Thanks all to everybody who came out, especially to our fabulous djs Mike Evans and Steve Best, and Erik Gilling who supplied the sound system.

If you pay attention to the timestamps in the bottom right corner you can see she spends almost 20 seconds fixing her hair in her reflection in my car window.

One from the archives.  This is from October 25, 2008, when I was at the Oakland Produce Market (near Jack London Square) very early in the morning on a field trip for my son’s 5th grade class.

August 26, 2009, on Poplar St near West Grand.  Concertina wire from a rare perspective.

Pier 17, with Treasure Island in the distance.  Wednesday, September 23, just before going into Tcho Chocolate to attend Dorkbot.

Timothy Childs talks about making excellent chocolate.

Mark Pauline describes his spinebot project.

Mang (Michael Ang) talks about photons, art and nature.

I had a great time last night attending Dorkbot SF, hosted by Tcho Chocolate.  Between the intense geek energy, the overpowering chocolate aroma, and the keg of Fat Tire, the atmosphere was truly intoxicating.

Timothy Childs, Founder and Chief Chocolate Officer of Tcho Chocolate spoke at length about how Tcho is bringing the Silicon Valley startup mentality to making chocolate.  He described how they are repurposing technology (like turkey roasters) intended for other users to lower the cost of making great chocolate.  They obsessively collect data, both in the field and their factory to shorten the feedback loop between chocolate growers in Peru and their operation in San Francisco.  Their goal of building a data-driven, reproduceable fine chocolate production process has the admirable side effect of empowering their growers in Peru to produce a more valuable product.  I was impressed.

Following Timothy was Mark Pauline, founder and spiritual leader of Survival Research Labs.  I’ve never seen a live SRL show, but I’ve followed them since I first learned about them in 1993.  He described his current project to build a better, faster, scarier spinebot.  A spinebot is a many segmented snake-like robot.  Mark’s reputation preceded him, and the San Francisco Fire Department actually turned up before the talk started to make sure he didn’t plan to do anything “dangerous.”  If you know anything about SRL and the shows they used to produce in San Francisco, you understand why.

Mang's Blue Flower in front of a pile of Tcho chocolate.

Mang (Michael Ang) followed up, talking about his Inverse Parasol (featured earlier by Myrtle Street Labs), his Blue Flower biologically inspired LED flower, his Strange Attractor project, and his gorgeous Gigapan photographs. Mang’s soft, gentle work was a fine apertif following Mark Pauline’s scary machinery.

Interior of the Tcho Chocolate Factory

All together it was inspiring to learn about people obsessively following their passions. Three images stuck with me:  Timothy in the jungle in Peru teaching a cocao grower to use Tcho’s data collection hardware, Mark thrilled to explain the new scary articulated robot he’s building, and Mang standing on a frozen lake in Canada using all his ingenuity to keep his Gigapan hardware running in -20C weather.

Taken on the evening of January 10, 2009.

Phillip and his creation: the roving party.

The Hopworksfiets is a custom built bicycle bar.  This cargo bike has it all: space for 2 kegs, inlaid wood bar, sound system and a rack to hold a stack of pizzas.  It was custom built by Metrofiets (makers of cargo bikes) for Hopworks Urban Brewing, both in Portland, Oregon.  This thing is a real beauty, and a clear shoo-in for the Hall of Awesome.  Read the whole scoop on BikePortland.org.

I do wonder how stable it is with the weight of two kegs on a two wheeled bike, but Metrofiets seems to know what they’re doing.  Regardless, I would love to cruise around Oakland on this thing.

(Hat tip to my friend Bill Richardson for pointing this out to me.)

Polyvinyl chloride

Unfortunately, this seems to be growing into a rather serious problem for humanity.  Researchers have learned recently that many of the catalysts used to form the stuff from raw materials (called plasticizers) are endocrine disruptors.  This means they mimic hormones (like estrogen)  in humans and animals, leading to strange developmental problems, such as an increase in the number of intersex fish and amphibians.  The most commonly known chemical in this class is BPA, which is used to create polycarbonate.  Another endocrine disruptor is styrene trimer, which is used to create polystyrene.

syndiotactic polypropylene

Not only are the chemicals used to create plastic a problem, the discarded plastic itself is a major issue we’re only beginning to come to grips with.  The Scripps Institute recently sent an expedition, called SEAPLEX, to the North Pacific Gyre, also known as the Pacific Garbage Patch.  This is a raft of marine litter, consisting mostly of suspended plastic particles, roughly the size of Texas.  Not only did they find the high concentration of plastic they expected once they reached the garbage patch, but every single water sample they took after leaving San Francisco contained suspended plastic.  Marine life, from microscopic organisms, to large creatures are ingesting these plastic particles.

Styrene

Bisphenol A

Plastic has another catch: its difficult to recycle.  In principle, its actually quite easy to recycle plastic into new products.  However, unlike glass, iron, or aluminum, which can be processed inexpensively from relatively low-quality, dirty source material, plastic needs to be both clean and sorted by type.  Generally speaking, if the plastic is too dirty, or the plastic is contaminated with other types of plastic, the resulting recycled material is weak, substandard stuff.  Not the kind of thing you’d expect to hold in the enormous pressure of 2 liters of carbonated beverage.

All is not lost, but we have to simultaneously reduce our production of this stuff, and find a way to clean up and reuse the stuff we’ve already created.  There are some new techniques that give me hope we can actually treat the piles of plastic we’re surrounded by as a resource.  Ecosheet is an interesting technology developed in the UK.  This is a kind of plastic “plywood” that can be made from mixed plastic.  Its strong, waterproof, and less expensive than the traditional wood-based plywood, and can be made from unsorted, mixed up plastic.  Better yet, it can be recycled into, you guessed it, more ecosheet.  I also just read today about a new process for breaking plastic down into its component hydrocarbons to make an inexpensive oil-like fuel.

In my fantasy future we’ll develop robotic ships fueled purely by floating plastic trash.  These ships will rove the oceans, scooping up the garbage humans so thoughtlessly tossed away years earlier.  The ships will process enough plastic into fuel to power themselves, plus fill their tanks with plastic-based fuel to sell once they get to port.  Along the way the ships collect scientific data to improve our understanding of the oceans.  Once their fuel tanks are full, they return to port, sell the fuel, and head back out to sea to clean up after the plastic revolution we’re still coming to terms with.