Last week we came across these tiny sea urchinshells at a beach shop, thin and light as eggshells. What to do with them? Light them up with LEDs, of course!
Category Archives: Art
Atomic Cookies!
The basic picture of the atom that many of us grew up with– that of little electrons orbiting the nucleus like so many planets orbiting the sun –turns out to be a little misleading. Reality is somewhat more complicated: a matter of wave functions, spherical harmonics, and ultimately probability clouds.
The chart above shows the appearance of a single hydrogen atom in a few of its lowest excited states.
In each of those states, the electron is found in a different orbital, some of which have unfamiliar shapes. But even the term “shape” is a little funny for something that you can’t hold in your hand. These are actually probability density plots, which show the likelihood of observing the electron in any one position at a given time– and more correctly, 2D projections of 3D probability densities.
So even the humble hydrogen atom can be a bit complex. Fortunately, we have advanced technology that can help us cut though the quantum mechanical haze: Cookies!
These are atomic spritz cookies, made by taking a fairly common cookie press and outfitting it with custom plates.
It’s not quite a trivial process, but the end result is pretty neat: you get to eat the atomic orbitals. Continue reading Atomic Cookies!
A History of the Sky
Ken Murphy’s A History of the Sky is a fantastic art project recording, collecting, and displaying time-lapse movies of the San Francisco sky.
The movies are displayed side-by-side in high definition– one little video for each day –and synchronized to show the same time of day in each movie. It’s simply stunning to see the progression in the length of the days as the seasons change.
Here is Ken’s video introducing the project, still very much a work in progress:
The technical aspects of this project are nothing to sneeze at either, involving weatherproofing a digital camera, tiny and large linux computers, design for high reliability, video processing, and big data sets. Ken’s site has the details. It’s an excellent set of hacks in service of an beautiful project; we look forward to seeing it complete.
Love this project as much as we do? You can help support it through Kickstarter.
Making something useful out of acrylic scraps
From a recent project we ended up with a few hundred scraps of acrylic, mostly in little squares like these. But what to do with all those scraps?
Continue reading Making something useful out of acrylic scraps
Café au lait, with Asteroid
Asteroids (the edible kind)
Roasting coffee at home: a DIY coffee bean cooler
I never really set out with the goal of roasting my own coffee beans, it just kind of happened.
It started a month ago when we got a coffee grinder. Naturally we started getting whole bean coffee, which we used at a rate of about one pound per week. While I’m not (by any standards) a coffee connoisseur, I found myself noticing that the first pot of coffee out of the new can really was just betterthan the last pot of coffee out of the old can– meaning that the coffee quality does actually decline noticeably after just a week.
Now, that’s a minor annoyance, and hardly cause for action. But, two weekends ago I happened to be browsing in a home brewing store (needed champagne yeast– that’s another story) where there were sealed bags of green coffee beans just sitting there on the shelf. Fair trade, organic, and in a number of varieites. Only 5 bucks a pound. So what the heck, right?
It turns out that there’s a common and cheap method of roasting coffee at home: using a regular air popcorn maker. You put the beans in the popper as though they were popcorn kernels, heat them for a few minutes until they’re properly roasted, and then cool them. (You can read the details of this process here, here, here, and here, amongst other places.) This is kind of neat because it doesn’t take much in the way of equipment and it roasts just enough for a big pot of coffee.
The weak point in the popper method is the cooling. The beans keep roasting as long as they are still hot, so many of the sites suggest pouring the beans back and forth between a couple of metal colanders until they cool down. We tried it, and while it did cool them faster than a cookie sheet, it was more tedious than fun. It also seemed a bit silly to use this nice semi-automatic roaster and then turn it over to a manual process for the next few minutes. So, here is our better (if somewhat obvious) solution: a dedicated coffee cooling tower, built from a second modified air popper. Continue reading Roasting coffee at home: a DIY coffee bean cooler
Marmalade is way easier than it looks
While trying to figure out what to do with about 75 pounds of fruit that our citrus trees bestowed upon us in January, we came across an interesting fact: marmalade is really easy to make. People of older generations may know this already, but so far as we knew, marmalade was one of those mysterious things that strictly comes from a jar. It turns out that all you need is citrus fruit, water, sugar and some time on the stovetop.
Peggy-O-lantern
Lately we have been working on a new version of the PeggyDraw program, which is a program that lets you draw things that you want to display on the Peggy 2 for static images. The new version isn’t quite ready to show off this week, which is too bad because we like to put out our Peggies for halloween.
On the bright side, Mark Delp just sent in a program called bmp2peg that’s been added to the Peggy project at Google Code. It converts a (tiny) windows BMP file and generates an Arduino sketch that can run on the Peggy. (bmp2peg runs on windows, and also on linux if you recompile it, macs unknown thus far.) Both bmp2peg and the original cross-platform PeggyDraw can be used to put static images on the Peggy, or to generate static frames that you swap out in the code to build simple animations. The window-friendly pumpkin above was drawn as an image file, converted with bmp2peg, and installed on a Peggy 2 filled with orange LEDs.
Last year at halloween we took a different approach to the Peggy in the window. We took one filled with red LEDs, and every twenty seconds (or so) it would flash the letters “BOO” — huge and bright — and then go dark again. We took a little movie of this last year, showing how that works.
(The flickr video is embedded below — if you can’t see it, click through to see it.)
The video is very dark, but it’s accurate: our street really is that dark on Halloween. You have to walk slowly because you can’t see where the sidewalk is.
You can find more Halloween decor projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
Everyday science: Litmus candy
We picked up some of these blueberry/yogurt candies at Trader Joe’s, which didn’t really merit a mention until we looked at the ingredients list:
Well, now, that is interesting. The last ingredient in the list is red cabbage extract, “for color.” But… red cabbage is one of those pH-indicating substances (Link 1, Link 2), that happens to make a pretty good DIY version of litmus paper.
So… if these candies have red cabbage extract for color, do we really have litmus candy?
Continue reading Everyday science: Litmus candy
