My Fading Youth

This summer I asked my friend Nik to take some shots of me on my bike while I was still young and vibrant in the declining years of my 20's. I think the pictures turned out great (at least the ones where I don't look like a big fatso...). They'll be something to harp back to when I get old..."I used to have good calves...Honest!". The pics were taken at Rattlesnake Point near Milton, one of the only places you'll find actual switchbacks in Southern Ontario. The pictures also showcase my new ride, a De Rosa Neo Primato. Handmade in Italy, the frame is a classic steel beauty standing out in a world ever obsessed with aero profiles and carbon layups. 

A New Lamp

I've always enjoyed making lamps and the offcuts from other projects seem to always have the right curve or shape to inspire me. I also just got a dowel cutter and that needed a test run so someone is getting a lamp for christmas!

The screen is made from mylar, which has a great translucence and structural rigidity you can't get with a paper screen.

Sho Brush

The selection of high quality Japanese calligraphy brushes is somewhat lacking in Waterloo it seems, so I decided to give a go at making my own. There are two types of hair used in brushes, with the badger hair being a stiffer brush (which I seem to prefer). I use a badger brush to foam up when I'm shaving, so I bought one of those brushes as a source for my bristles and then planed and drilled and glued up what you see below. It has a semi-octagonal barrel, which is my nod to the appreciation of imperfection in Japanese design. It was also a project that didn't involve any power tools, which is always a nice thing!

So far I'm pretty happy with it. The hairs are much stiffer than the ones in the cheap badger hair brush I had in my collection and the flow of ink seems to be more controllable too. Let's see how it works in the long run once it gets broken in a bit. I'm interested to see what my calligraphy teacher is going to think once she gets back from Japan!

初心 - Shoshin - Beginner's Mind

Shunryu Suzuki's collection of Zen thought was an "enlightening" read....get it...."enlightening"....


With recent years of my life spent at least partially as a teacher I found some ideas I liked a lot:


You have a teacher for yourself, not for the teacher.


There should not be any particular teaching. Teaching is in each moment in every existence. That is the true teaching.


In the beginner's mind there are many possibillities; in the expert's mind there are few.


Zazen, or the practice of meditation that most people think of when they think of Zen Buddhism, is in my inexperienced and uneducated understanding a path to calmness, oneness, and enlightenment.


For me zazen is found on my bicycle.

Belgian Shots

Here are some initial shots from my time cycling through the Flemish part of Belgium:

Charles Yu

"The only free man," he would say, "is one who doesn't work for anyone else." In later years, that became his thing, expounding on the tragedy of modern science fictional man: the desk job. The work week was a structure, a grid, a matrix that held him in place, a path through time, the shortest distance between birth and death. 
- Charles Yu - how to live safely in a science fictional universe

Finding something, or more accurately, not finding something seems to be a consistent theme of Charles Yu's writing. Most of the time it's not even clear what Man, 35, is looking for in Yu's stories. There is a vague concept or emotion perhaps, and it is this quest of Man, 35, that is so identifiable, so ingenious, so obvious, but is so difficult to express. The search is often complicated by Man, 35,'s analytical mindset; a viewpoint that demands connections, diagrams, and equations to explain his existence. Man, 35, knows all too well that these tools of research won't help him one bit, but he has nothing else and insistently hammers away with the same approach he would use to solve partial differential equations. Ironically, just like these PDE's, an analytic solution is usually impossible due to the complexity of the problem. The best we can hope for is a numerical approximation of the answer. A numerical approximation of longing; of contempt; of a thousand different emotions. Would Man, 35, give up his world of complex domains and eigenvalue problems to understand these things? Does he have to?

Maybe Man, 35,'s mindset isn't the problem. Maybe he just needs a new perspective, a new method. A Feynman diagram for Love, Hope, Despair, and Regret.

When I get old...

I put in my time this afternoon and then, when I was done and entirely frustrated and sick of my computer screen, I went for a ride. This was a funny ride, because I did two things: I went faster than I have ever gone by myself over a significant distance (36kph average over 65km), and I thought about some things. Usually the two don't go hand in hand, but today they did. When I lugged my bike on my shoulder through the front door John took a look at me and said "Wow Matt, you must have been going really hard, you look spent". Then I sat on my front steps in my bike shorts with my shirt off drinking my water bottle until I stopped sweating. For whatever reason there were about 50 little birds fluttering around pecking at the ground and tearing off pieces of grass. Sometimes little fights would break out over a prized bug or a stick that might find a useful role in building a nest. I wrote some code to imitate birds flocking in flight last year, and that always makes me think about the dynamics of riding in a group of cyclists and the amazement of the swirling coordination of 50 sparrows being scared into flight by a passing car. Something else I thought about was the fear I find pleasure in when I ride my bike. Three motorcycles roared past me tonight, and to be honest I've never really understood motorcycles, but I imagine that at least part of the reason people sit on a piece of metal they can send flying across a skinny slab of asphalt at 200+ km/h is that they enjoy being afraid, and finding the strength to withstand that fear and rev their engine another few thousand rpm's, launching their consciousness at ever more insane velocities (that was a long sentence). For me, riding a bike is not about the magnitude of the speed; only occasionally will you get up to 80km/h or better, and that's usually after spending an hour climbing up a mountain going 15 km/h. So it's not the speed I'm afraid of; it's not being able to make it, just being shattered and falling off the pedals without any more energy to turn the gears another inch. Maybe that's too dramatic, but every time I go out on my bike there seems to be a point where I ask myself to keep going when my legs are just screaming and feel like they're ready to explode. Fear probably isn't the right word, but something like it, maybe it's just the voice or Fear telling me to quit. I have to try my best to block it out, but I'm not always successful. Tonight I was though, every time I asked my body to get out of the saddle I did. Whenever I could click into a bigger gear and push my legs a little harder, I did. I measured my resting heart rate the other day and it was 43 bpm, which is apparently pretty low and means that my heart is pretty strong. When I have to stop at a traffic light after riding for a while my heart feels like it's going to shake my body apart. There are days when I look down at my legs and I don't know how I got to this strange place where I'm pushing myself the way that I do. I look down and think that those aren't my legs, that's not my bike, that's not the asphalt ripping past underneath it all. The last hard section of road on my ride tonight heads east, and with the sun setting over my shoulder, my shadow was dancing ahead of me as I climbed up the final few hills. Tonight I didn't feel disconnected or out of place, the dark outline draped on the road was me, this was my bike, those were my legs, and I wasn't listening to Fear whispering in my ear.

What I actually do for a living...

Sometimes I think people don't really get what I do. Piano research...but what does that mean?Well, it means I do things like carefully measure and tape up a guitar so I can do modal analysis, a technique that lets us see how an object vibrates at different frequencies. It also means I spend a lot of time writing programs to analyze sound and create maps of those sounds so we can compare two different instruments. I do all of this in my piano lab...a room full of computers, accelerometers, and a big old grand piano. A lot of my time is spent thinking about things after they've been transformed to a new domain, something that makes you think differently about the world we live in.

Above is what a piano sounds like, and below is what a guitar sounds like...

I've also been teaching this term, filling in for a prof who is on sabbatical. To say the least teaching a class of 90 second year engineering students has been an experience...The course was about social factors in design. A lot of singing and dancing in front of a presentation screen, but overall a good experience.

Beech; a good wood.

Beech, in my books, is an underrated wood. It doesn't cost a lot, it's not all that flashy, but it has that kind of simple beauty I seem to prefer. The above picture is a beech coffee table that is 3/4's finished. I've also got a desk, a chair, and a side table in mind...maybe after all of that I'll be in beech overload! I've also been thinking about making a plane or two that I might add to my arsenal...

Drawing Things...with a PENCIL!!!

I saw a neat table by Tomoko Azumi that uses a semi-Japanese joint (it's not really super traditional or super functional, but nice nonetheless) to join the skirt and legs of a table together. It's basically a 3 member joint, with the curveball that the legs are titled at a slight angle. I drew it up in Sketchup to let the computer do the hard math, but while dimensioning it I wasn't happy with the visual appearance of the drawing I'd have to work with to actually layout and cut the joints. I redrew it, which you see above, and I kind of liked the process of trying to get my head around what is hidden, what is visible, and where things are pretty much the same, but not quite the same. Overall a good experience and a good chance to get off the computer and do some designing in the real world. I kind of like the drawing too...it's got something nice about it going on...

Sharp

I'm back at it again....finally. After a BUSY term in my PhD and the Christmas rush I'm finally going to get back to doing some woodworking. Before you can do any woodworking though you have to first do your sharpening. I'm still developing my sharpening skills, but the back of my hand is missing some hair right now, so my blades are getting razor sharp at least.