hacker house dream

I can't help but get excited in this neon class -- just about the whole possibility of making stuff. "Don't ever let money or time get in the way of your creativity," says Brett. But what's even more exciting is all the possibilities. He shows slides of what people have made in the past, the way they've used lightbulbs and neon and LED's, paper mache, mirrors, glass, plywood, posterpaint, even ceramic flowerpots. The craft center is in a low-lying wooden building -- hardly a building at all, actually; with open or glass walls it's more more like a 'framework' -- full of wonderous things. A line of kilns, glowing furnaces full of glass, a small machine shop, a darkroom. I'm mentally pasting these items into my dream house, which is sort of like CZ but with machine tools and kilns and all these tools for fabrication. There's other stuff, too, like beehives and home-made PBX's (I was just reading about ESS7) and solar panels and gardening and even the mass production of food and the sorting of waste. CZ + Tweedy + Craft Center + ... = Hacker House Dream. Matt, it's like a Castle.

neon lesson one

Three hours in the neon lab tonight for my first tutorial! I got my 'toolbox' (which is a toolbox full of various goodies) and then set to work with the first lesson -- joining glass. Basically you take a glass tube, cut it into little pieces, and then try to put it back together again.

The tubes are surprisingly strong, but if you score them ever slightly with a metal file, you can easily and cleanly break them into pieces.

To join two pieces of glass, you put a cork in the end of one of the pieces and you attach a rubber tube to an end of the other piece, and this tube leads to your mouth. You heat the exposed ends of the tube pieces in the flame until they're glowing rather brilliantly, and then you bring them together. By varying the air pressure and by pushing and pulling gently and with repeated cycles of heating you can fuse the glass back together.

But it's quite tricky. Blow too hard or while the glass is too hot and you'll blow the glass up into a little balloon (!) just as if it were some thin plastic. Then it will rupture. The glass becomes quite fluid, so you have to be careful not to stretch or bend it unintentionally.

I did a bunch of trial welds, and got one or two that I was happy with. It's tricky!

Seaborg and Kennedy

Glenn Seaborg on John F. Kennedy:

His Charter Day speech was as eloquent as every speech I ever heard him make. His eloquence was matched with an unfailing wit. He received a tremendous reaction at the White House dinenr he held for Nobel Prizer winners when he made his famous ad-libbed comment: "I think that this is the most extraordinary [collection of] talent that has ever been gathered together at the White House"—we all puffed up our chests proudly—"with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

I'm reading Seaborg's autobiography, Adventures in the Atomic Age (I picked it up for $5 at the UCSD bookstore.. a steal!). It's an engaging read — snappy and to the point yet full of interesting history of Berkeley and the Manhattan Project and all that. He makes it all sound so easy, like "I started graduate school at Berkeley, discovered Plutonium, and then four years later we started four national laboratories to mass produce the stuff." He was something like 29 years old when he discovered plutonium. Time to get busy!!

(I just encountered the line, "Kennedy lent us Air Force One for the trip, and we flew eight and a half hours nonstop... Kennedy lent us Air Force One for the trip. Yeah. "Kennedy once said that anyone who wonders why a person would want to be President hasn't traveled on Air Force One, and after the comfort of that flight -- including taking a nap on the President's bed! -- I understood what he meant." ... "And so I became the second American whom Leonid Brezhnev ever met..." Makes being a Chemist sound not half bad, eh?)

Kennedy lent us Air Force One for the trip. I can't get over that line.

"One evening on the way home, I stopped at the University Club for some exercise. As was customary there, I was swimming in the nude when an attendant told me that the President was on the phone..." You just can't make this stuff up.