Buzz Aldrin visited NYC on Tuesday night. I wandered by because Buzz Aldrin is a fairly awesome guy. Buzz was part of the first manned flight to the moon. He was second to ever touch lunar soil. And he’s an all around amazing guy. In the Korean war he shot down 2 MiGs. He has a doctorate from MIT. And he’s worn a hell of a lot of hats and helmets in his life. But when it comes right down to it, he’s got a real first person memory of having walked on another celestial body. Only 12 men have ever experienced that.

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Rich Gibson is visiting New York City from his normal digs in California (he works for the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA-Ames/CMU-West). NYCR has asked him to give a public talk about the work he’s been doing on the Gigapan project (http://www.gigapan.org) — and you’re all invited!

Gigapan photographs are gigapixel panoramic images, composed of many (sometimes hundreds) of individual photos taken with an ordinary consumer camera using a robotic unit that simplifies the process of capturing the images and later stitching them together. The result is explorable panoramas of astonishing depth.

Rich will start at 7pm with a short slideshow and talk, then shift to a demonstration of the hardware and software that makes the whole thing possible. We look forward to seeing you!

This is the first of possibly many book reviews, or possibly the last of them.

MythOS is the fourth installment in the masterful Web Mage book series written by Kelly McCullough. Here at NYCR we are no strangers to this series, and anyone who has ever spent considerable time in our bathroom is well acquainted with the books. Blending ancient Greek mythology with modern technocracy has produced a profound work of literature that finds a balance in classical interpretation of drama and tragedy with the common parlance of our times. As true today as it was two millennium ago, the Greek’s hallmark style of story telling and character development has inspired Ms McCullough to craft a masterwork in the genre of science fiction. The primary character is Ravirn, or Raven. We are taken through a roller coaster love affair with Hellenic age foes, and divine heroines whose allure wafts from the pages like a fine perfume. As you are introduced to this magical world of web goblins and code spells, you find yourself gripping the pages like the last stable purchase holding you to your mundane reality and saving you from the adventure within. But you wish for nothing more than to let go.

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So during the Thursday craft night we received a request from one of the hackerspace folks for some time lapse videos of the space over a 24 hour period. They are working on a project that will no doubt be stupendous and magnificent. However this spawned a quick project.

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From foulab.org: Jack Oats made a mini documentary called “repurpose” about the montreal based foulab. We got a shout out, which is very cool. It’s awesome to know that our talk at hope helped in some small way make this happen.

Anyways awesome job foulab!