8.23.10

First day of class is complete, and I’m not despondent about my changes of actually making it out of here with a degree. Hopefully that feeling with last until the end of the week. In Intro to Computational Theory, I learned about the origin of the word algorithm – from the 9th century Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī. Pretty interesting stuff actually. I’ve also been reading The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas – a pretty interesting collection of essays with the premise that Earth is perhaps best understood as a single celled organism.

Dr. Einsenberg also gave me my first assignment as a PhD researcher in the Craft Technology Lab. I’ll be working on a 3-dimensional input device, whereby one can intuitively model objects by the placement of markers/balls/magnets on a point in 3d space – essentially a grid or set of planes that are computationally aware and can transmit the locations back to a piece of modeling software on a computer. Should be an interesting challenge – I’ll be posting my thoughts/code/pictures under the notebook section of this site.