May 30th - June 1rst. Details will be posted to the website as they come in.

summercon 2008 | A new tradition of organization

A bit of the old Ultraviolence.

Korova Milk Bar | East Village, NYC

] Anyway, for this we also needed something moving or
] changing very fast, so we decided to build a bolt gun. Of
] course, bolt guns aren't very fun unless you can see, in
] great detail, the object they are hitting explode, so
] these two projects seemed like a match made in nerd
] heaven. With the aforementioned micro-controller, we
] simply had no choice but to build a flash timing
] mechanism to capture images of hot bolt-on-food action.

The tale of what evils can occur when 3 nerds from MIT are bored over winter break. They build a bolt gun power by a BASIC stamp, that takes cool bolt-traveling-through-fruit-at high-velocity photos

Fruit Killing bolt gun powered by BASIC!

] This anti-SUV fervor strikes me as a classic geek assault
] on jock culture. Here are the geeks: thoughtful, socially
] and environmentally conscious. They understand that only
] spiritually shallow people could possibly get pleasure
] from a motor vehicle. Then there are those jocks. They
] cruise through life infuriatingly unaware of how morally
] inferior they are to the geeks. They make money, become
] popular, play golf and have homes that are too large. And
] they're happy! For all the wrong reasons! And so every
] few years the geeks pick on some feature of jock life
] (McMansions, corporations, fraternities, country clubs)
] and get all worked up about it. And you know what? The
] jocks don't care! They just keep being happy. The geeks
] write, protest and fume. The jocks go to St. Croix.

I am geek and I hate the whole anti-SUV thing. I own an SUV. I love my SUV. It gets better fuel milage then my previous car. It served my old office car pool very well. It also serves my friends interests very well, as I'm always moving stuff for them that they can't fit in their cars.

I particularly love it when I hear bitching about my SUV from someone who drives an older car that gets less then 12 mpg. How bout that as an outlet for you eco angst, bitch about people who have old cars! Couldn't afford a new car? You suck! Needed cargo space? You suck!

I wish people would at least get specific with their bitching, and limit it to vehicles that fall into that under 20 mpg class, which is not limited to SUVs.

If there was HEV version of my vehicle, I would have bought it. Sorry, I needed cargo space. I didn't mean to shit on anyone's eco parade.

WSJ.com - The Scarlet SUV