For a recent video-game costume party, I made a Tron Jacket! I've always wanted to make one, and things finally came together for it. I got an awesome (fake) leather jacket at a RoboCop remake props sale, and then this party popped up on my radar, and I knew I had to do it! There are lots of interesting examples of Tron Jackets on google image search. I tried the reflective tape idea, but I didn't like how it looks close up, and it's also highly dependent on the illumination in the room (works best in black light!). I also played with EL-strip, which is awesome because it's wider than than the EL-wire, but I found that the lamination was so inflexible that actually working with it on clothing was basically impossible. Despite hints here, I couldn't figure out how to cut and resolder it (basically the interior is made of paste, so soldering to it directly certainly doesn't work), and it doesn't bend, so I think it's basically only suitable for long linear strips, like on a car or bike or something like that. Anyway, with those two options out of the way, I settled on EL-wire for sure. So I bought 2x 10 foot lengths of white EL wire at Creatron, and associated inverters/battery holders.

At the insistance of a friend, I decided to do it non-destructively, meaning: I can't sew the EL-wire into place using clear thread, which is the best way to hold it in place. I walked in a local sew shop and asked the owner there about how to attach things to leather, and he sold me what he called "leather double sided tape". I tested it on the fake-leather and it does indeed stick things good, but comes off without leaving a mark (or even sticky patch, it kinds of rolls up under heavy friction). Then I traced some patterns on the jacket with reference to some of the images online, and started putting the EL-wire unto the jacket. I put the inverters in the front pockets and had to make six holes in the end: out of battery pocket, then up and around to back of jacket, then into the interior, and back out for the circle on the back, that's half, double it for the other side.

Over-all the effect is great, I got a lot of compliments at the party, in the dark it's super convincing. In better light, you can totally see the glue, and the black tape I used in places to make the circles stand alone (with no connecting light). And the glue proved to be more temporary than would be really desirable - the EL-wire starts to lift off in places after a couple of hours, and by the end of the night it was getting impossible to have it not lifted somewhere. Still, I'm happy to have my jacket mostly non-damaged, so it was the right choice. If I ever get a second leather jacket though I totally want a full-time Tron Jacket!

You can see many shots of the jacket, including in-process shots, at my Tron Jacket Flickr Set. Total cost of this project: about $100, and 10 hours of time (of which about half was design/prototyping, once I was going with the double-sided tape & EL-wire, it was pretty quick). Plus jacket, of course :-)

Sorry for the long haitus, I've been super busy with far too many projects. One of them was a talk I gave at TEDxOCADU, an extremely well put together event held at OCADU, a local design and arts university. My talk was on DIY Cyborgs, the idea that we are all capable of augmenting ourselves, in fact that we do this all the time, it's basically human nature. Technology is just making that more obvious. You can see some really cool illustrated versions of my talk that were produced at the event: one by Sacha Chua and one by Patrica Kambitsch. You can see the illustrations for all the talks at the Experivis archive of TEDxOCADU. More updates soon!

So this is a couple months late, but back in September I attended my dad's annual Mushroom Forey. Just like last year, we hiked the Bruce Trail across the street from where they live, it's a large wooded area which includes some of the last old growth forest in southern Ontario. Check out my complete flickr set: Mushroom Forey 2012. The forey was later this year than is typical, but we found roughly as many mushrooms as usual, including a large set of edibles. In particular we had three different "tooth" mushrooms that were all super yummy! Unlike last year though I don't remember any particularly stand-out non-edible - though there sure were a lot of slime molds out!

I attended the Quantified Self Conference 2012 last weekend, it was a total blast! I learned a lot, and I have a huge list of todo's from the thing. Small flickr set. I'll post my complete notes below, but some serious highlights for me:

• Quantified Mind kicks butt
• Dual N-Back does lead to permanent improvement, but it's not just you: everyone finds it super frustrating! Dave Asprey says in fact that everything he's done that has lead to serious improvement in mental functioning was super frustrating: maybe that's the brains experience of stretching itself?
• Heart Rate Variability is easy to measure, and gives you insight into stress and other things that you wouldn't suspect you could see with heart data! It should be fairly easy to add some of this to my Heart Spark
• Nancy Dougherty made a super awesome smile detecting device which lights up a chain of LEDs, to inform her conscious brain when she is smiling: awesome! Uses EMG, shouldn't be too hard to duplicate!
• B.J. Fogs behavior model - a habit consists of a trigger, a routine, and a reward. Trying to change or add a habit, you can't do anything with the tigger (e.g. hunger, stress, etc), you need to make a new routine, which is integrated with a similar reward. This is fascinating and totally actionable!
• The Quantified Doctor - discovered that he needs a third member of the medical team (in addition to Doctor and Nurse): the quant coach. Helps you design and run experiments, learn devices, handle data, basically do all that preventative care that the current system doesn't handle well...
• Finally, Kevin Kelly called out the North Paw during his wrap-up plenary, and said that really what we want from our QS devices is not that data, what we want is new senses, exo-sense, to perceive directly all this new information about the self.

And so, so much more, I learned a lot! My full notes (sorry they may be kind of impenetrable, they are notes I made for me):

Quantified self conference, Sept 15th, 2012, Day 1

Coffee is protective against depression?
Minutes of meditation per day - good proxy for whether he is having a good day.

When you skip a day, or more, you loose confidence - academically called "loss of self efficecy"
Gary plotted inverse of meditation plot - days missed, longest skip, per month: turns out his skipping is seasonal!  Now he doesn't loose confidence!

What is a computer for? The answer has been changing, it's now very personal!

It's not the bigness of the data that matters, it the ourness of the data.  The outliers are the most interesting bits, they are not mistakes!

What if it's data all the way in? Data all the way down.

Technologies for mindfulness, Nancy Dougherty.
Tracking your emotions really changes them!  Aka, mindfulness really works.
She build an EMG device that activates a string of LEDs when she smiles - real smiles, she put the electrode up by her eyes.
"help sparkle me out of whatever funk I'm in"
She wants her sparkles to make her more like her dog - bringing happiness to herself and others everytime she meets someone.

Dave Asprey, talking about using software to exercise your mind, grow your focus
Dual n-back, he claims 10 iq points if you can stick with it, but super frustrating!
Calmness generates better thinking, recommends heart math 
Some claims that you should NOT use chunking on dual n-back, be more intuitive
He claims the benefit persists even if you stop doing it.  But it will make you super angry while you are doing it.  You need to let go in order to do well.
He also recommends feedback as you play, rather than only getting feedback at the end.
All of the things that improved his IQ he found super difficult and emotional - something about this stuff really pushes your buttons.
Active vs passive mode of your brain - more like a slider switch, how can we learn to better remember what our brain does in passive mode?  He has a counting app to be used while blindfolded with audio that forces your brain into alpha mode.
I3mindware - fun but doesn't think it works very well.  Brain workshop is the open source one that is good.
He recommends walking meditation, breathing, increasing your heart rate variability.
He is writing another book, partially about "threat response" stuff in your brain.
The heart math training allows you to turn off the threat response stress system, that's what the training is for!
The things that you pay attention to, you get better at.  He's impressed with the smile detecting device.
Neural programmer 2: software with sound training.
There is EMDR software.
Emotional n-back - squares have faces, words have emotional content - it's supposed to improve your emotional regulation.
Toba score - a measure of your ability to pay attention.
Most surprising - gratitude and forgiveness really required to get IQ improvements.  Not just mentally - has to be more than you pretending.
Biocybernaut testing - 10 day $20k retreat to do neural feedback training.

Ignite talks
A factory line of awesome
Doctors - reactive and paternalistic

Habit session
The muggle chasm - QS right now is for male geek wizards.  How do we cross the chasm to regular people.
He thinks "behaviorism 2.0" is the best thing for habit design.
Conditioning the environment to support the new behavior - shoes by the side of the bed
Exponential fee structure if you don't follow through with your habit
He no longer believes that gamification can lead to behavior change - it ultimately backfires, especially anything involving unbroken trends, etc.
Triggers like timers and alarms as things to hang habits on, eg calling friends.
B.j.fogs behaviors model
Book: the power of habit
A habit follows a que, then a routine occurs, and then there must be a reward.  Without all three, the habit will not last
Book: the will power instinct
"the science of small wins"
Negative habits - replace the routine, but not the que.  E.g. Eating cookies, keep the hunger queue, but replace cookie with socializing in cafeteria: same reward of getting out and seeing people.
Anchor habits - the big things in your life that happen every day.  Many routines are triggered based on the structure of the day, e.g. Getting up to go to work

Qs show and tell
600 nights of sleep data
Sleep charts are like fingerprints
Zeo is her mechanical mom
Best thing she learned - see the hidden part of you! (when you are asleep)
Www.lauriefrick.com - she tells how to visualize your sleep like she does - lines of color

Stephen Cartwright 
Visualizing data using mechanical systems with ardunio - cool programmable bar chart and 3d chart thing.
Really cool vizualizations of where he has been - GPS data for 15 years!

Seth Roberts
Brain tracking: what I've learned recently
Humans enjoy making skilled movements
People are innately specialists.  He has a theory of evolution about how hobbies were the stepping stone in our evolution from everyone making a living the same way (like any other species of animals) to everyone making a living in a different way.
A sign that you are omega3 deficient: bad gums

Body transformation
Wanted to live a more brauny life
Three types of motivations: vanity (looking good naked), performance (eg at sports) and health.  He claims health is less common!

Adafruit sells a $30 polar chest strap, new this week

Sunny Bo, with misfit ?.  Amar works with MCten
Sunny is looking at accelerometers, pressure sensors, GSR.  Things that you clip on your clothing, and things that you would wear but not strap on - no skin contact.  One of the great possibilities for wearables is real-time feedback.  E.g. Real time GSR sound feedback to overcome elevator phobia.

Amar is thinking mostly about the power that the sensors take.  Stickers, band aids, tattoos.  Conformativity to the skin is super important for them.  Looking at preventing injuries in athletes, e.g. Looking at hydration.  They want to eliminate the compliance issue. They plan to scavenge power from your cell phone.



Quantified Self Conference, Day 2, Sept 16th 2012

Cognitive measurement - by quantified mind people.
Yoni first got into this because he wanted to stop aging.
Trying to build stuff that is repeatable, fast and efficienct.
Did a year of research in psychometrics
They have also been doing brain scanning stuff (open source) using the emotiv.
They have been experimenting the doing tests while wearing it, and recording the data.
Have managed to increase alpha doing this.
The emotiv puts pressure on your head, Jacob says he can only wear it for about 15 minutes before it becomes too painful.
Yoni says that he can't think of a test on quantified mind that isn't heavily G loaded
Analogy between muscle testing and mental testing - its hard to measure your strength without depleting your muscles, and ultimately making them stronger.  But the mental change due to testing seems a lot faster than they change in muscles - and this does matter.  It complicates things if you do multiple tests in a row, does it matter in other ways?  There doesn't seem to be anything practical we can do about it.
Analogy to early days of AI - we are probably naive about how much will actually be possible with simple tests in terms of cognative measurements.  But continuous measurements like EEG offer some small hope...
Processing speed, executative function, working memory, several other things
He hasn't been able to make a repeatable test for creativity, despite lots of research...
Commenter suggests using mechanical Turk to get human judging of such a test...
Practice effect - he has a huge data set of 100,000 people doing tests repeatedly, and it turns out the practice effect is better modeled with plateau and burst than power law.
Can you use the practice effect itself as a test?  Totally, he has seen some stuff on this.
Quantified mind was built to measure, but he can get a lot more users by claiming its a tool to improve!

Ignite talks
Hind hobeika
Shutterfly swimming adapted pulse rate sensor, adapted from open source pulse sensor, uses rgb led to display in corner of vision.
Butterfleyeproject.com

Automated activity tracking
How to not drain battery?  Bursts, adaptive sampling, upload strategy

Natalie mckeever, internal worlds - other species

iPhone rhythm strip
Clinical implications of wireless and ubiquitous heart rate monitoring

Ellie's log
Quantified baby 

Human systems debugging
Fluxtream

The quantified doctor
Started "my doctor" private practice
Needed "quant coach" on the medical team to help patients self track
Quantdoctor.com

Heart rate variability.
RR intervals - the time between beats of your heart
30 years of research on it, 5000 papers in NIH alone
There are studies comparing chest straps to real EKG in terms of HRV, polar and ANT+ are both good these days
HRV is created by tug of war between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system.  It's trying to keep a more constant blood pressure, and other things.
Vageltone corresponds to HRV, Vegas nerve
Even athletes with low resting heart rate but low HRV can have heart failure
HRV is measure of your adaptability
It has a circadian rhythm - lower at night
Age, gender and ethnicity dependent!  Declines with age, of course
HRV is also a proxy for will power!
Time domain, frequency domain and non-linear measures of it - a whole series of acronyms.
Time
SDNN = standard deviation of NN which is similar to RR 250ms to 50, 25 is cutoff for sudden death, done on 5minute window
RMSSD root mean square
PNN50 percentage of intervals that are not different by more than 50 ms
frequency
Low LF  - .04 to .15 sympathetic
High HF  .15 to .4 parasympathetic
Looking at the balance of the nervous system - LF/HF ratio.  <2 is great. In morning, close to 1 or a little less than 1.  If you meditate, or do coherency training, it all goes into LF (.1hz, called the meditators peak), very little in HF, so it looks bad.
Non-linear
Pretty plots, fractal stuff, obviously different in different states.  Wavelet analysis.
There is actually research showing (dean ornish) that there is causal change in improving your HRV to improve your heart health.  So it isn't just an indicator
eustress - good stress that motivates us to do things - still associated with high HRV, you're in the zone
They have an app: Sweet Beat.  Beathealthy.com
Open source data analysis - kubios.  It's a tool you can get and import HRV time series

Jo Beth Dow  - heart rate variability show and tell
green exercise - in the park 
Alcohol is terrible for her HRV and makes her resting heart rate higher too - even just a glass or two 
Quantified marriage breakdown
She thinks the weight loss helped lower her HRV 
HRV is low when you are exercising, cause the beat to beat time is so low already. 

Elliot Hedman, GSR during a concert
Noisy to quiet - all three people responded
He was the only person to respond to xylophone, he used to play it
Any transition, e.g. To whispering, gets peoples attention
Buildempathy.com
Emotional stuff - look into core affect at MIT media lab.  

Lisa betts-LaCroix
What i learned about tracking by tracking
Behavioral tracking + weight tracking = success.  Weight tracking alone does not work!
Tracking weight is really just a proxy for mindfulness about your life.

Jonas on spaced repetition
SuperMemo
Uses a scanner to grab sentences from things he reads, puts definition into SuperMemo.
Familiarity increases interest
12500 flashcards, 50 minutes a day, 90 minutes on the weekend
He is now using it to memorize poetry!
SuperMemo is not for learning - you need to learn it first, then review to remember with SuperMemo

Free posters at the registration desk!

Project lifeslice
The onion: 90% of time spent staring at glowing rectangles
What how learn next (these are the three QS questions + typical follow up :-)
Webcam snapshot photo
Taking photo/ screenshot once per hour is actually a good productivity hack!
Code is on github
Wanderingstan.com/lifeslice

Kevin Kelly: "your mission is to discover your mission"
The quantified century
Documentary: the century of the self
Extended self
He thinks the quantification is a step on the route to new senses - like North Paw
Exo-senses
We'd like to just perceive the data, as a sensation
2x(n=1) > n=2, but probably this only extends into 100s, not thousands
Quantified community
New ways to measure, new things to better
Data = new gold (including bubbles and hype)
Information wants to be linked
Surveillance is proportional to personalization

Hacklab.to exhibited at the Montreal Mini Maker Faire this past weekend, we drove up with a carload of stuff and people and had a total blast! I showed off my sensebridge stuff, we brought the flipdot display, and we had two 3D printers, hacklab's makerbot industries cupcake, and a prototype of PandaBot, a 3D printer that some friends of mine have been developing (kickstarter soon!). My Montreal Mini Maker Faire Flickr Set includes some shots of Foulab as well, which we visited Saturday evening. On a final note, we used AirBnB to find a place to stay, and it was AWESOME, we got a great house with four bedrooms only about 2 miles from the faire venue, only a block from some great restaurants on Sherbrooke, it even came with kittens! All that for only ~$100 a night, incredible deal.

As usual with a maker faire, there was tons of interesting stuff to see, including the lego-based WALL-E pictured right, some awesome tiny "ladybird" quadcopters, some cool steampunk stuff, a lot of great 3D printers (including some RepRaps by Foulab, the Up!, and an Ultimaker), several clever interactive motion-sensing games, and most mind-boggling for me, games of Muggle Quidditch. I kid you not, apparently it's been adapted for play by us mere muggles, and includes bludgers (dodgeballs), the snitch (a player dressed in all yellow who can use an area of play as big as "campus"), and of course the three hoop nets. Is there no limit to how silly a sport can be? For fans of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I think it's worth noting that actually catching the snitch is apparently worth only 30 points in Muggle Quidditch, so the game is more balanced!

Surprisingly, I haven't blogged much here about the Toronto Awesome Foundation. We're still giving away $1000 every month to the most awesome idea. Pictured to the right is a recent winner showing off her rainbow flame gun :-). For Canada Day, the harbourfront center gave us a tent, and we held court all day, check out the photos, Video of the Pitches, Video of random fun. I've been doing all this video editing, which is a new thing for me, certainly gives me a new respect for making movies, since I know how much work a 5 minute video is! For those of you into guerilla gardening, there is also a video update from Terry on the Toronto Guerilla Gardeners. Other recent winners include: StopGap, the complete street band, Dr. Cornelius von Martlehüp’s Fantacular Tent of Spectastic Oddities, the love lettering project and numerous others... I'm having a lot of fun as dean, but only because I have a lot of great trustees who so most of the real work :-)

As mentioned in the previous post, once again this year I am the downtown coordinator for the Toronto Guerilla Gardeners, which means that I get to pick the spot in the downtown area that we will garden, and coordinate our efforts on the day of the plant. I did this last year as well, so I've had all year to plan our refresh of this garden.

I borrowed a small rototiller from Byron, because I knew from last year that the ground is super hard and in need of work - last year we spent two long hours with shovels to prepare just a small zone. This year, with the help of the rototiller, we were able to prepare about half of the entire lot!! The soil sadly isn't very deep: about 4 inches down, there is a very hard gravel-based subsoil, which is best left as is. We added about 8 bags of soil (thank you Toronto Awesome Foundation, some of your money well spent! Also thanks to Terry and the Guerilla Gardening Mobile, for actually doing the leg work on that), plus we moved a 3 foot stretch of soil from the ungardened area into the gardened area. The combination of those those two got us a workable amount of soil over the whole prepared area.

Which brings us to: donated plants! Thanks to a wonderful donation from now non-anonymous Sheridan Nurseries (thank you!) of as many Iris's and Astilbe's as we wanted (they had 1000+ of each), we got 13 big boxes of perennials. This is what allowed us to dream so big this year! Thanks to Linda's awesome direction and knowledge, we made a rivers and islands layout for the garden, which turned out so beautiful. Combined with the awesome black mulch, the garden looks incredible and alive.

The final touch was the fence. Ewan and Christopher and I spent the morning building fence pieces, and once again it just takes the garden that extra mile. It also clearly marks the garden out as a special zone, which should keep the drunk people from tramping through it. I'm absolutely overawed at what we managed to accomplish in a single afternoon - it went from looking like an abandoned piece of land, to looking like a well maintained front-yard flower garden, and sooo many of the neighbors stopped by while we were working to say thank you. We asked them all to help us keep the garden watered, hopefully they will! See the complete flickr set: Guerilla Gardening Downtown 2012

Thanks to everyone who came out, I for one had a fabulous time and I know that this kind of thing can't be done alone, it's best done with friends!