May « 2009 « Michael Doornbos

31May/091

We like to move

My wife and I are creative people. We're creatively different (you might say opposite) but often known as people with the ideas. I didn't say "all the good ideas", just "ideas".

We like to change.

Your brain is wired to recognize patterns. It's very very good at it. The lazy thing for your brain to do is to recognize patterns it knows. Reinforcing those patterns. Staying stationary, both mentally and physically is not good for creativity.

When you have new experiences, your brain creates new patterns and reconnects and rewires old ones. This is why you often have "ah ha" moments if you leave your home or office to go for a walk while pondering something. Your brain is seeing new things and it is in the mode to make new connections. If you bring your thought with you on your walk you bring it into this rewiring process.

We like to move. We like to meet new friends. We like to go to new places and try new things. We do it because we love being creative and keeping our minds in that new connections state.

This is often problematic for the relationships with our friends. Our desire to always be on the move creates a significant barrier to long term friendships. Lately, we've managed to reconnect with some old friends via the internet that we lost touch with because of our movement. The Internet is great for that, but it's not quite the same as being reunited in person.

We've been in the same area now since 2002. This is a very long time for us. We did move across town in 2006, but it really didn't satisfy that need to move.

We've decided to spend the summer exploring what's next for us. I'm not certain that a move is in store this year, but I do know that we are both making major changes. Long term it might mean staying here and just traveling a significant part of the year, or it may mean picking up and moving.

Whatever happens, I do know that this summer will be a great time to explore new things and I'm really looking forward to what we might uncover.

Filed under: Ideas, Think 1 Comment

27May/090

Remember the show “V” from the 80′s? Yeah, it’s back.

As we all know, any aliens we encounter will want to eat us which makes for good SciFi.

Was that Elizabeth Mitchell I saw? Sweet.

Filed under: video No Comments

20May/094

Science Funding Explained, SMBC Style

Filed under: Comics, Cool Stuff, Funny 4 Comments

7May/090

Power to electric motors from a digital controller is never easy

Hooking up 2 electric drive motors seems like a simple task on the surface, but never is in practice. Here's my mockup of a circuit I'm going to use. The meat of the control circuit is an L293D Quadruple Half-H Driver. Now that the breadboard prototype is working, it's time to assemble the thing permanently on a printed circuit board. Leave a comment if you want the schematic for this, it works pretty well with no noticeable gitter thanks to a bunch of capacitors.

Filed under: Robotics No Comments

5May/091

Everything’s amazing and nobody is happy, Part 2

Louis CK revisits his famous Conan appearance and reassures us that while all the examples he gives of our cultural impatience are actually him, he also thinks we're a shitty generation. Not a shit generation, though. Just shitty. If we had jetpacks, we'd think they were the crappiest jetpacks out there.

Filed under: Cool Stuff, Think 1 Comment

5May/090

It’s time to make the robots

I'm building a small robot this week. We're calling him Evadotbot (Caleb came up with that).

He's pretty simple, a two motor gearbox will control 2 wheels, the 3rd being a caster wheel so he can spin in a circle. He's controlled by a simple motor controller chip and powered by 4 AA rechargeable batteries.

His "brain" is an Ardunino Duemilanove which has a whopping 32k of memory. If you're not a computer geek, think about that Commodore 64 you could get in 1981 and divide it's RAM in half. Or, go to the It's shown here in it's "skull", aka an Altoids mint box.