Monthly Archives: February 2017
Final updates
For the final Marco, Dorothy and I going to work on demodulating frequencies that use APCO Project 25. We’d like to see if we can decipher (1) whether communication is occurring and potentially (2) the information being transmitted. We’re not sure if communications might be encrypted but this itself might be useful information. If we have […]
Tap: Mushrooms
This week for our assignment on cut-ups, I decided to mash up the text of about 30 Magic the Gathering Artifact, Enchantment, and Instant cards and the recipes from Student’s Hand-book of Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous by Thomas Taylor. I picked arguably the best cards from these categories from the Magic Card database, […]
Limits to Growth Proposal: Algae Brewer
Updates I met with NYU professor David Kanter last week and had a very helpful discussion. His work is focused on the nitrogen cycle, but nitrogen and phosphorus have a close relationship given their role as fertilizers. One important difference is nitrogen is renewable and phosphorus is not. He pointed me to the Planetary Boundaries update supplementary materials […]
Proposal & Ad
Updates This week I learned about the green revolution, which increased world-wide food production and fed masses of people, but resulted in inefficiencies to the extent that more energy is being used to produce food than its output. I also learned about the haber-bosch process–its use in industry is responsible for massive amounts of ‘nitrogen fixation.’ […]
SDR, digital voice & P25
This week we used our SDRs and gqrx to listen to different frequencies. There’s some playing around required with squelch and gain before you can actually listen to something. I looked at radio reference to find radio frequencies used for communications in NYC. These communications happen on narrow FM. If you type in the frequency and […]
Rare earths in things
This week I spent some time learning about rare earths, which have very obscure element names but are ubiquitous. All their names end with the same few letters which seemed like it might lend itself nicely to computational manipulation. I wanted to play with the scientific taxonomy and naming conventions of these strange elements, the […]
Project sketches
Reading “contaminated soil” described as Mel Chin’s “sculpture medium” in To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet made something click. Of course soil is central to the problem of exponentially increasing phosphorus use, but I hadn’t thought of as a ‘medium’ in itself. I was immediately reminded of the image included in Liu, Tang, & Li’s […]
P recycling research & references
[updated 5/7/2017] Articles Roy, E. D. (2017). Phosphorus recovery and recycling with ecological engineering: a review. Ecological Engineering, 98, 213-227. doi: 10.1016/j.ecoleng.2016.10.076 Bradford-Hartke, Z., Lane, J., Lant, P., & Leslie, G. (2015). Environmental benefits and burdens of phosphorus recovery from municipal wastewater. Environmental Science & Technology, 49(14), 8611-8622. doi: 10.1021/es505102v “Overall, mineral depletion and eutrophication […]
Built to Last: ch.3-4 response
I used to think I didn’t understand the motivation of for-profit companies, but now I think I understand it even less. If part of what makes a company ‘visionary’ is its pursuit of varied goals and a ideals, then what’s the point of being for-profit? I understand that making money is important for the continued existence of […]
OpenVPN
This week we made a device a client of the Towers of Power VPN–I used the virtual box we set up last week. Downloading openvpn and running the ssh server were pretty straightforward. The ps command allows you to see a snapshot of current processes. After creating the client.conf file and leaving my cert and […]