Author Archives: jas920
encyclopedia of life poems
Since there’s a Magic the Gathering API, I was hoping to continue working with card text this week, but in a more robust way. But, for some reason I kept getting a handshake error. I googled it, and people suggested using the request library, which I gather is somewhat more secure. I downloaded the libraries, […]
Macrophotography & algae updates
Daily practice: macrophotography The daily task I chose was macrophotography which utilizes the amplification strategy, very literally. I did my best photographing my growing plants with a magnifying lens that was apparently left on the junk shelf. I don’t even know if I’m calling this the right thing because I know so little about photography… […]
Towers of Power: prototype components
Scanning frequencies The perl scanning script required Net::Telnet, which we realized when we finally specified the command. We defined a csv file with the frequencies we want to scan–then by specifying the path to the file and running the code below, the gqrx scan script finds the frequency with the most activity and records when the signal […]
Magic mushroom dictionaries
I decided to continue working with the same texts from last week because I was dissatisfied with their ultimate form. I thought it might be interesting to pick out words based on their length, which would allow me a lot of control over the line length and rhythm. My very ambitious goal was to create […]
Algae
Understanding algae My inquiries landed me on algae-based solution, but I and Marina (who rightly pointed this out after my presentation) wondered “what are the differences between algae and micro algae, run-off algae species and the ones we eat in smoothies?” There are thousands of kinds of algae, and cyanobacteria, green-blue, and red algae are […]
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 […]