Witty Name Here

Kicking the tires on this Tumblr thing. Don't be surprised if all this changes.

[morphosis7]

A medical application for rapid prototyping that claims to improve the quality of care - by fabricating a custom cast, the design can accommodate an under-development technique wherein the patient receives ultrasonic vibrations (Low-Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound, or LIPUS) at the site of the break. Because the treatment requires access to the skin, the cast needs to allow access in a way that traditional casts don't allow. As an added bonus, fabricating the cast via these techniques address longstanding drawbacks with comfort.

[morphosis7]

Protovis has been superseded by d3.js, but one of the examples I found most compelling from that platform was the Job Voyager. This tool allowed users to dynamically filter a time-sequential dataset - the demonstration was to display self-reported occupations from census data going back about 150 years.

Type "farm" in the filter box to see farming occupations disappear from the labor force. Other interesting filters are "type" and "secr".

I am not (yet) literate enough with d3.js to recreate this display, and haven't seen it surface yet from anyone else. I'm tempted to use this as a model, however, for a dataset that we are collecting of terms that run through our search interfaces.

[morphosis7]

Continuing to kick the tires on the MakerBot 2 replicator we're evaluating - this is a model of the Stata Center here on the MIT Campus. The source model (by 3Done) was downloaded from the SketchUp Warehouse, exported via Blender into MakerWare, and printed with minimal cleanup (there were some floating window frames off in space around the building, and some trees that needed to be deleted).

The total print time was an hour and 12 minutes.

This was perhaps the tenth model I've produced on the MakerBot - photos of some of the other models will be coming soon.

[morphosis7]

A Minecraft Library Scores Big: Mattituck, NY, Branch Is a Hit with Kids - The Digital Shift

Minecraft, and Second Life before it, is an interesting immersive world. Personally, I love playing it.

I get nervous, however, when institutions try and engage a platform like this on an "official" basis. Space is tricky to work with, and not everyone can do it well. I've seen too many bad implementations like this, where organizations badly translate real-world buildings (that weren't well designed to begin with) and in the process kill what little was good in the space to begin with.

To be fair, however, this project seems to be one of those that bucks the trend. I'll be curious to try and find the library server to poke around myself.

[morphosis7]