My Greenport Garden - April 2012

Ajuga reptans

tulips

more tulips

and espalier apple blossoms

Four Busts in Gazebo Location

In this Junaio AR browser photo from the 'inVisible Presence' installation there are four virtual busts next to the close up of a plant from the Gazebo location in the garden of Villa dei Pini. The Bogliasco Fellows from left to right are Flavio Ermini, James Schmidt, Veronica Branca-Masa and Marco Cappelletti. The busts will vary in relative size on every AR viewing.

Benedetto Sicca in Panoramic Aloes

Benedetto Sicca visiting the opening of inVisible Presence finds his bust among the Panoramic Aloes of the gardens of Villa dei Pini. In this photo the bust appears to be a logo on his shirt. Sicca is a playwright, director and actor, and a Bogliasco Fellow in 2011. One of his productions is Principe Jorgos.

Everyone Invited

The Bogliasco Foundation
is happy to invite you to participate

INVISIBLE PRESENCE
AR INSTALLATION BY STEVE BULL
14 - 15 April 2012

Bogliasco Foundation, Garden of Villa dei Pini, Via Aurelia 2, Bogliasco (GE)


Programmed for the XIV Settimana della Cultura,
by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivitá Culturali
Press release
Map and Summary

AR Installation Explanation by Elena Zanichelli

inVisible Presence, Garden of Villa dei Pini, The Bogliasco Foundation, Via Aurelia 4, Bogliasco, ITALY.

Organized within the Settimana della Cultura program from 14th until 22nd April 2012

Curated by the Ministero per i beni e le Attivitá Culturali.

"Augmented Reality Busts in the garden of Villa dei Pini"

On the occasion of the celebration of the 15th year of activity of the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Bogliasco Foundation will open the Villa dei Pini's eighteenth century garden to the public. Located close to the Via Aurelia, which follows the track of the ancient Roman road to the town of Ventimiglia and France, the Genoese style garden features paths with breathtaking views of the Mediterranean from a cliff which goes down to a steep rocky seaside. Since its inaugural year, the Linguria Study Center's garden has hosted strange and stimulating encounters, being a location for both meditation and creativity.

inVisible Presence - Augmented Reality Busts, the installation by Steve Bull, explores the unusual intersection between sculpture in public places and the most modern digital technologies. It will guide the public down the garden path to stop in search of inVisible Presence. These presences will be seen only on the screens of the visitors' smart phones or iPads, showing the busts of academics, artists, writers, novelists, choreographers and professors, composers and architects from all over the world. These busts will talk to the visitors about their projects at the Study Center. While literally geo-localized, these traces or presences are superimposed on the reality of the garden, memorializing research work or artistic endeavour that occurred at the Villa dei Pini.

The protagonists of this “encounter hunting” are the visitors themselves, who are invited to explore the garden and interact with it.

The technology used in inVisible Presence overturns the celebratory and "irremovable” aspect of the traditional bust, not only by making the traces of the presences fluid, but also by adding new information that should stimulate (im)probable discussions and encounters.

To this extent, Steve Bull participates in the contemporary debate about virtual experiments with augmented reality, a technology which enriches our perceptions by electronically addressing information which is not available otherwise to our five senses. He does this by taking an ancient expression of individuality, the bust, and putting it in a traditional location, a garden. By allowing the busts to talk and to be both visible and invisible, he invites the visitors to consider the social impact of virtual reality and the its creative potentialities, both popular and emotional.

The scope of inVisible Presence is to create a network of conversational interferences which can transmit us beyond our culture, the living and lived, the speaking and spoken. It creates a lively experimental laboratory in a micro-political environment of confrontation, discussion and cultural cooperation.

by Elena Zanichelli
Bogliasco Fellow 2012

Translation IT=>EN: Alessandra Natale and Terese Svoboda
AR browser: Junaio

Progress in front of Villa dei Pini

Here is a work-in-progress screen grab from my iPad2. First, I acquire latitude and longitude coordinates from Google maps to postion Pasquale Pesce and Marina Harrison in front of the main entrance to the Villa dei Pini. Afterwards I walk around the site viewing the results. In technical rehearsals next week I plan to make corrections to the busts' orientation that will alter the keystone visual effect the next time a visitor views from this postion.

inVisible Presence

I am installing thirty-eight virtual AR busts in the garden of the Villa dei Pini by a commission celebrating the 15th year of the Bogliasco Foundation. The current fellows that you see as busts in this photo (L to R) are Arni Ingolfsson, Ersi Sotiropoulos and Judith Wechsler. My next several posts are dedicated to my installation process.

Solid Buckyballs in Space

Q: What happens when an interstellar space craft or inner solar system space craft collides with a relatively small solid buckyball cluster?

A: A dent in the hull and minor deflection from course.

"Astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have, for the first time, discovered buckyballs in a solid form in space. Prior to this discovery, the microscopic carbon spheres had been found only in gas form in the cosmos."
- NASA's Spitzer Finds Solid Buckyballs in Space

World Freshwater: Real vs Virtual

The NYTimes article Tracking How the World Guzzles Water
By JOANNA M. FOSTER interests me because I have two half sections that are dry land farmed near Grant, Nebraska.


View Larger Map

The circles on the map show intense pivot irrigation agricultural practice.


T-L Center Pivot Irrigation System

The sprayers under the pivot boom are positioned above the final crop head height. These sprayers are a recent innovation delivering moisture closer the ground. The pivot irrigation practice in western Nebraska requires significant amounts of water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer that is nominally threatened by the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Canadian teens send Lego man off planet

"Two Canadian teenagers have sent a Lego man into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere using a home-stitched parachute and equipment found on Craigslist." reported by Shiv Malik, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 January 2012 11.17 EST Full article with video

Home Companion Reporter - 2012 jan 25

Home Companion Reporter is a telephone service that allows caregivers to reassure family members that their aging parents are receiving quality attention. A quick and easy service, Home Companion Reporter encourages independent living and promotes positive dialogue between caregiver and family members. Messages can be reviewed at the family member's convenience and archived.

Home Companion Reporter is a work in progress and this the current iPhone logo and mission statement.

Algae Culture Techniques

This lecture addresses everything you know about algae but were afraid to ask. Learn about the good the bad and the ugly algae species and find out why this critical base of the marine food chain affects shellfish from birth to death.
Date/Time: Thursday, 1/19/2012 6-8pm, and again Friday, 1/20/2012 2-4pm
Where: Cornell Marine Center, 3690 Cedar Beach Road, Southold NY

I will be there.

Floppy Drives Music: Flight of the Bumblebee

Makes me :)
youtube.com/watch?v=Nrp1PALeWCI

Become An Artist

Happy New Year 2012!
ox, steve

Talking Tea Kettle + Magic + Museum of Moving Image

I am FCP mechanical turk in the production of this video and pal to the artist Terese Svoboda. On Saturday, December 10, 2011 Talking Tea Kettle premiers at the Museum of Moving Image in the opening of their winter show Magicians On Screen. There is a Live Magic Show by Ben Robinson at 4:30pm before Terese's video.

Thanksgiving in Greenport NY

Families join to celebrate Thanksgiving in Greenport NY.
Left to right: Stuart, Terese, Jonathan, Kit, Frank, Seanna, Katy, Felix, Steve
Surnames: Bull, Hollingsworth, Hunt, Svoboda
On a leash: Dixie
Background: Mitchell Park Carousel

My donation to your re-election campaign

Following today's outcome of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, I sent the following email message to ALL the committee members.

[Message begins]
I am an independent voter in New York. I do not make donations to one party over another. I support the various campaigns of elected officials across the USA by individual donations. I am so disappointed by the results of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that I am going to donate some money to the campaign of whomever runs against you in your next election. I am sending this same message to ALL the committee members. You have individually and collectively failed the citizens of the USA. You are not an effective politician. You should no longer continue to represent hard working citizens.
[Message ends]

Members
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), (co-chair) Secretary of the Democratic Conference; Chairwoman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; Vice Chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
(D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; Vice Chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Senate Minority Whip
Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH)
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA)
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), (co-chair) Republican Conference Chairman SHAME: Does not accept email outside of 5th Congressional District of Texas.
Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; Chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation SHAME: Does not accept email outside of his district.
Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee SHAME: His weblink contact creates this alert "This Connection is Untrusted"
Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), Assistant Democratic Leader SHAME: Does not accept email outside of his district.
Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Democratic Caucus Vice Chair SHAME: Does not accept email outside of his district.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), House Budget Committee ranking member SHAME: Does not accept email outside of his district.

NOTE: The House of Representatives' server will not deliver my email message. Anyone in a "qualifying" HoR district is encouraged to forward this posting to them. Thank you.

Brushless Motor vs Brushed Motor

A DC Brushless Motor uses a permanent magnet external rotor, three phases of driving coils, one or more Hall effect devices to sense the position of the rotor, and the associated drive electronics. The coils are activated, one phase after the other, by the drive electronics as cued by the signals from the Hall effect sensors, they act as three-phase synchronous motors containing their own variable frequency drive electronics.

PRO BLDC Motor
Electronic commutation based on Hall position sensors
Less required maintenance due to absence of brushes
Speed/Torque- flat, enables operation at all speeds with rated load
High efficiency, no voltage drop across brushes
High output power/frame size.
Reduced size due to superior thermal characteristics. Because BLDC has the windings on the stator, which is connected to the case, the heat dissipation is better
Higher speed range - no mechanical limitation imposed by brushes/commutator
Low electric noise generation

CON BLDC Motor
Higher cost of construction
Control is complex and expensive
Electric Controller is required to keep the motor running. It offers double the price of the motor.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -



A Brushed Motor has a rotating set of wound wire coils called an armature which acts as an electromagnet with two poles. A mechanical rotary switch called a commutator reverses the direction of the electric current twice every cycle, to flow through the armature so that the poles of the electromagnet push and pull against the permanent magnets on the outside of the motor. As the poles of the armature electromagnet pass the poles of the permanent magnets, the commutator reverses the polarity of the armature electromagnet. During the instant of switching polarity, inertia keeps the classical motor going in the proper direction.

PRO Brushed Motor
Two wire control
Replaceable brushes for extended life
Low cost of construction
Simple and inexpensive control
No controller is required for fixed speeds
Operates in extreme environments due to lack of electronics

CON Brushed Motor
Periodic maintenance is required
Speed/torque is moderately flat. At higher speeds, brush friction increases, thus reducing useful torque
Poor heat dissipation due to internal rotor construction
Higher rotor inertia which limits the dynamic characteristics
Lower speed range due to mechanical limitations on the brushes
Brush Arcing will generate noise causing EMI

Click on images for their source and catalog.
Text source http://www.dynetic.com/brushless%20vs%20brushed.htm

Death Is My Caddy

Death is my caddy and the others
   in my party don't seem to notice.
He proposes the seven iron
   as I play under par.
While I get no holes-in-one,
   Death applauds my long putts.
I can feel Death's hot eyes
   as I wedge out of a sand trap.
Death chuckles when I
   murder the ball.
Death kindly offers advise
   on how I can improve my swing.
I fish some other's lost
   Titleist from the water hazard.
Lightning strikes me down
   as I tee off on the 13th hole.
I will wait for my companions
   at Gabriel's clubhouse bar.

Death Is My Caddy
by Steve Bull, November 2, 2011
for Bert Fraser
Death and Dying Conference
sponsored by AtlantiCare
at Stockton College

RF Sky Rings

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside--no those are not uber-UFO's over the Midwest. There is a logical explanation. However, what is the explanation? The Chinese claim success with their weather controlling efforts. Does this October 12, 2011 weather radar image show some attempts by North Americans? Take a look at the YouTube link and think. Comments/reactions by locals in these areas is most appreciated. Stay well.