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