A year ago, @madscisf was just a crazy dream. Could we create a makerspace and community in SF that felt fun, creative, curious, and most importantly, like home? We created a nonprofit, signed a lease, filled it with all our gear, and started inviting friends to collab and talk shop. The rest is history. Come hang! Every Monday night is MadSci Monday ⚡️ Forever grateful to my co-conspirators @benhylak@mascobot@arramsabeti@greyeverest
Ah, Church of GPT. What started as a joke when ChatGPT was released has now been exhibited in a museum, featured by BBC and CNN, and even embodied as an animatronic Furby with tentacles. It took a village, and in chronological order I am particularly grateful to @bfortuner@auderdy@richddt@urfe23@kowkowkao for helping bring this to life. Swipe for all incarnations, and check him out on exhibit at the @misalignmentm ! Or resurrect your own, the code is on GitHub: tarzain/goodlord 🙏🦑
Baby’s first reel! Enjoy this BTS! Forgot to take a photo of the actual cone at the end 😅 was a crowd favorite and sold out before I even thought of it 🥲
PenPal is an AI writing assistant with a twist 🔀 it reads 👀 and writes on paper with a pen just like you do ✍️📃
It took some gaussian neural network magic to get it to write realistically, but it was well worth it. Once piped together with GPT-3 and some @googlecloud OCR the result is 👌
I had the pleasure of putting PenPal together with the help of @lizzthabet and @florsignol at @itpcamp - a most lovely crucible of creation and play and invention. Miss it more every day 🥲 can’t wait for next year.
Reading about laser resonant cavities helped me discover the incredible optical illusion of infinity mirrors. Pioneered by a number of visionary artists like Yayoi Kusama, I was especially inspired by Anthony James and his exploration of high quality multi-faceted polyhedra. My first infinity mirror was fairly simple and only took about a day to put together, but the result is pretty mesmerizing! I often find myself staring at it for much longer than I meant to.
After post-concussive syndrome showed me a new sensitivity to light, I followed the rabbit-hole to light therapy and seasonal affective disorder. I learned that experts believe light therapy can work, but commercially available lamps are simply not bright enough, so I built myself a 20k lumens, 98 CRI LED SAD lamp, which uses only 130 watts of power. Trigger warning: shades worn indoors.
Inspired by a fellow laser cutter enthusiast at the shop building some tessellated sculptures, I started experimenting with defocusing the laser cutter to make foldable structures. A few hours of iteration later, I had a foldable icosahedron! One day this will make complex polyhedral infinity mirror sculptures much easier to put together.
One of my best friends is a huge space nerd, so for his birthday I built him a replica of the Voyager record plaque in laser engraved gold-anodized aluminum. The frame is laser cut balsa wood with a geometric pattern, and around the record is the Pale Blue Dot speech by Carl Sagan. The back features a personal note.
My good friend lives in a basement bedroom with no sunlight, so for her birthday I built her the best simulacrum of the sun I could. The wooden body comes from a clock I took apart, and the LEDs are the highest density high CRI LEDs I could find. Overall, the lamp looks beautiful and decorative, but fills the room with a whopping 10k lumens of light when turned on.
Mosaic was a magic trick in an app. Combine any number of iOS devices into one big display with just a swipe of your finger across them. So magical we won an Apple Design Award!
Axis was such a fun game to make. In it, you and your opponents wage war over a Cartesian plane. With a UI inspired by old submarine missile radar systems, you need to define the trajectory of missiles you fire at your opponent with mathematical functions 🤓📺📈
