Michael created a dog-shirt equipped with persistence-of-vision LEDs controlled by a LilyPad soft Arduino, and programmed it to output the text of my novel Makers as his pooch ran gleefully around the park at night. Then he photographed it and sent it to me, and my head exploded with delight.

Mounting 5 LEDs on a moving object creates one of the cheapest and largest displays: Persistence of Vision. It’s been done on bicycle wheels, fans and other rotating objects.

In this project i am sewing a Lilypad wearable Arduino board and five LEDs with conductive thread on my dog’s shirt. She’s a Miniature Pinscher running very fast for fun. In curves fast enough for Persitence of Vision. And she likes running in large circles in the park! Light writing.

My Dog Light Writing “Makers”

Last week, my wife Alice and I stopped into MakerBot Industries, the DIY 3D printing company in Brooklyn, and got our heads scanned. The MakerBotters covered us in cornstarch (so that the laser-scanner could resolve our hair and eyebrows) and waved this crazy, six-degrees-of-freedom laser-scanning wand around us until we had been turned into polygons. Now our heads are online in Thingiverse, along with many others who happened to pass through MakerBot’s doors while they had the scanner on the premises (it was a loaner). It’s no Stephen Colbert head, but it’s mine, and I’m (cautiously) excited about what the world ends up doing with it!

New York Notables « MakerBot Industries

Jon Bard and Lauren Backes have assembled the introductions to the free ebook editions of my novels and collections into one free electronic volume they call “the problem isn’t piracy. the problem is obscurity.” It’s fun to see these little essays I wrote as ephemeral forematter take on a life of their own.

Paul Clip was inspired by my novel Eastern Standard Tribe and made a set of analyses of world population by timezone.

I cheated a little by using a simplifying assumption: if a country has multiple time zones, I divide its population evenly between them. This inaccuracy doesn’t change the fact that our top three are…

UTC+8: China and others
UTC+5.5: India and others
UTC+1: Western Europe and a good chunk of Africa

According to Mathematica, there are 39 different time zones ranging from UTC-11.5 to UTC+14. I wonder if anyone has visited them all? Now that would be a glorious adventure! :-)

I gave the closing keynote at yesterday’s Personal Democracy Forum in NYC; they’ve posted the video already. It was a remarkable event, filled with speakers who inspired me and got me riled up and wanting to do stuff. It was an honor to be on stage there — thanks to the organizers!

Cory Doctorow- People and States in a Hyperconnected…

I sat down with BookBaby‘s Brian Felsen last month at the London Book Fair for a long interview about business, publishing, authorship and copyright. Brian’s just posted the first installment of several that comprise the whole discussion.