When Tuiten, a disheveled, youthful 58-year-old, told me the story of how he conceived of Lybrido and Lybridos, there was something sad and funny and metaphorically perfect about it — it was a tale of scientific ingenuity stemming from a young man’s broken heart. Tuiten was in his mid-20s when his girlfriend, a woman he’d been in love with since he was 13, abruptly decided to leave him. “I was — flabbergasted. You can say that?” he asked me, making sure, in his choppy English, that he was using the right word. “I was shocked. I was suffering.” He was an older university student at the time; before that, he’d been a furniture maker. The breakup inspired a lifelong quest to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry and led to his career as a psychopharmacologist. “I’m a little bit — not insane,” Tuiten said. “But. There became a need for me to understand my personal life in this way.
Once upon a time, a boy met a girl. Then a short amount of time later, the boy decided to design and build a ring for the girl, because doing things in the most complicated way possible is just what he does to show the love. This is that story.
It starts off in Jan of 2013 where the idea for the ring was refined to what will ultimately be the final form. Several designs were considered and were rejected because of exotic material requirements, machining geometry limitations or violating the laws of physics. It was a fun exercise to explore potential and unique designs, but at the end of the day, I still needed to make her something that I could present and that didn’t look like it was carved with a spoon.
The final idea was to embed a LED and copper coil assembly inside the titanium ring, illuminating it from under the stones when it was in close proximity to an induced alternating magnetic field (henceforth called ‘the transmitter’). Autodesk Inventor helped me develop all of the dimensions and constraints for the design. Having some help, I was able to obtain her ring size and the rest of the measurements were based from there…
…the original plan was to present this ring to the girl, then take her to a professional jeweler the next day to pick out something more permanent. Well, she insists that I change the design on this ring to make it more permanent and forgo a professionally made ring.
Project Longhaul - KdN - Kokes dot Net
(Previously)
...a culture that was sometimes boyishly puerile, sometimes rigorously hierarchical, occasionally friendly and welcoming.
The definition of success has somehow become running your own start-up. And venture capitalists decide who will get funding, who will get a chance for that success. Venture capitalists are all but explicit in their search: they want a couple of guys who can write an app over a weekend.
(~~~PREVIOUSLY~~~)
How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer’ - Ellen Ullman - NYTimes.com
You can lash back, which I have done too often and which has rarely served me well. You can quit and look for other jobs, which is sometimes a very good idea.
But the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response. Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.
unbornwhiskey:
What must it be like to slick the green hairs of algae across my kneecaps? to breathe in the muddy water? to look into the button-eyes of a massive gar, and to say my goodbye in bubbles? Say, Goodbye, world. Goodbye, gar. In pictures they are needle-nosed and have many teeth, but I do not think they are aggressive. They look impassive. I do not think they would eat me. The carp is king.
Evan Bryson, “Bottom Feeder”
My life improved greatly when I realized I could hear “Weightless” by Brian Eno any time I want, in my head.
colchrishadfield:
Space Onion - came up on the Progress resupply spaceship. We sliced it up and had it with everything - nice flavor!
[Paul Graham] wanted to isolate patterns that portended ill, which he called “negative predictors.” He was already aware of a few — investors tended to be biased against older founders, for instance. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32,” Graham says. “After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.” And Graham knew that he had his own biases. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’ … But after ranking every Y.C. company by its valuation, Graham discovered a more significant correlation. “You have to go far down the list to find a C.E.O. with a strong foreign accent,” Graham told me.
