TikiRobot! » inspiration

Khan Academy

may — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:38:48 +0000

I just found out about the Khan Academy in the news earlier this week and I think it’s one of the most inspirational projects I’ve seen in a while.

Salman Khan is a former hedge fund manager who single handedly created a whole library of YouTube videos to explain all manner of mathematical and scientific topics to kids in a way that’s easy to understand. He started doing them as a way to tutor his nieces and nephews. Now

…his 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he’s helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can’t afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.

I watched a few of them and I’m totally hooked! When I was in school I always learned just enough math to do well on tests, but then I’d promptly forget what I learned after a test was over. I wished I had someone like Salman Khan as a teacher…someone who made math relevant and interesting beyond a test and who spoke in plain english instead of abstractions.

He’s also got a series on economics and the financial system that I totally plan on watching since I know so pathetically little about how it all works.

There’s more about his project over here.

Blinky lights + Fashion

shag — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:06:59 +0000

Blinky lights and vibra motors plus clothing and makeup equals I Heart Switch. Linked from this article in the NYT.

Update: second link fixed.

Rolling Rubber Stamps

may — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:49:49 +0000

Another lovely thing made with a sharp blade and something inexpensive. Betsabee Romero carved these intricate rubber stamps out of old tires.

Crafty

may — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:12:51 +0000

Look what can be done with some paper, an xacto knife, and glue! By Helen Musselwhite

Bflat Buddha Machine

rajbot — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:31:05 +0000

I went to bed at 2am last night. The alarm went off at 6am this morning . It was waaaay too early to do much other than check the internets, so that’s what I did, and found inbflat.net. This site is magic.

Eventually I realized I had to stop playing with it and do some work, but I wanted to keep listening. So I made the Bb Buddha Machine.

It probably doesn’t work in IE. It brings linux machines to their knees. But I listened to it for at least eight hours today. Enjoy!

2011 update:

Some awesome people have taken the Bb Buddha Machine and modified it to make new versions! Check them out:

Bb Buddha Machine
Dynamic Buddha Machine – a version by curiousjapan that dynamically loads YouTube videos tagged with “In Bb 2.0″ or any other phrase.
noiZe vieW – a version by Peter Heß using his own recordings of his circuit-bent instruments.

Also, I have put the code on github for easier collaboration.

Mind Tricks: Ancient and Modern

peliom — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:43:07 +0000

My new favorite little book. It’s got all kinds of helpful funny things. One of the ideas is to map letters to numbers, then make up nonsense sentences to remember strings of numbers (combination lock?). Of course I used a unix command to come up with the most frequent initial letters in the english language. Then I massaged the results a little.

cut -c1 /usr/share/dict/words | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | uniq -c | sort -nr

Here is the resulting map … let’s go memorize some long strings of numbers!!! oh wait … we have cell phones, nobody needs to remember anything any more :-)

0 s ero
1 u on
2 t wo
3 r ee
4 d oor
5 a live
6 m ix
7 h eaven
8 b ait
9 p ine

93 68 59 79 45 47
please remember milk, bread, and please help piggy drain all drinks hai!

Author Steven Saunders has an eccentric little consulting company but I found this paper ABOUT EMERGENCE an interesting Sunday read.

2000-2008: EPIC FAIL

shag — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:00:43 +0000

finally.

Tracking a Kiva Loan

rajbot — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:03:36 +0000

This is a great video that a Kiva volunteer made to document the path that a $25 microfinance loan made in London took to reach a rice farmer in Cambodia. The $25 loan is paid back in 12 monthly installments of $2.08, and one of the repayments is captured in the video. It’s awesome to see the connection between the people in London who made the loan, the Kiva employees in SF who brokers the loan, the microfinance institution in Cambodia who processes the loan, and the farmer who receives it. Yay Kiva! Our next Amazon check should go towards a microloan!

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

This better work…

rajbot — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:25:38 +0000

C215 in New Delhi

rajbot — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:38:15 +0000

C215 stencil art in New Delhi:

via Wooster