BlackStarr

02/12/2013

BlackStarr's Scott Norman and Simone Syed were invited to partake in "i.am.angel Foundation"'s TRANS4M Concert featuring Bill Clinton, will.i.am., Cameron Sinclair and several other notable innovators and thinkers in education and social entrepreneurship. It was pretty epic!

picture by Mat Luschek

01/13/2013

Well, the US Government won't be building a Death Star. I guess somebody must have stolen the plans... *ahem*

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

12/27/2012

Scientists and explorers don't just make discoveries. They build flashlights.

12/17/2012

Sometimes, it just feels a little cramped down here.

12/07/2012

Hey techies and makers-- who wants to contribute to new communications infrastructure in NYC?

Sometimes the the most important ingredient in innovation is the capacity to see old things in totally new ways. On our swiftly warming, somewhat crowded planet, the creative thought that it takes to turn the things that surround us into new advantages for the human race is incredibly valuable.

Inventors and technologists don't always invent entirely new things whole-cloth-- that would be a pretty tall order. A lot of us are building on the shoulders of giants-- that's how we push everything forward.

If you're running out of innovative ideas, don't get caught up inside your head-- look around. There's opportunity everywhere!

Just 15 years ago, New York City had 35,000 phone booths. Thanks to cell phones it now has just 11,000, most of which serve little purpose for anyone but Clark Kent. Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to change that. In a contest that it's billing as the first of its kind...

12/04/2012

Technology imitates life-- and life is a technology.

One of the most profound things about our search for new technological solutions is that we have to deal with the same physical laws and constraints that evolution had to deal with-- we're all working on the same playing field here.

So it makes sense that, often, our most efficient solutions are borrowed from the natural world--- spider silk, synthetic minerals, and now, apparently, mechanical protein-folding.

Our day-to-day efforts to stake out new scientific territory and tackle new tasks involve us in a vast, expansive, planet-wide dance of iterative problem-solving. We're not counterposed to the natural world-- we're on a continuum with it, working in concert with it, participating in it.

Who knows what new forms of life, of mechanical engagement, of generativity, are going to erupt out of this collaborative process in the future?

Who knows, indeed. But it's fun to think about.

The device doesn't look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawe...

12/02/2012

By this measure, we can all be scientists.

11/30/2012

Other worlds exist.

It's a simple and obvious statement, but a profound one, and it's hard to truly wrap the mind around-- vast, frozen alien landscapes never seen in person by human eyes. Fathomless oceans of liquid and gas. Thousand-year storms. Acid rain.

It's not a science fiction story. It's actually out there.

The challenge NASA and private space exploration firms face isn't that of making space more interesting, more profound, in the eyes of the public. It's almost the opposite problem-- the faces of the cosmos are so incredible that human descriptive language has difficulty encompassing them. We resort to cliche, to Star Trek aphorisms, and the real meaning of the thing is lost.

Entire. Other. Worlds.

In order for human being to be affected by that kind of idea, we need to rediscover our sense of adventure, our desire to explore. Sometimes our own tiny lives are so stressful that the idea of an infinite expanse filled with fantastic planets is just a little too much to handle-- we don't know how to relate to it, or what use it is to us.

But that's the nature of exploration-- when you're looking for something entirely new, you can't anticipate all the ways it's going to change your views and explode your reality. You just go looking.

It's all out there. And it's waiting.

Vast supplies of water ice and organic material on Mercury were found by NASA's Messenger probe.

11/25/2012

what empires will you conquer today? what skirmishes will be fought at the borders of ignorance?

11/24/2012

Technology's about getting your hands dirty.

We can plan and theorize in the form of nice, clean abstractions, but when we want to start building our ideas out, they run into the real world-- and sometimes the real world gets messy.

Even after we figure out what works and what doesn't, unpredictable forces, things we didn't anticipate, can foul up our carefully designed systems.

But the process of problem-solving is one of the exciting things about making technology. These pictures, in a way, are beautiful-- they show the innards of an incredibly complex network that human beings built, and it shows humans repairing that network. It's almost like a living thing-- organs laid open, medics cleaning out the tubes.

It's great to have a great idea, but the real work starts-- and the real heroes are born-- when you start running into problems. Setbacks aren't the end of the line-- they're a sign that it's time to take off the kid gloves.

Even if your setback is a hurricane.

Hurricane Sandy's storm surge flooded Verizon's downtown office, rendering miles of copper wiring useless

11/23/2012

Holiday project and gift ideas starting to pop up?

One of the most exciting moments in developing a project is the moment when an idea starts to become real.

Someone writes a science fiction story or has a brainstorming session, with the focal question being "what if we could…"

That's the question technology answers. "What if we could…" …and the potential answers are as big as your imagination.

But everybody daydreams. There's a turning point in the process where you start asking a different question: "how exactly would we…"

That's when you start to articulate the mechanics of the dream; when you start to imaging physical components meshing in the service of your idea. When you start to make lists, and diagrams, and you start looking for potential problems and pitfalls.

A lot of attention is given to the spark of inspiration; it's romanticized. But there's something really extraordinary about the roller-coaster ride back down into practical, physical reality. That moment when you jump up off the couch and start collecting tools and components or you rush to the drafting table. That's when you know your project is about to be born-- and that's a great moment no matter how big or small your project is.

Michael Shinabery of the New Mexico Museum of Space History traces early history of the groundbreaking British Interplanetary Society.

11/19/2012

Perspective can be a beautiful thing.

We have a lot of problems to solve here, on our tiny little floating rock, and sometimes those problems can seem overwhelming. But there's a whole, whole, whole lot going on elsewhere.

There's an enormous space out there for us to spread out and explore, and it contains vast fields littered with glittering, undying explosions, those themselves surrounded by entire other globes, as yet mysterious.

Imagine all of human history, all the love and conflict and magic and adventure that's unfolded over the human race's time on our own huge sphere. Now imagine all those others. What does that do to your perspective?

It's hard to imagine that, I know. Maybe we need some help from the experts:

"I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified façade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."

— Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11 astronaut

An interactive 3D visualization of the stellar neighborhood, including over 100,000 nearby stars. Created for the Google Chrome web browser.