We're taking a quick trip to the maul as the big snowstorm begins here in Baltimore.

- mike lee

On our way home to Baltimore tonight, we stopped in Halethorpe, a little town south of Baltimore, to admire our friend Bill's ice-covered Xmas tree. No, we haven't had an ice storm here lately; Bill rigged a garden hose over their tree in the backyard, and sprayed water on it non-stop for two days. A string of lights remained embedded inside. The icy coating grew to form beautiful knobs and stalagtites of crystal, which, in darkness, conducted the colored light in wonderful ways.

- mike lee -

This is special effects on less than a shoestring budget. Keri climbs the ladder to position herself on the stationary trapeze while Adam animates her cape with dental floss. We'll replace the background with sky and clouds later in Photoshop.

- mike lee - baltimore

At the Broom Factory continuing with photo set-ups for the Trixie Little Story slideshow.

- mike lee - baltimore

I reviewed some of the sponsor goodies I brought home from the Media Lab yesterday:

1, 2) "Maeda Book Club" offering: Haptic - Awakening the Senses, a showcase of tactile fine artworks.

3, 4, 5) DVD of the 8 1/2 minute video of the Visible Language Workshop's 1995 showreel ... made a year after the passing of founder Muriel Cooper. The VHS quality video has footage of classic explorations in flying in real-time through dataspaces.

Not pictured: Simplicity Special Report #1, an analysis of online shopping websites by Connie Yeh.

Links related to the lab presentations to visit later:

~ MIT Concept Cars with GM & Frank O. Gehry ... be sure to click through "More Cars" ~ Smart Cities Project ~ Third party reseller of E-ink displays ~ More info on omni-directional wheels shown in Photo #4 of this post ~ I need to have our research library at work order an original copy of Ted Selker's blurb from a November 2004 issue of the New York Times Magazine on Spray-on Baby Clothing. Here's the text of Ted's comments from a handout he gave us:

7. Problem: Too Much Dirty Laundry Solution: Spray-On Baby Clothes

Ted Selker, director of industrial design intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab

''I first had the idea when I was 11. I was with my father, who was visiting a laboratory where there was a little extruder of polyethylene. I sprayed it on my hand and made a little glove. It was very warm. The idea has been with me ever since. Adults are tricky. How can you conceal flab? But babies have the perfect shape for spray-on clothes. The apparati are all under the changing table. A vat of heated polyethylene, a bag of starch, bottles of color and an air compressor. Using the nozzle that's got lines to all these elements, you would first add color to the starch, then powder on the starch as a warm layer next to baby's skin. Then you'd spray on a layer of breathable polyethylene pile that's kept cool by the air from the compressor. The plastic acts like fabric, very flexible, ideal for a wriggling baby. When you change the baby, you tear off the polyethylene and recycle it in the vat. And, when you go out, you take some along with you in an aerosol can for touch-ups.''

And finally, a correction of the link to Processing in this previous post.

- mike lee - langley park, md

Repost -- Today was the digital Snowflake-a-thon at the Media Lab, but I hope tonight's flight home won't turn into Snowflake-a-thon II--our flight is already an hour late due to snow delays. We should be boarding in a few minutes. The snow is coming down steadily here at Logan as I chat with Sandy about the day. Also attached is a "miss you daddy" photo (may or may not display) from my wife's Nokia.

- mike lee - boston logan

From 2 - 4pm, 19 students from all over MIT presented their digital snowflakes to one of two videographers in the atrium (1, 2, 3). There were several really cool projects. One I captured on the Sidekick was Ben Dalton's kaleidoscopic snowflake. Coded in Processing graphics programming language, Ben's snowflake takes a video feed from an Apple iSight camera and pipes it into each of six rotated facets. The photos here (4, 5) show a PowerBook's lighted power plug rendered as a snowflake. At 4pm, a roughcut video of each of the participants' presentations was shown (6, 7) including peeks at the sourcecode to show efficiency. Contestants worked with a variety of development tools and languages including Processing, OpenGL, Java, Python and C++. The first prize of an iPod mini went to Hugo Liu for his snowflake which, in 86 lines of Python, mined Googlism for comments on a given famous person, processed the text fragments through linguistic heuristics (rules), and composed an ode to the individual in the first person as text wrapped around a snowflake. Hopefully some of the entries will get posted to the web somewhere. One our way out of the lab it was snowing (8)--what an approriate end to the Snowflake-a-thon.

- mike lee - boston logan airport

Luckily I remembered that I had a USB charging cable (1) for my Sidekick, so I used a Media Lab paper clip to do a hard reset of my crashed phone, and am giving it a full charge from my laptop while we are on break from the event.

The Snowflake-a-thon is underway. Students are showing their snowflake creations in the lower atrium and two people are videotaping the results for the awards ceremony at 4pm. An iPod mini will be given away as a first prize.

After the whirlwind (typical) lab tour to get updates from some of the students, we all took to our assigned seating in the atrium for lunch. I had nice conversation with Deb Roy about how we need to dispel the average person's notion of robots as humanoid machines. Deb says with the arrival of consumer products such as the Roomba vacuum, we can think of robots as just very helpful tools.

The hour's worth of talks started at 1pm in the Bartos Auditorium. John kicked off the session by showing a 3-minute video of abstract, snowflake-like computer aninimations (2, 3). Then a bunch of us presented gifts to John's assistant Heather (4) who is leaving soon to go on maternity leave.

I went up first with a short presentation on some 3D paper web site maps I experimented with a couple years ago (5, 6, 7). Then Peter Meirs of Time Interactive showed a very enlightening (and funny) video of some of his co-workers talking about Time, Inc's massive operation around the use of paper for it's vast array of print magazines (8, 9). Last up was Joe Jacobson of the Center for Bits and Atoms to give an update on the latest developments at E-ink, where is is a founding scientist (10, 11). He talked about the new Sony manga e-book, and showed some unreleased video of full motion video running on a greytscale E-ink display. He also mentioned that the second generation of color E-ink displays is coming later this year, and will be impressive to see.

Now we're checking the weather reports on snow and inauguration-related flight delays. Let's hope not.

- mike lee - cambridge, ma