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Posting about Alex's mad science week (note:updated) reminded of the amazing musical he made about August Strindberg, the famous Swedish playwright and absinthe fiend:

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Entirely performed by residents of the Oscar Wilde co-op! ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

My friend Alex thought up something really great, and then, most impressively, carried it out. It was this: Mad Science Week. He's in neurobiology grad school in Boston and so of course knows myriad clever people who are usually very busy hacking on their own particular research. The idea was this: everybody take a week off of the usual grad school research to put their skillz together to accomplish a Mad Science Task, a week together engineering something fun. They did this!

Here's what Alex has to say about it:

Last week was Mad Science Week, an event that's been in the planning all summer. The basic idea is to design and execute a Tobin-esque project in a week, using collective grad school power to do something interesting. Our project consisted of a musical instrument controlled by the power of light. What this translated to was a bicycle light, a webcam, and a software synthesizer. I'll try and get a video of it out at some point, but what's important isn't the project itself, but that we finally did something. A lot of my department is lots of talk and almost no action, so it's refreshing to move past that, and spend a week programming and hooking things up and being frustrated and figuring things out together. Working hard on a project I like is infinitely more rewarding than leisure. I'm crushed that I don't get to work on a project I like all the time.

I'm flattered that he called it a Tobin-esque project, especially since I only rarely work on such things myself anymore!

My friend Alex did a rather unusual thing: he came to Rochester for Spring Break.

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alex is here! we're having an epic time. check out his photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexstorer/ .

four and I made, if I dare say so, an incredible dinner tonight. French onion soup, fresh bread, baked asparagus with olive oil and lemon juice, mashed potatoes, salad, another soup for the vegans, wine. It was quite good, anyway. The bread in particular was a snap to make, about 45 seconds in the food processor to make the dough, and especially delicious smothered in butter.

I received an email today from ladyada saying that my name has come up on the x0xb0x waiting list. hot! i'm pretty tempted to get the thing, a kit for a clone of the original roland sequencer. I happened upon one when

shephi was taking

probablevacancy and I through a tour of the wondrous MIT dorms, and it is a thing of beauty.

this afternoon i attended a lecture on nucleosynthesis, i.e., the first three minutes of the history of the universe, in which things cool down enough to make some hydrogen and helium.

i am daydreaming about my and bree's future trip to california and maybe mexico. i hope i can get to california in time to attend little one's graduation from berkeley.

four's banjo is a thing of beauty too. i haven't seen him play it yet, but bree is amazing on it.

on sunday i am retrieving and installing my hot tub, with a little help from my friends. (I have been bugging people incessantly to help with the move; it does, after all, weigh 836 lbs.)

hypostatization and i may be forming a partnership to rent out a spectacular loft space we recently discovered. it's current occupant is an amazing guy but tragically he's moving out west next month, and we can't bear to see his space slip away. we have no concrete need or use for the space, but the place is so amazing it seems a moral imperative to sieze upon it. our own l0pht will be formed here in rachacha.

Picked up Alex in Basel.. it worked out beautifully.. I arrived there at 09:45, one minute before his train was scheduled to arrive, and was there waiting when he stepped off the train, me after three hours from Geneve, him after an all-night train from Hamburg.

We loitered about Basel for the day, enjoying the sporadic showers and brilliant lightning of a passing thunderstorm. In the sun we walked through the old town, sat at a quiet cafe near kantonspitzen, where the sun umbrellas shielded us from another (welcome) passing shower, and a nice lady paid for our coffee and coke for some reason.

Basel is a triple-point where Switzerland, France, and Germany converge. It was a quiet town, and, wondering where everyone was, we noticed that the stores on that particular street were closed for a four hour lunch break. Open 8-10, 2-4:30. We strolled down along the Rhine.

Drove home via Bienne and Neuchatel, enjoying new views of Switzerland. The area between those towns is particularly nice. Back in Geneve, we went for dinner with the NEU students to a crepe restaurant in St. Genis for several hours of crepe-eating yumminess.

Went to breakfast this morning (i.e. 2:30pm) at Ann's Kitchen with Alex (

probablevacancy), who I dragged out of bed for the occassion. me: patty melt; him: french dip. yummy.

Graded two assignments for CS 70. Almost done!

Slept in the living room last night, as did Jeff and Sam.

Went to the [aftermath of] the Ridge House special dinner. Hottubbing.

okay, to sleep, I think. In the living room.

Saw Robotmedia XIII. Several hours of mindless drivel. Really, out of twenty submissions there was only one legitimate film. Back at Showcase IV there were only a handfull of films but they were all great. Ryan Landes even apologised afterwards via email:

Well first off I'd like to apologize for the crappy audio at last night's showcase. I'd like to apologize to the filmmakers who put in so much effort and then were forced to watch their creations be mutilated by the VLSB speakers. I'd also like to apologize to the audience for presenting a show that was not as good as it could be.

Last night Alex and I went to Adaptation at Wheeler. It's hard to understand the point of the film since there are so many levels of metadrama, but in the end we concluded that it's a pessimistic tale: by selling out, you succeed. The first half is painful to watch—really, watching someone wallow in self-loathing and self-doubt while making no progress on a big, important project is only so entertaining. It certainly hits too close to home for anyone who's had to do as much as write a term paper. Then things suddenly get entertaining with Charlie sells out—goes to the seminar, invents a sappy, fabricated ending with a sex-and-drugs-and-chase-scene plot twist. It's a successful card trick performed in slow motion -- the audience is duped into believing the fabricated ending despite their knowledge that it is a fabricated ending.

The Being John Malkovich reference is funny and adds to the self-reference. Charlie Kaufman really did write the screenplay for BJM and Susan Orlean really did write The Orchid Thief. How much of this fiction is actually true and how much of this is an inside joke? The extent to which the film deals with the trials and necessity of `Adaptation' is successful, and also the seminar man's spiel about how "this really does happen in real life—people do change, etc..." could be taken as a message, but to me it pales in comparison to the selling out. The self-reference is cute and not surprising considering it comes from the same brains that brought you a film that hypothesizes what would happen if someone went through a portal into their own mind.

I've been sick but I'm feeling better now.

I've started making a packing list for my departure.

I saw Bean today and she blew me kisses.

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Mitt liv som Tobin

Experiments in Nomadicity

Entries tagged with alex

best thing ever: stringberg the musical

best idea ever: mad science week

a post for rocwriters

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Robotmedia

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March 2020

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