(Roughly) Daily

Tim Fort has a fascination with kinetic art…

To the uninitiated, my kinetic gadgets are gnarly chain-reaction devices that collapse and explode in, like, really cool ways; to the discerning aesthete, they’re mechanically-iterative, entropy-generating entities designed to confront the observer’s pre-conceived notions about Newtonian physics and challenge their paradigms for processing reductivistic-mechanistic Weltanschauungen  from a post-modernistic perspective. (Well, not really…)

Much more than mere domino tumbling, my kinetic gadgets use a wide variety of chain-reaction techniques of my own invention and they have Dalíesque names like Experimental Polymodal Slack-Generating Apparatus #9 and Test Detonation of 0.2 Kilostick Boosted-Yield Xyloexplosive Device #1. Not only can my gadgets collapse and explode in many ways, but they can play music tunes and have animation in them.

The video above– 2250 colored tongue depressors woven together, then “detonated”– is Tim’s largest and most recent; see his others here.

Many thanks to reader CE for the tip.

As we marvel that all is in motion, we might remark that the Homebrew Computer Club held its first meeting in Gordon French’s garage in Menlo Park on this date in 1975.  The HCC was a forum devoted to making computers more accessible to folks-at-large, and included members like Bob Marsh, George Morrow, Adam Osborne, Lee Felsenstein, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. and John “Captain Crunch” Draper– many of whom went on to found (and/or profoundly to influence) personal computer companies.

The first issue of its newsletter was published ten days later, and ran for 21 issues, through 1977.  It was hugely influential in the developing culture of Silicon Valley (e.g., it debuted the concept of the “personal computer”)– and in establishing the battle lines in the industry then still nascent: it published Bill Gates’s Open Letter to Hobbyists, which excoriated enthusiasts of the time for “pirating” commercial software programs, and set the tone for what would become Microsoft’s IP posture.

click image above to enlarge, or here

UPDATE: Further to yesterday’s “The Challenges of Social Media, Part 69…,” from reader KL (a link to reader MKM’s program): “Facebook faux pas for Israeli soldier.”