Boats are judged not only on lack of engineering but also on crummy implimentation. The coveted “last place” award for least effort is the category to watch out for. The idea of Camp Tipsy is to have fun and build boats. Build ‘em outa nothing at all. It’s an excercize in a catyclismic future that Kevin Cosner portrayed so poorly.

More details on the event: Camp Tipsy weblog.

We went to the first one last year (there were two last summer). Here's pics and video I shot:

Inaugural Launch of the Camp Tipsy Bar from Dav Yaginuma on Vimeo.

We had a great time even though we didn't build a boat, but I started idly thinking about what I wanted to build for this year soon after. My first thought was a floating human canon, so you could do canonballs into the lake with style. I have no idea how those things actually work though, and I suspect I shouldn't actually try to build one. Then I thought how about a floating catapult? That seemed doable, but too complicated. In the end I scaled it back to a swingset mounted on pontoons, so you can jump into the water. So that's the plan.

Abstract:

A backyard-style swing set (with a slide and maybe two swings) mounted on two long pontoons with an additional beam or two across the middle for lateral support (also serves as a platform to help get into the swing seats). The pontoons will be wooden enclosures filled with empty containers or foam or whatever can be found.

Concept rendition:

Considerations:

• The whole thing might flip over. Such is life. If that seems likely to happen I guess I'll just try to make the pontoons longer on site.
• Not sure where to mount the slide. Maybe make one pontoon bigger, or extend it for some support. I'm sure some lousy solution will present itself.
• I'd been thinking that it would be nice if the energy produced by swinging was mechanically converted to drive a propellor, but I have doubts that 1) I could pull off implementing such a system and 2) it would provide enough thrust. So there's no plan for propulsion yet, I'll just tow it out with another boat or get a trawler motor which probably will not work either. I'd love to rig a sail, but I think that would be a disaster as well.

I have an alternative concept that would make it so that if the whole thing tipped over due to swinging, it would just land on another set of floats so you could keep on swinging, but the one depicted above is probably good enough and easier to build:

On Wednesday night I went to a class on Flame Effects at Langton Labs (billed as Learn 100% of the technical skills you need to make 80% of the fire art you see at Burning Man) so now I'm thinking it should have propane flame effects as well, but that might have to wait for the next event. Besides, we're totally going to win without going that far.

Gates said there is evidence North Korea has begun work on another long-range missile, but a launch anytime soon remains unclear.

I realized the word 'unclear' strongly brought to mind the word 'nuclear', for obvious reasons. Then I started wondering if that word choice might be a deliberative one. I did a Google News search for the words "North Korea" and "unclear", then compared the results count to many synonyms for unclear that I found on an online thesaurus:

1,610 for north-korea unclear

13 for ambiguous,

80 for dim

26 for elusive

6 for fuzzy

4 for hazy

2 for imprecise

110 for shadowy

531 for uncertain

481 for unsettled

11 for unsure

47 for vague

I also threw in another word that I thought could likely be used instead.

342 for unknown

I don't suppose this answers the question on whether the word choice is deliberative or not (it could be a subconscious choice), but I don't think it is mere coincidence.

Here's Steve teaching the class:

More photos from this trip at my Strawberry 2009 flickr set.

F*ck Oil from Dav Yaginuma on Vimeo.

I snapped a photo of it one day with my iPhone, then this weekend I displayed it on the living room TV (we have an iMac attached) so that one half of the screen showed the original and the other half of the screen was filled with PhotoBooth showing the iSight camera view. I had to set up lights to get the shadows right, but it wasn't too hard to closely match the poses with the side by side display. Mie clicked on the mouse to take our shot. I'm not really pleased with the photoshop work, but I didn't have a lot of time to perfect it.

Mie had the idea to print out our version and secretly put it in the frame in their foyer. I snuck over and gave it a shot, but unfortunately there was no easy way to replace the original in the frame so I had to resort to taping it onto the glass. They found it within 24 hours, but I think it could have gone for a week or more if I could have actually got it under the glass! Here's the two together (after they found it and we moved it):

I used two Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr and one of my own photos of Mie. The background is from Aele and the wings are from ARTchemist*. And of course also the original of Mie. The title is a quote from Joseph Campbell.

Jed drew his breath in with astonishment, his face and torso awash in warm rush of the sunset. He unclasped his hands from the wheel of the aging tractor drawing them back and out at an even pace, as if flinging them in slow motion towards a position of exultation. He didn't exhale as an epiphany rolled through his inner mindscape like a suddenly fallen apple rolling down a sloping blanket of grass, dimpled with roots, seeds and the rest of Nature's miscellaneous detritus.

"None of this is real," he thought, and the moment seemed to last an eternity.

I made a little box with a photo of Mie or I on it for each day and we will put a treat in each one. Hopefully she won't think we've abandoned her completely this way? Parental guilt starting to to get thick...

A moose is asleep. He is dreaming of moose drinks.
A goose is asleep. He is dreaming of goose drinks.
That's well and good when a moose dreams of moose juice.
And nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice.
But it isn't too good when a moose and a goose
Start dreaming they're drinking the other one's juice.
Moose juice, not goose juice, is juice for a moose.
And goose juice, not moose juice, is juice for a goose.
So, when goose gets a mouthful of juices of mooses
And moose gets a mouthful of juices of gooses
They always fall out of their beds screaming screams
So, I'm warning you, now! Never drink in your dreams.

I thought it odd that the otherwise adventurous Seuss was so conservative in dream juice segregation. I mean, come on, fall out of your bed screaming screams just because you drank the wrong juice? Doubtful. I decided to draw a goose dreaming of moose juice on the RV.

I've gone on google hunts (and sourceforge, rubyforge and freshmeat hunts) for this several times but somehow can never come up with one even though I know one must exist. I could probably write one in under an hour using a ruby or perl library, but there has to be a more robust full-featured one than I could do in an hour out there.

Anyone know of one?

I really enjoyed the first of these sorts of photos. It made me want to do a whole series of Last Supper photos, whenever I had a feast and 13 people I could arrange another shot. To facilitate this I want to design and print 13 placards. On one side of each placard will be the original painting, on the other side will be a close-up of one particular apostle (or savior) along with some meta data (name of the apostle, significance in the scene, etc). I could just pass these out in the proper order and very quickly get everyone to self organize for the photo. The whole process would probably take less than 5 minutes.

Then it occurred to me that I should do a whole series of these placards, so that I have one painting requiring N models where N is between 2 and 13. Then I can take a shot at almost any occasion with any group of people. So I'm working on this list of paintings now. The Creation of Adam is a nice one because it is instantly recognizable merely with model positioning (no props necessary to reliably evoke the original) but also you can pull it off reasonably with any number between 3 and 8 or so.

I flipped through a large art history tome and had problems coming up with others for the list though. So many paintings that the average person would consider famous aren't appropriate either because they are landscapes, or too abstract or too simple and/or require a difficult specific background/props to be instantly recognizable (like the Mona Lisa). They need to be realistic portraits of a small set of people with unique positioning. I'm thinking if I try really hard I can come up with maybe a couple dozen of these. Jeremy thinks he can find 100. So far the only other one I've found is Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (N=4). I'm looking forward to seeing Jeremy's list, I could really use some help! Feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

I can look over someone's code and tell if they are a slumming math guy. In other words, the guy who has a PhD in some esoteric math field, but now, for some reason, has to demean himself to coding for a living. Here are a few clues I see in the code:

• You use i, j, k, l as variable names, liberally.
• Your objects have no clear separation of responsibility.
• You pass way too much between functions as member variables, globals and so on.
• You don't make any use of reasonable language features like access controls, statics, constants, or anything like that.
• Your indenting looks like you just smoked some meth.
• You have no problem have three lines of continuous equation with no temporary variables.
• All of your data structures are arrays where each index has a special meaning.
• You have functions to convert between zero based arrays and one based arrays.
• All of the variables in your functions or methods are defined at the top regardless of when they are used.