Build Your Own 3D-printed Ring Light to Upgrade Your Remote Meetings

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 1 Comment on Build Your Own 3D-printed Ring Light to Upgrade Your Remote Meetings
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We are entering year two of pandemic lockdowns and remote meetings, teach from home classes, and teleconferences are hear to stay. Early last year we addressed some of the basics of perfecting a decent space for teaching from home: The true, essential, and definitive guide to looking like a professional while teaching from home.

But some folks want a little extra edge, a little something that dramatically improves how you look in the camera while teaching your class, giving a talk, or holding a meeting. And not just because of vanity. The better and clearer your camera image, the easier it is for your audience to see and understand you (though vanity is a perfectly fine reason too, we have all spent far too much time this year staring at ourselves in the little Zoom box).

You could buy a ring light to provide the best possible light source for looking good on a webcam, but why buy something when you can spend several hours soldering and coding your own custom, addressable, RGBW ring light.

The good nerds at Southern Fried Science are here for you. I spent the last month polishing up my coding, soldering, design, and 3D-printing skills to bring you a 3D-printed, DIY ring light that you can build and code yourself.

Is it cheaper than a commercial ring light? No.

Does it work better than a ring light designed and manufactured by a professional team of engineers? Also no.

Can you independently control each color channel so it looks like you’re in the Matrix, under water, of cosplaying the This Is Fine dog via a large, bulky box that sits on you desk? Yes.

Does it come with a panic button that lets you bail out of Zoom calls by pretending that you’re being pulled over by the police? You better believe it does.

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What Johnny Mnemonic got right about 2021: we keep trying to build housing out of old shipping containers.

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 1 Comment on What Johnny Mnemonic got right about 2021: we keep trying to build housing out of old shipping containers.
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Internet 2021 from Johnny Mnemonic

From a global pandemic to information overload to out-of-control drug prices, 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic made a lot of bold predictions about 2021 that landed a bit too hard. Among the hits that landed hardest? The rise of containerized housing and a chaotic kludge of weird construction welded together in a way that doesn’t exactly scream stability and permanence.

The year is 2021. Can we put to rest the idea that a shipping container home is anything but an aesthetic choice?

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Inauguration-induced landsickness: what you feel when the shaky world beneath your feet suddenly stabilizes, and how to feel better

Posted on By David Shiffman 1 Comment on Inauguration-induced landsickness: what you feel when the shaky world beneath your feet suddenly stabilizes, and how to feel better
Blogging

For the past few days I, like many of you, have felt a variety of intense emotions. First and foremost I’ve felt an overwhelming sense of relief. No matter what happens next, Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States, and he and his enablers can no longer work to destroy so much of what we love and value (at least not as easily). We can start the hard work of fixing so many things that have been awful and growing worse every day. I’ve felt hope that we can start to make things better, and I’ve even felt a little bit of joy at the noteworthy progress that’s already been made. All of this was expected, but one thing I haven’t expected is how much of a particular sensation I’m feeling, and have seen other people report feeling as well. For some of my friends it was a totally unfamiliar sensation, but as a marine scientist I recognized it immediately: many of us are basically experiencing landsickness, also called “dock rock” or “mal de debarquement syndrome”.

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Where is the Biden Ocean Team?

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
Science

In forty-eight hours, and amidst the largest peacetime deployment of a military force in any nation’s capitol, President Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States of America. Biden will inherit a civil service bureaucracy that has been deconstructed by the twice-impeached President Trump. To build back a federal government that has been decimated and demoralized, President-Elect Biden has begun rolling out nominees for critical agencies throughout the federal government. And though these appointments have been met will enthusiasm from the environmental and scientific community, a nagging question lingers among America’s Ocean Stakeholders:

Where is the Biden Ocean Team?

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Donald Trump secures his legacy as the worst ocean president in American history.

Posted on By Andrew Thaler 1 Comment on Donald Trump secures his legacy as the worst ocean president in American history.
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Donald F. Trump hates sharks. We learned that in 2013, when, during an entirely uncontroversial discussion about shark conservation foundations on Twitter, the would-be President of the United States of America blocked a small cohort of marine scientists.

Gracing David Shiffman and myself with a timeline blissfully free of his insufferable Tweets for eight years was the only good thing he has ever done for the ocean.

Initially, it appeared as though Trump’s war on the oceans would take a backseat to his other social, judicial, and environmental atrocities. Though a troubling selection for a host of reasons, Wilbur Ross’s appointment as Secretary of Commerce was seen as a relatively non-threatening move. His letter to NOAA staff, reassuring them that his department would continue to follow best-available science, was met with praise. His initial leadership appointments received bipartisan support.

It is clear now in hindsight, that that initial optimism was intensely naïve.

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3 kid-friendly STEAM electronics projects that harness NOAA’s massive public databases

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
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This is the winter of finding as many good, educational projects to keep our kids as occupied as possible. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a stack of assorted electronics in various stages of disrepair, which is great for your hardware hacking dads and moms, but kids need projects with a little more structure and, especially for the younger ones, a lot less soldering.

We can’t build open-source CTDs every day.

Fortunately, the awesome folks at Adafruit have built up an absolutely massive collection of electronics projects using just about every component you can imagine. I’ve culled through the archive to find three kid-friendly (projects that don’t require soldering or involve particularly risky components) ocean and weather projects that take advantage of NOAA’s publicly available databases to help students learn a little bit about electronics and the natural world.

All of these projects were built with the help of my kiddo (age four), require no soldering or electronics skills to start, involve just enough coding to stay interesting, and use Adafruit’s CircuitPython ecosystem, which is fairly easy to learn. Adafruit does a great job compiling detailed instruction for every project. These can all be completed in a lazy afternoon.

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Beyond Batteries: exploring the demand for scandium and tellurium from the deep ocean

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
Science

This article originally appeared in the October/November 2020 issue of the Deep-sea Mining Observer. It is reprinted here with permission. For the latest news and analysis about the development of the deep-sea mining industry, subscribe to DSM Observer here: http://dsmobserver.com/subscribe/ For the last decade, next-generation batteries have been the motivating force for the deep-sea mining industry. The … Read More “Beyond Batteries: exploring the demand for scandium and tellurium from the deep ocean” »

The United States moves towards exploration and exploitation of critical mineral resources in the deep ocean.

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
Science

This article originally appeared in the October/November 2020 issue of the Deep-sea Mining Observer. It is reprinted here with permission. For the latest news and analysis about the development of the deep-sea mining industry, subscribe to DSM Observer here: http://dsmobserver.com/subscribe/ Since the signing of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the creation of … Read More “The United States moves towards exploration and exploitation of critical mineral resources in the deep ocean.” »

Sharks, Squalene, and a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

Posted on By Catherine Macdonald
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A bluntnose sixgill shark (Hexanchus griseus). Photo credit: NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer.

Hi, friends at Southern Fried Science!

You’ve probably seen in the media lately that there’s been a lot of coverage about whether sharks are being killed for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. With an awesome undergraduate co-author, I’ve tried to gather some facts about what is happening (or might happen) and what it means. You can read a preprint of that work here, or read on for a short FAQ in plain English.

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Hot air for windmills, oceans get layered, and North Korean ghost ships – What’s up with the Oceans this Week

Posted on By Andrew Thaler
News

Nothing but hot air. Trump bans windmills. The President made bemused news last week during his oddly partisan attempt to ban offshore oil in several key states (though for some reason, seismic testing in those states continue, making it seem less like a ban and more like a request to “stand by”). Unsurprisingly, the offshore … Read More “Hot air for windmills, oceans get layered, and North Korean ghost ships – What’s up with the Oceans this Week” »