dorkbot.org: dorkbotsf

dorkbot san francisco

People doing strange things with electricity

RSS     mailing list     archives     calendar     blog     tours     press

Images from Spaceman Sam

Video Stream from James Young

time:
7:30pm Wednesday
13 January 2010

place:
Jellyfish Gallery (not its real name)
1286 Folsom @ 9th
San Francisco, CA

Directions

FREE ADMISSION but donations appreciated.

Gallery With No Name

Pavel Machalek - From Pixels to Exoplanet Atmospheres

Hundreds of planets have now been discovered around other stars and for those that orbit their star in our line of sight we can observe them transit in front of and behind their star. I will briefly talk about how observations with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes has enabled astronomers to study the atmospheres of transiting planets and what the near future holds for such studies.

Pavel works at NASA Ames studying exoplanet atmosheres with the Spitzer Space Telescope after getting his PhD in Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. He was born in Prague and lived in London, Dharamshala, Baltimore and now San Francisco.

http://pavelm.com

Camp L. Peavy - Homebrewed Robots

Camp L. Peavy, Jr. has been building robots for over 20 years. Highlights include creating the 1996 autonomous Robot Wars champion "Gladiator Rodney" and the Burning Man ARTBot "Springy Thingy". In 2003 Peavy and others founded the "TABLEBot Challenge" currently in its 8th year of coopetition. He has written several articles for SERVO magazine and earnestly desires total world domination. It all started with a book by David L. Heiserman entitled "How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot". After years of wrestling with this graduate level engineering course Peavy eventually applied Heiserman's "Alpha" level machine intelligence theory to a store-bought PC and is still working on "Beta" and "Gamma" level experiments. Come hear about the three levels of machine intelligence and discover the craft of "Homebrewed Robots!"

http://www.camppeavy.com/

Eric Boyd - North Paw: Haptic Compass Anklet

Augmented reality usually means overlaying information on your visual field. But humans have a lot more senses than just vision, and for something as physical as direction, touch seems like a more natural interface anyway. North Paw is an anklet which contains 8 small vibrating pager motors, a microcontroller, and a compass IC. The original German guy who pioneered the haptic compass idea (in a belt form) reported an unerring sense of direction after wearing it for six weeks. The talk will focus on the details of how the device works and the experience of wearing it. Plus open ended discussion of our cyborg nature and the plasticity of the brain - what other senses do you want?

Eric is an engineer and hacker, transhumanist and environmentalist. Lately he's been building wearable electronic devices which augment his senses. Please join the noisebridge cyborg group: 1pm Sundays at Noisebridge, till the hacking stops.

http://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw

Please mail Anselm Hook (anselm [at] hook [dot] org) or Karen Marcelo (dorkbotSF [at] dorkbot [dot] org) if you would like to open dork (10-15 min mini-presentation)

dorkbotSF mailing list info         RSS

dorkbot.org