detergent 90gm salt in a l of water). Then heat gently for 15 min, strain and gently add some methanol or isopropanol. DNA will start to precipitate at the interface between the phases. Its bucket chemistry. Its lovely!

Monday, Stewart Brand(of the WELL, Whole Earth Catalogue, Long Now Foundation) talked at Life about his ideas on the future and humanity. How it might be time to rethink some of the popular stances against genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, urbanization and geoengineering. He intimated that the precautionary principal had gone too far, it wasn’t precaution in the ways of fixing acid rain and banning thalidomide, but anti-progress. Yes we can’t understand all the consequences of a technology, but we can be eternally vigilant.

• GM: mentioning how GM and organic food production should not be anathema, but that green peaces stance aginst GM has been more anti-science than reasoned.
• Nuclear Energy: comparing the effects of Chernobyl and Bhopal, Bhopal was definitely the more damaging to humanity. Chernobyl is now a de-humanised reserve full of plants and animals.  Nuclear is a base load energy producer, so can be controlled as opposed to solar and wind. It is not perfect, will have to be rethought, and he showed a number of smaller, cheaper safer reactors that might be used for local energy production (or even mobile ones). Of interest was Freeman Dyson’s buriable thorium reactor, that dosent need lots of reprocessing  tthat provides steam for energy production. If the US and India and China went down this route, most of the energy needs of the worlds populations would be satisfied. How to get this uptake? Make coal more expensive. On the nuclear waste problem, it is a smaller more controllable problem than the tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Each human would probably use the energy in a coke can or less to power their life. Some of the other reactors (such as fast breeders) can consume the waste of the other reactors.  An interesting aside was that the us nuclear plants are being powered by reprocessed USSR nukes. My idea was always that nuclear power stations werent viable, because they werent scalable. Each instalation took so much money and time, and ran over budget as they need to be made ensite. The smaller ones have the advantage that they can be fabricated in factories. More playeres than just the big ones (RR, Serco, Westinghouse, Mitsubishi). It might even provide a way out for companies heavily invested in the military uses of nuclear to find another revenue stream.
• Geoengineering : Talk starts with Mt Pinatubo which released 200million tonnes of sulphur dioxide and decreased the earths temperature by 0.6C. Can humans do the same? Should we do the same.  So strange contraptions that release sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere might give us a bit of breathing space til we get C)2 under control.
• urbanization: What happens as we reach the point where there is more people in cities than outside, reclamation of natural spaces, leaving areas for more intensive farming. Why are people streaming int the city? For jobs and oportunities Slums are strange places in this, an informal economy that works even though it is por and life is hard. However, it is probaly easer than it was on the land, otherwise they would be back there. So communities are being built in these areas, people are getting together to teach their children, and that is their objective, to never stop teaching.

A lot of this talk came from the idea that the greens have got it wrong, there is no unnature, they are being too romantic, and dramatic(see the book). There is more science needed, but we have been talking about global warming since I was in high schoolin  the early 90’s, and nothing much has been done. Ozone was stabilized, but that was relativly more simple, although the replacement for fluorocarbons are intense greenhouse gasses.

SO why is this post important to me?  If it isn’t already obvious, all of the topic by Steward Brand came with the caveat empor “More science needed” . But where will this science come from? The UK, USA, or China a society directed by engineers.  It also intersects at a strange angle with Fo.AMs “Luminous Green”, bricolabs, peer based learning, citizen science, synthetic biology, P2P production: Knowledge and learning, and making…..

Related articles by Zemanta

• Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto (newstatesman.com)
• Why greens need to grow up if they want to save the planet (thestar.com)

Last year was a year of finding many interesting people, online, in email lists and in real life. These are in no particular order, but I respect and appreciate these peoples talent.

• Dougald Hine of School of Everything and Dark Mountain, a talker, thinker and doer.

• Cathal Garvey Makerbot aficionado, maker of the dremelfuge, a centrifuge attachment for a dremel.

• Aaron of Oomlout, and generally geeky with the robots and e-commerce

• Tuur Meneer RCA graduate, doing lots of amazing things with design and societies particularily like the Open Urinomics project he did with Vincent Rouilly + others.

• Joanne Jacobs social media expert, Australian around London, and igniter of Amplified events

• Vincent Rouilly Research scientist pushing forward with open source bio,

• Yaroslav Tenzer medical roboticist, started savepleo.org and other wacky ideas

• George Kuk business academic researching open source software and hardware

• Richard Barbrook academic / writer of the book imaginary futures, part of Guy Debords Class War Games at Wunderbar Festival 2009

A very interesting panel on opensource hydrogen cars at #openhw.
Start with a blank page, get rid of the gearchain, use 4 seperate motors, get regenerative braking from all of them.
Car is small and lighter without gear chain.
Interesting, they riversimple has IP and thats ok, but it also can use out of patent hydrogen cell technology.
Keeping the car on the road, and on the books of the factory, only leasing it, means its in the best interest to make it good, make it ecological, make it light in resources.

I was happy when I got Arduino working on a stock xandros eeepc 701 in this post . However Arduino has moved on, and Xandros has lagged.

Running the latest arduino versions (13+) and the eeepc on a stock xandros is not possible due to the fact that the compiler (gcc-avr) is too old (need 4.32+ to support the avr328) . There is no way I know to upgrade Xandros to the latest version, so I have been looking at other linux installs. I need the new version because otherwise I wont be able to use the atmel 328 based arduino, as it needs the new compiler. However, as this chip has twice as much program memory it is very very useful.

So this is what I have done to get it all working.

You should have a Internet connection, a 1Gb usb stick and a bigger card (I am using a 4gb sd card, I will be booting my install with arduino 17 off this card)

1) Download live iso from http://www.eeebuntu.org/ (I chose the base version as it is the smallest)

2) find a Windows or Linux computer and download http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ (This allows you to make a live usb disk)

3) use unetbootin to copy the live iso to the usb disk (1Gb or bigger)

4) boot into it by plugging in and after turning on eeepc, hit esc

5) you will see at least two options, chose the disk that has the eeebuntu on it

6) it should boot up and you will see some options

7) chose install

it wll ask you some questions and ask where you want linux installed . Chose the the bigger card/usbstick that you have (you could install to the 4gb ssd in the eeepc, but I like to keep it for quick bootup)

9) once the is finnished you need to install the other dependancies of arduino 17 (this section from http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Linux/Ubuntu

use synaptics and install

• librxtx-java (this will bring in the rest of the java development environment that you need as well)
• gcc-avr
• binutils-avr
• avr-libc
• avrdude

then download arduino 17
unpack and run!

There have been three unconnected but referential events in Newcastle around health, science and art.

• Artists Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich, Michael Pinsky and puppet doctor Professor Hilary presented The Panacea Casebook at the Baltic.

• Ben Goldacre visited the Centre for Life to talk about Bad Science and how journalists can kill.
• Adinda van ‘t Klooster talked about and demonstrated her emotion light protoype at Lunch Bytes Culture Lab Newcastle University(you can see her lecture at STEIM here.

What is the connection?  Panacea Casebook uses many of the methods of clinical trials, for treating a number of modern maladies. For  the sci fi hottub trial that therewas a small but significant changein peoples wellbeing after the hottub experience. Of course for there to be any prof that art was the cause of this, there would have to be an exact copy of the hottub (see left) that wasnt touched with the idea of being art.

Only by comparing in a double blind trial these two treatments, the art and the art placebo, could the hypothesis that “art has a beniicial effect” be tested.

Ben Goldacre talks about how clinical trials can be misused, using the Durham Fish Oil ‘trials’ as an example of  the effect of placebo, and  the problems of expectation on performance. They havent met, but it would have been interesting.  The Panacea Casebook and the Emotion Lights have connections around the way ‘art’ might be good, and engagement with new media art might be benificial to cure a social ill.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things (neilperkin.typepad.com)
• My quest for a perfectly awful formula (guardian.co.uk)

Are oceanic ecosystems heading for a refactoring?

One of the segments in the Blue Whale episode of “Last chance to See” was about the Humbolt Squid or Red Devil.

Had never heard of them before, but thay are wierd and scary

This squid hunts in packs and can grow to 7ft, and so poses a risk to divers. If you dive with these suckers you better be wearing a chain mail suit, because they are known to attack humans.

The reason they have invaded the straits of cortez, is that there are few sharks/ top level predators left.Noone knows how many are there, but estimates are in the millions.

Just up the coast, another ecosystem has been hit by the rise of slime, and a new dominant species, jellyfish.

There is more about  Humbolt Squid in  the Blue Planet  http://www.bbc.co.uk/oceans/locations/cortez/loreto.shtml.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Celebrate Cephalopods! (takepart.com)
• Jumbo Effin’ Squid (manolith.com)

People and Projects shown

• Alistair (http://agm.me.uk) :  A PhP flight simulator (as shown at Hackday 2008)
• Richard(http://www.myspace.com/roadtorimini): An excerpt from music he is composing influenced by We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Pete(http://pete.hindle.com : The art of Subtitling Hacking, with example. Subtexts and subtitles
• Derrick Welsh(http://www.handheldlearning2009.com/handheld-learning-conference-and-exhibition/confirmed-speakers/908-confirmed-speakers/238-derrick-welsh-artist) : Pictures by children from Derricks picture drawing sessions. Kids are keen to play with devices(such as touch screen phones. The sessions are run in the Library, and the children can book them out.
• Dave Hughs(from http://infectionmusic.com : demoed his Bach hybrid digitla/analogue music synth tonight (he has talked about the ZEIT Step Synth at Datarama #4), influenced by Sequential Circuits Pro One and Moog. The nice thing is that they are nice, marketable, individual. A nice description of the design, and a version of the protoype/implementation. Barge Board is great. Cheap cost,  not pretty yet but it works. (very Heath Robinson). Its going to be very nice AVR based keyboard when it is finished.

The Wednesday just past I was invited to see the output from Robot Visions at the Centre for Life. All day 6th form students had been considering the societal impacts of more robots in our midst and what direction robot research should go. In this they were assisted and challenged by robotics and AI researcher Noel Sharkey(http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~noel/).
Recommendations coming out of this will inform the EPSRC and RAE in the policies and funding.
Over an hour we had a chance to talk to the students about what they thought was problematic about robot research. For instance one group was looking at robots being used in war situations, and whether there was a justification for them being autonomous, or under human control all the time.
In this and other proposals, there was a desire that the robots not become too smart, and a disbelief that robots could become complex enough to show emotions and exhibit decision making ability.
It was an hour of lively discussions, and I was lucky to have attended it, having been invited because I was at the inaugural Newcastle dorkbot a few days earlier.

project2891

Originally uploaded by sctv
twentyeightninetyone.net
Inspace Gallery (Inspace, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB).

Found myself in Edinburgh and with a few hours to kill, went wandering through the streets.
First off went to the Forrest Cafe, and from there plotted a route past a few galleries.
Went to the Inspace gallery, which is the new beta space of New Media Scotland. They are putting on a show of their alt-w funded works. It was great to see another instance of Ben Dembroski’s project2891. I had seen the last version at the CCA, Glasgow in April.
A new favourite is the Cybraphon, a strange steam punky artifact that registers his online popularity by making noises, and singing songs. A large dial tells us how happy ‘he’ is,