7 Kinds of Awesome Busy

I have been 7 different kinds of awesome busy lately, although at the moment exhaustion is chipping away at the thick layer of exuberance I've been smearing across my forehead lately. Please do not expect this post to be in chronological order.

Last Tuesday the flow cytometer I needed to get data was broken. So instead I went to Chicago and Milwaukee and drove back in the same night for the Two Hands Project. I also went to Boston for a week at the beginning of the month with absolutely no hotel reservations, just friends of my brotherfriend to stay with. There I met Prime*, who is awesome in 17-8,597 different ways and I'm 97% certain that I'm in love with her now and I can't help it and don't care except that there's a rather inconveniently large physical space between us (1Mm, too big for catapults!). We're trying to figure out how to fold the space between us into technical nothingness, so if you live between Michigan and Boston please be aware that there may soon be a sudden extreme change in the topography of your region. I'm sorry, Cleveland, but Prime sends me cookies and cookies > Cleveland, although it should be noted that I can be bribed with plane tickets now.

I did many other things in Boston, some of them rather unbloggable** now that I know my boss reads this site, but they include surviving biking through downtown Boston traffic with several kgs of computing and goggles and letting complete strangers surprise-dye my hair however they wanted to. They're not strangers anymore and my hair was a very lovely bright pink for about a week when it faded to a strawberry blonde. However, the purple sides did not fade nearly so quickly and now, even after buzzing away the unruly mop that needed trimming anyway, I have a subtle bright yellow blotch on one side of my head.

Regarding blog-reading bosses, I changed laboratories shortly before going to Boston and am quite pleased with the change. In Immunolab, I read papers to actually apply them to the science I'm doing and planning instead of just reading because I'm bored, and doing so matters(!) and this is also awesome even though it has also resulted in a drastic cut in how many PLoS Computational Biology articles I have time to read. I expect to find an equilibrium again sometime as I climb the learning curve.

But as for equilibria, that's been thrown even further off balance by trying to organize a local hackerspace. And that brings me back to the Two Hands Project, but only in a moment. A hackerspace is a place where creative awesome people can come to build their ideas, talk technical shop, imagine, invent, innovate, destroy and re-create whatever they want to. It's essentially a community in a common shared working space with shared tools and parts, and maybe even eventually club-like membership to buy those parts, that fosters creative productivity by pitting like-minded people of completely different backgrounds into their own creative passions. These emerging spaces have the potential to remodel the entire American economy by shifting innovation from closed-source company driven patents to fast and flexible open-source crowdsourced invention. So far we have computer programmers, musicians, roboticists, artists, biotechnologists, cooks, textilers, and other crazily awesome people coming to meetings and generating large numbers of incredible project ideas. However, forming this group involves a lot of email management, community outreach, calender planning, part sourcing, charter writing, agenda creating, etc etc etc and I for that I am grateful that I can rely on most of my friendfamily, who're also all embroiled in this.

And yes, I have a friendfamily that has coalesced. Sister Doom, Brother Discord, Brother Deliverance, and myself, Brother Destruction. These are people whom I can completely count upon to have my back, whom I can trust and who know that they can depend upon me as needed. Sometimes I want to kick Brother Discord in the face, but that's probably because he's also my roommate. Sister Doom and I drove to Chicago and back last Friday to pick up a stranded Brother Deliverance.

But The Two Hands Project is also awesome. As I understand it, Brother Deliverance first came up with the project when he found out that JetBlue was offering a $600 ticket that lets you fly as much as you want from September 8th to October 8th. So he put out a call for donations at http://www.twohandsproject.com and raised enough money for a ticket and people donated equipment, and 2 have even joined him on his bad dash from coast to coast. It was with him and his crew that I (politely and enthusiastically) stormed Pumping Station One in Chicago, went on to interview James Carlson (director of Bucketworks in Milwaukee), and then drove from Milwaukee back to Ann Arbor so I could be back in lab by 10am. Because Brother Deliverance et al are too busy recording footage, flying, and meeting awesome people across the country to keep up the blog at Two Hands Project, they've enlisted me to do it for them remotely. I posted the first semi-polished video from San Francisco's Noisebridge and The Internet Archive*** today here and will be posting a string of profiles of hackers/makers soon.

There're some sweet experiments coming up that I am very excited about, and I just realized that I forgot the slip of paper that has the part name of the low-voltage audio amplifier I wanted to buy from RadioShack tomorrow on my desk in the lab.

I'm not quite sure what to do with Atomic Pudding. On the one hand, I could just use it like I've used this venue and let my awesome shine through, but on the other hand I liked what I was doing with open-access research and interviews, but it was just getting absolute crap page views and as such I'm not sure I was doing very well with it. Thoughts?

I also went out to visit i3 Detroit recently (Wednesday night, I think?) and had mjaddra before that (I think?) after a local maker/hackerspace meeting that Brother Deliverance recorded for the Two Hands Project (I had a lapel-mic, but was probably still unintelligible) and invited them to the free Drupal Web Development class that our as-yet-unnamed space**** is holding this coming Wednesday. And somewhere in here I know I made some really awesome live music with a fellow maker/hacker at a meeting sometime that may have been last night but I can't be certain. Wasn't I in Boston last night?

*Whose intellectual and physical hotness are mutually inclusive and inseparable properties! In testiment to her awesomeness, note that she was the first person to ever convince me of the functional utility of buying clothes that don't need to be modded to fit and has even inspired me to replace the whiskey in my burritos-cookies-and-whiskey diet with vegetables!
**Get your mind out of the gutter!
***Technically not a maker/hackerspace.
****We're working on it!

P.S. - I don't recommend prying all the keys up off your keyboard and rearranging them from QWERTY to DVORAK before you know DVORAK very well. Makes passwords very difficult.

The End of a Naive Love Affair

I have recently come to realize that one man may only have so many love affairs at once. This is not to say that I have been a skeevy philanderer, just that I now realize that I tried for far too much at once. You see, I'm not the sort of man who is satisfied with limpid, lukewarm love affairs. No, I burn for towering, epic love affairs of grand scope and sweep: steamy and heaving and deep. The kind that steal your breath in thunder and inspire epic poetry and symphonies.

The above realization was inspired by a prior, long overdue, acknowledgment that there was one love affair that I had been poking along for far too long, too stubborn and proud to admit that the free-flowing passion had cooled into quiet despair and subliminal frustration. So, logically, I ended it.

Now she stands in a corner of the room, muttering balefully and gathering dust. Sometimes I have echoes of that former lust, the ecstasy of sliding my fingers gently along her smooth mocha neck, feeling her dulcet murmur against me as my hands slid farther below. But I don't care anymore, for I have more important things to do and can no longer afford to waste my time giving far more than I have ever received in return.

I am speaking, of course, about the violoncello.

Figure A: Baby got back!

I once believed I could wear many many hats at once. While this is topographically possible due to rather large size of my head, it is metaphorically unfeasible. I cannot be a punk rock bassist, industrial electronica composer, death metal guitarist, virtuoso cellist, oddly talented visual artist, polyglot, and console gamer all at once. Especially not when I am enraptured of and captivated by the hot and sweaty passion of Science. I realize that, to be a successful Scientist, I must necessarily place my love for Science above (almost) absolutely everything else. Science is demanding and voracious and will cuckold you in the split millisecond you flinch. But I don't care, I will love it anyway.

However, cello is also a demanding love. Of all the instruments I have ever taught myself to play, it has been by far the most difficult and time-consuming. And I simply don't have the time to devote to it anymore*. What follows is the story of my tumultuous love affair with the cello.

Figure B: Apocalyptica. Eicca Toppinen (far left) is a motherfucking genius.

I was inspired to pick up the cello in addition to other instruments by these guys: Apocalyptica. They were a 4-piece cello metal band from Suomi, now they're 3 cellos + 1 drummer. More specifically, I was inspired by the song: "Path, Vol. 2" from the album Cult, which is still, as far as I'm concerned, their most innovative and daring album to date. I was completely captivated by the sound they had managed to beat out of their cellos and weave into an entirely new music, and I damn near wore that CD out. Other notable tracks from this group that have stuck to me are "Wie Wiet" (Apocalyptica, remake of Quutamo), "Kaamos" (Cult), "In Memoriam" (Cult), and "Toreador II" (Reflections, listen for the cello solo after the violins enter and the subsequent riff).

Cello was also a lot more practical to get around than a double bass, although it must be noted that I miss the automatic hipness that one acquires when playing walking jazz bass lines on a double bass (I never owned my own).

Shortly thereafter I found out about Rasputina.

Figure C: Melora Creager, the brains of Rasputina.

Figure D: Zoë Keating.

I got to see Rasputina live when they were just Melora Creager and Zoë Keating and that drummer guy and I still don't know whether or not I was staring at their cello technique or their corsetry. Zoë Keating has also played with Imogen Heap and has her own solo project.

There is also a cello-alt-rock niche, sort of. To wit, this includes Cursive and Murder By Death.

But that's not all I tried to do with cello. I also discovered what an absolute motherfucking badass J.S. Bach was. Dude was the de facto inventor of modern Western musical tradition. I've found that most people remember Bach for The Well-Tempered Clavier and his solo cello suites (which, by the way, are REALLY difficult). However, when someone mentions Bach to me I immediately think about Lara St. John's recording of his "Double Violin Concerto in D minor", perhaps because I was at one point in a chamber orchestra that tried to play this. It is such a frenetic, complex, yet powerful piece of orchestration. I've heard people obsessed with productivity blather about entering the "flow state". To me, that concerto is the flow state, listening to it is like being back in the heady romance of the initial love affair. I have pulled those notes in the Largo movement from my cello, I tried desperately to keep up and not squeak my strings or hit my fellow ensemble members (it was a small stage) during the Allegro movement. I have played death metal in a band, but Bach was so much deeper and more urgent. With death metal you ask yourself about 2 minutes into any song "Wait a moment, what was I angry about again?", but with Bach, there's no question, you're just in the music, part of it, no longer just an individual but a voice.

Without Bach I would've given up on cello much earlier. However, the fact remained that despite what I wished were true, there was simply no good way for me to devote the time to catch up with my cohort who had been playing with lessons for 15 years already. I saw a fellow group of students play Schubert's "Death and the Maiden", and they fucking rocked it. Looking back, I guess I knew right there that cello would never pay off for me like that because I was too late to the party and had too many other loves in my life to devote myself as much as it required.

Somtimes I still feel the cello notes of classical counterpoint bubbling in me, but more often than not that's backed by an industrial hip-hop beat. I mean, I play bass guitar like I breathe, so I don't need cello.

I do, however, need Science. Come hither, my love!

*This does not in any way mean that Toaster is giving up music, just cello. I have every intention of continuing to make music with bass guitar and computer, and I'm sure as hell not going to stop listening to music. Toaster without music is like powdered water**.

**I actually saw a billboard for Powdered Water in Toldeo, OH. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a joke.

Audio Monstrosity #2

Toaster has been up to nefariousness for the past couple of hours (2.5h, to be exacter). This is what inevitably happens when he's left up to his own devices. You see, I have created yet another Audio Monstrosity! But this one is better. Much better! Although it's not finished yet, either...

Anyway!

In this track, I programmed the drum machine myself (I generally don't like using loops), played the guitar myself (which is why it's so bad) and the bass guitar myself (which is why it's so good). I know, there is a buzzing, but I wasn't able to process that out as it seemed to be part of the feedback from the distortion I was using on the guitar. My equipment is rather limited, so I do the best I can.

Here is the track: Mad Scientist Personal Ad!

Here are the lyrics:

Toaster Sunshine, Personal Ad, Take 9

The life of a mad scientist is so sad and lonely
All of my best friends live in formalin jars, you see

So I took out this personal ad
As an appeal to all the hot science ladies
You know, I might be mad
But that doesn't mean I'm all bad
At least not for you, baby
I'm about six feet tall
With a slightly hunched back
Uh, my hair's pretty wild
But, you know, I know that
I enjoy long walks
Through the city ruins
After I've destroyed it
Um, I love the smell of Tesla coil in the morning
Um, my hobbies include orchestrating my enemies' doom
And, building weird devices
The more devices I can fit into one chassis, the better
So I really hope you like electronics
And if you know how to solder, it's a plus

Did I mention I have a zeppelin?
Because it's a really cool zeppelin!

I'm a mad scientist
Lookin' for love
Your legs need to be as sexy as your brain
I'm a mad scientist
Just looking lookin' for love
Want brains so full and curvy
I want your brains wrinkly
I want your brains smart
I want your brains so juicy
I want you in my heart

I'm a mad scientist
Lookin' for love
Your brains gotta be as hot as your legs

Call me.

This one is downloadable!

I have also uploaded a couple of older tracks, "Zombie Cookie" (lyrics: "I am a zombie, give me a cookie!") and "Dishware Flossery".