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it will affect us all . . .
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Re: Herbert, Taaki on SOPA
speaking of open sourcing . . .
Lacy Atkins / The Chronicle
Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay, creators of the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in Sunnyvale, work on everything from alphanumeric LEDMadcap scientists’ zippy creations skittering away in all directions
By Julian Guthrie
CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
Lenore Edman and her husband, Windell Oskay, had wanted to make a robot out of a brush for some time. Visiting hardware stores, they pushed brooms, scrub brushes and wire brushes along the floor to gauge movement and bristle stiffness.
Their “aha” moment came during a visit to the dentist.
Handed free toothbrushes, Edman and Oskay smiled. The bristles were pliable. The nylon brush was cheap. And here was a brush that was soft but strong enough to motor.
They cut the toothbrush at its neck, affixed the head with a piece of double-sided tape, and placed a small battery and pager motor on top. Set loose on the floor, the BristleBot, as they called the bug-like brush, vibrated and zoomed to life.
Not long after, in December 2007, they posted an instructional BristleBot video on You-Tube. Since then, the concept has inspired a book, “Invasion of the Bristlebots,” and the video has attracted more than 3.7 million views.
Even though their intent all along was just to share a concept — not to inspire a toy — Edman and Oskay say their idea is the forerunner for one of the must-have kids’ gifts of the season: the Hexbug Nano.
“Any hard feelings toward the Hexbug folks?” Oskay, a physicist and electronics hobbyist, asked rhetorically.
“We’re happy if anyone copies our ideas, but it would be nice if they gave a little bit of credit.”
(Innovation First, Inc., an international robotics company in Texas, which did a limited release of the Hexbug Nano at the end of 2009 and opened it to mass retailers nationwide in 2010, said in an e-mail statement that the company had no comment.)
In the laboratory
Edman and Oskay, who met in high school in Portland, Ore., run a small business in Sunnyvale called the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, where their tongue-in-cheek motto is, “Making the world a better place, one evil mad scientist at a time.” They make an array of products — from “hacker friendly” alphanumeric alarm clocks to fuzzy percentile dice — and post do-it-yourself projects weekly (a recent project was concocting the perfect cucumber martini).
They are proponents of “open source hardware,” a movement and culture based on documenting and sharing ideas through blogs and links, collaborating online, and giving credit where credit is due.
“If someone uses our product and builds a kit that is a fairly direct copy of ours, they need to say this is based on Evil Mad Science,” Oskay said.
“That’s advertising for us, which is good. But also, if they have nice new features, we can turn around and use those to make our product better.”
Edman explained, “We come from a do-it-yourself ethic. The people we have been around have taught us different ways to do things. When we create a blog project, or new electronics, we like to provide enough documentation so people can do it themselves. You create a community where everyone gives back. We believe in the greater good kind of thing.”
From their small storefront, the mad scientists, both 37, host occasional workshops and an open house. Their retail space fronts a large and growing back shop, filled with small parts and truck-size machines. Their immediate neighbors are a guy who cooks trash into compost and another man who builds gliders. A stray cat named Zener — a type of diode, which is an electrical device — calls the office home.
Edman, whose academic background is in classical Greek and English, was a latent tinkerer and a self-professed geek. She designed and sewed her own wedding dress, and overhauled a mid-century Hawthorne bicycle named Stella.
Oskay, whose day job is as a design engineer in Silicon Valley, was always interested in “learning how stuff works at the most fundamental level.”
He has built an array of things, from a CandyFab machine, which is a 3D sugar printer, to Nixie tube clocks, made of glass vacuum tubes filled with neon gas.
“That was a very evil mad scientist thing to do,” Oskay said of the Nixie tubes, one of his earliest undertakings. “I looked online, and saw ‘Evil Mad Scientist’ was available (as a Web domain), so I snagged it and then didn’t do anything with it for years.”
Finding their own kind
In 2005, Oskay and Edman moved from Colorado to Sunnyvale. In 2006, they attended the Bay Area’s first Maker Faire, a gathering that now attracts tens of thousands of people who make everything from fire-breathing metal dragons to reflective sculptures.
“We had an old table that broke in shipping,” Edman said. “I said, ‘Let’s see how it looks with interactive LED lights.’ As we were doing that, we heard about this Maker Faire, so we called to see if we could bring our table. We went, and saw all kinds of interesting people and projects. It was very much a matter of finding our own people.”
In recent times, they have helped create an accepted definition of open source hardware, participated in the annual Open Source Hardware Summit in New York, and are in the exploratory stages of building a foundation to support open source hardware.
They look at concepts like the BristleBot as projects more than inventions, as ideas to be shared. Still, when they learned their BristleBot had been co-opted by a company called Klutz, they protested.
Klutz, a maker of novelty goods, had released “Invasion of the Bristlebots,” a book that came with two mini toothbrush robots. “We mind that they took our name — BristleBot — without asking,” Edman said. “Originally, they told us it was developed independently. But their book came out two years after our video, which had already been watched by 2 million people.”
Klutz later apologized and agreed to give the Evil Mad Scientists credit. They put them on a royalty schedule, and now provide this statement with the book: “With grateful acknowledgment to Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.”
As for the Hexbug, Edman shrugged and said, “It’s the same type of product (as the BristleBot), a small vibrating motor and angled legs. Cleary, if you do a genealogy of vibrobots, the Hexbug follows the BristleBot.”
Original is best
While allowing that the Hexbug makers “did some interesting things, like centering the weight so it stays righted,” Edman and Oskay remain smitten with their humble toothbrush bugs.
“The rubber feet on the Hexbug make them slow,” Edman says. “And, another reason why we don’t like them is they’re expensive, so they’re not accessible to as wide an audience as we like. We like to make things out of trash. We want our ideas to be accessible.”
Oskay, who cruises around on a bicycle with an ooga horn, said his hope for Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is that “someone starts to build things and enjoys building.”
He added, “We love to see how projects branch out in ways we hadn’t expected. This is a community where we all build on what has already been done. When you look at something and say, ‘Wow, I had not imagined that,’ that is the best of outcomes. That’s what we are about.”
E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.
Lenore Edman, co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, holds eggs with designs drawn on them using an Egg-Bot kit.
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Re: Herbert, Taaki on SOPA
only the strong get nominated . . .
Oscar Rule Will Cull Nonfiction Contenders
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — In a move to trim the number of documentaries submitted annually for Oscar consideration, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is poised to require a movie review from The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times to qualify a documentary feature for the Academy Awards.
Ric Robertson, the Academy’s chief operating officer, confirmed the plan on Sunday after word of it began circulating among documentary filmmakers and their supporters. In a phone interview Mr. Robertson said it would be made public this week and would apply to films qualifying for the 2013 ceremony.
The review requirement is an unusual twist in a long list of qualifying standards that apply to the various Oscar categories, including best picture, best animated feature, best foreign language film and others.
It will trim the number of films that must be viewed annually by the Academy’s small documentaries branch, which narrows the field to 15 qualifying movies, and then 5 nominees. In 2011 the branch considered 124 movies, up 23 percent from 101 films from a year earlier.
But the rule might diminish the prospects of those who make smaller and less prominent movies; these filmmakers have often qualified their documentaries without the kind of commercial release that typically leads to reviews by the two news organizations.
Particularly hard hit will be DocuWeeks, a program sponsored by the International Documentary Association, which for more than a decade has let filmmakers pay a fee to have their pictures shown briefly in New York and Los Angeles, thus qualifying for awards. Under the new rule those films would be considered only if a movie critic for one of the two newspapers chose to review it, something that typically does not happen.
At least one film on this year’s Oscar qualifying list, the documentary “Semper Fi: Always Faithful,” about the Marine Corps and tainted water at Camp Lejeune, was shown through DocuWeeks and appears not to have been reviewed in either publication before its submission. Another dozen films — including “The Mexican Suitcase,” “The Power of Two” and “Unfinished Spaces” — qualified for Oscar consideration through the program, but also appear not to have had the reviews that will be required for next year’s awards.
“This will be a disappointment to a certain number of filmmakers,” said Thom Powers, the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, on learning of the policy.
Mr. Powers called it “a strange thing indeed” for the Academy to shift decision making to third parties, in this case the newspapers. But he added, “I can understand that the Academy wants to focus its recognition on films that have had a kind of legitimate theatrical release.”
Mr. Roberts said the rule was part of an effort by the Academy to ensure that Oscars go to what he called “genuine theatrical” movies, rather than to films that might be made primarily for television but given brief theatrical exposure, or played for a tiny number of viewers simply to qualify.
Asked whether worthwhile films might be cut out, he said: “We may indeed lose worthy films. But I don’t think we’ll lose worthy theatrical films.”
A draft of the proposed rule did not specify whether the review had to be included in a print edition, or might run only online. It also did not specify length, or distinguish between the sort of capsule review, which sometimes introduces festival films, and a more elaborate piece of criticism. Reviews by television critics were specifically ruled out.
The review policy comes atop other major changes that will be announced this week, according to Michael Moore, a member of the Academy’s board of governors and a prime mover behind the revisions. Mr. Moore said the Academy planned to abandon a system under which committees within the documentary branch divided up films for viewing and scoring under an intricate numerical system. Instead, the entire 157-member branch will now be allowed to vote for the five nominees and the whole 5,800-member Academy will then vote for the best documentary, even if members have seen the films only on a screener. In the past only the several hundred members who actually attended a screening voted for the best documentary, a limiting factor that Mr. Moore and others have long believed to work against the more popular and culturally significant films.
The documentary branch has often been a center of controversy, as a large and growing number of documentarians each year press for recognition and question decisions that have often slighted relatively popular films in favor of smaller and more obscure ones. Eyebrows were raised when widely viewed documentaries like “Tyson,” from James Toback, and “Capitalism: A Love Story” from Mr. Moore, were overlooked in favor of less visible movies.
Only recently has the Academy eased life for often-struggling documentarians by allowing them to qualify films by having them released during the calendar year, rather than meeting a deadline that previously fell months earlier in the year.
But the new rule puts a squeeze on those who do not have a commercial distributor, and particularly calls into question the viability of DocuWeeks, which has consistently shoehorned films into the Oscar process. A spokeswoman for the International Documentary Association declined to comment on the proposed Academy rule.
Informed of the change, at least one documentary maker — an Academy member and a past Oscar nominee — described the change as contrary to the very nature of documentarians, with their inclination toward difficult causes and subjects that often are not commercially appealing. “This is not what we’re about,” said this filmmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity to keep from offending peers within the Academy.
By policy The New York Times reviews every film released on a commercial screen for a week in New York or Los Angeles, and reviews some new releases screened by nonprofit groups like the Museum of Modern Art.
The annual number of reviews has risen to about 760, according to A. O. Scott, who, with Manohla Dargis, is co-chief film critic for The New York Times. That number is up by about 100 from a year earlier, Mr. Scott said.
Kenneth Turan, a senior critic for The Los Angeles Times, did not respond to e-mail queries on Sunday morning.
As for the notion that filmmakers will qualify for Oscars only if they are reviewed in the paper, Mr. Scott, in an e-mail on Sunday, said, “It’s flattering.”
Beyond that, he said, the change shows that print criticism and the theatrical release of movies remain important in a media environment that has rapidly expanded to include a universe of online reviews and unconventional distribution methods.
“It’s not only Academy voters, but also moviegoers in general who benefit from newspapers committed to reviewing as comprehensive a selection of new movies as possible,” Mr. Scott said.
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