Head Full of Air

1st Transcontinental & 1st Trans-Atlantic Balloon Overflight- California Near Space

Mathew — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:18:21 +0000

I’m not up on my balloon news! posted here for the purpose of completeness. California Near Space was already slashdotted four days ago.

Amazing, they beat the White Star team and Robert Rochte, who threwdown on transatlantic ballooning earlier in the year with his SDG-10, which appears to still be grounded.

White Star’s not working with off the shelf balloons though– they’ve got a bigger goal: DIY tropospheric superpressure balloons. these will be capable of multi-week flights, if successfully built. Dan Bowen’s talk– Jump to 3:30 into this talk, and see the superpressure tetroon discussion. 5:40, discussion of Rochte’s designs.

Mutoscope for Fernando, on the SIP Blog

Mathew — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 04:30:47 +0000

My work for the Public Laboratory is partially funded by a grant from the Shpilman Institute for Photography, who’ve featured my Mutoscope on their blog. Great images I haven’t posted here.

My summer, generalizations only.

Mathew — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:35:13 +0000

Its been so long since an update. I Spent my summer between Switzerland, studying sanitation with Cewas and Butte, Montana working on community mapping in Centerville through Public Laboratory and the Scoria Residency Program. Now Molly and I are mentoring a studio at PNCA’s MFA program in Collaborative Design, and I’m teaching a class on an intermedia undergraduate course in Art and Science. First critique is tomorrow…

In the mean time, I’m making a cheap kite kit from bamboo and tyvek.

Public Laboratory wins a grant from the Knight News Challenge!

Mathew — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:17:05 +0000

At the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, of which I’m a co-founder, we’ve just been awarded $500,000 by the Knight Foundation. Congrats to all my co-founders, Jeff, Sara, Shannon, Adam, Liz,Stewart, and to our whole online community, and thanks to the Knight Foundation! This is really going jump-start a lot of work!

Read the announcement here

Our post about it here

scientific, photographic, and person-lifting kites, 1900-1940

Mathew — Fri, 13 May 2011 07:49:42 +0000

Baden F.S. Baden-Powell’s Manlifting Levitor. 1895. No photos or film I can find. Was it flat or bowed?

Charles Lamson’s Aerocurve, 1901

Samuel Franklin Cody’s Bat 1901 The best film is actually for a french aerial photography unit in 1917. The Cody kite is still used occasionally for high-wind aerial photography. Turn off the music.

Rudolph Grund’s “Self Steering” Meteorological Kites, 1905-1940. They apparently adjusted their bridles to wind speed. There is certainly some rigging trick to learn from this series.

Kite Fishing in Indonesia & Melanesia

Mathew — Mon, 09 May 2011 06:56:51 +0000

Traditional Kite fishing in Indonesia, using the motion of a kite to give bait a constant motion. A little more history here. I think this is the one of the first applications of flight outside of games and signals.

and in Melanesia, with a cringe-worthy soundtrack

Topographic maps from fled kites

Mathew — Mon, 09 May 2011 04:52:09 +0000

I just started building fled kites, but my fellow Grassroots Mapper Nathan Craig is already doing 3D topographic scans with them. He’s using AgiSoft’s PhotoScan, which is unfortunately not open source, and costs $179. But as he points out, you just feed it images and it makes a damned good 3D model.

Mapping Colonialism, Talk on 4/9

Mathew — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:55:44 +0000

This saturday I’ll be dipping in briefly to the Counter-Counter Insurgency Convergence, at Reed College. Given my current work with community mapping, I’m very interested to see what Geoffrey Boyce has to say in this seminar:

MAPPING COLONIALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY: THE CASE OF “MEXICA INDIGENA”
Geoffrey Boyce, School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona
2:35-5:05 PM
Eliot 103
In 2005 a group of geographers from the University of Kansas began a “collaborative mapping” project with indigenous peoples in the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca, Mexico. Dubbed “Mexica Indigena”, this project was pitched to the participating communities as a means of empowering them to defend traditional land claims and practices through the generation of geo-spatial data. Yet, unbeknownst at the time to these communities, Mexica Indigena was in fact a program sponsored by the Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas – the pilot for a research program overseen by the American Geographical Society meant to augment U.S. intelligence and counter-insurgency efforts, now operating in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Lesser Antilles and Colombia. This paper explores the implications of Mexica Indigena for a number of issues of contemporary concern, including military / academic collaboration, politics, ethics, and the colonial legacy of disciplines such as geography and anthropology. Specifically, the controversial aftermath of Mexica Indigena exposes the deficiency of institutional protections against predatory research practices when the latter operate under the umbrella of U.S. “national security” interests – challenging common assumptions within the academy concerning the nature and beneficence of geo-spatial or ethnographic research, the position of Institutional Review Boards, and the value of academic research in general, in light of the colonial present.

Amateur Radio Throwdown: Planetary Circumnavigation by Balloon

Mathew — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 22:54:34 +0000

Mark the date, March 24, 2011- Robert Rochte throws in his hat for circumnavigation of the globe by an autonomous balloon on the Balloon_Sked mailing list. I’ve covered Rochte’s superpressure balloons here before. In this message, he’s referring to the White Star Balloon’s ongoing attempt at crossing the atlantic, a feat which Rochte has been pursuing as well.

Well, I was going to sneak-launch a competing superpressure balloon

this morning, but alas, the universe had other plans for me today.

If WSB make it across – which I expect they will – then our next great

challenge should be circumnavigation of the planet. I’m officially

throwing my hat in for that one right now!

Best of luck with the flight, guys!

73,

Robert

KC8UCH

Reed Arts Week

Mathew — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 04:24:06 +0000

The talk and workshop went great. I was too busy to photograph the flights, but will get photos soon. Su Liu came up with a great double-layer heat seaming strategy for her tetrahedron balloon- it was fast and quick: