16 ms·
To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab
- caiobegotti 6y agoKind of tangential because it also involves the MIT and lots of crazy funny sentimental stories like this one about working and studying there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightwork:_A_History_of_Hacks_and_Pranks_at_MIT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightwork:_A_History_of_Hacks_...
- saeranv 6y agoAwesome post. Who was the cranky researcher who developed the climate-controlled window system with the Linux box and python scripts? I want to do the same thing.
- Scoundreller 6y agoSame, but it seems overkill. I'm in an old office where the only openable window is consumed by a window A/C unit. I want to put a 120mm fan in a small opening next to it that'll turn on when it's more than 3C cooler outside, and more than 24C inside. Seems like an Arduino would do it.
- bbarnett 6y agoSo when it is 21C outside, and 24+C inside is close enough. Two analog temp switches will be far more reliable, easier, and adjustable. (I get the fun with an Arduino, but it is hard to beat century old tech)
- saeranv 6y agoYeah that's a good way to do it. I think there are a couple of additional ideas that might be worth exploring: - Comfort is a function of multiple factors, not just the dry bulb temperature difference. It includes occupant metabolism, insulation from clothing, radiant heat exchange, air speed, and humidity. This is trivial to solve in the case of a single-person office (just give them control of the window), but more complex once you have multiple occupants with different needs, who are in different locations in the office. I wonder if there's value in using reinforcement learning to customize natural ventilation to optimize the comfort of multiple occupants. - Predicting the temperature the next day, and using a fan to draw in cold night time air into your HVAC ducts when a hot morning/afternoon is expected. This way you can have a reservoir off cool air you can access the next day. - Once you have multiple rooms, and a tall building, there's multiple effects that are worth attempting to coordinate. For example you could coordinate the ventilation of the building air with the stack effect and wind-driven air through the windows, or coordinate the cross-ventilation horizontally through multiple rooms. This would not just modulate temperatures, but also satisfy indoor air quality needs traditionally achieved through the HVAC. Typically a lot of fine-tuning of natural ventilation isn't done because the actual energy/comfort impact for one of these ideas is small relative to complexity of building the system, and the large uncertainty associated with the dynamics of airflow. But my general hypothesis is that with the integration of cheap prediction or RL methods, we can reduce that uncertainty which would permit a more long-tail approach where we can combine multiple small improvements.
- squarefoot 6y agoIt could be much simpler. If I understood the problem, a differential amplifier (any opamp would do) wired to the temp sensors would output a voltage proportional to the difference between the two temperatures, plus adjustment. This voltage then can be used to drive a pwm generator wired to a h-bridge that drives a reversible fan that would pump air with speed and direction depending on the difference between two temperatures, so that it could be used both ways too warm up or cool down. The same could also be done the digital way by using for example an uber cheapo ATTiny85 small board wired to the sensors, plus the fan and its driver, then doing all in software. That little critter has just the right amount of ports for the job and then some. Not checked on paper (especially the first) but on principle both should work and also would be extremely cheap.
- phyzome 6y agoI have to ask -- are you aware of the existence of bimetallic strips, and how they can perform this function in a completely mechanical way? (No electricity.) It doesn't get you active air movement, of course, but it has worked for years in greenhouses.
- Scoundreller 6y agoMy only worry with that is having one end hang out the window. The household round thermostats are still like $35+ each.
- squarefoot 6y agoI know about them; that would be the simplest and safest possible solution indeed, however they are on-off switches and also have a fixed (sometimes excessive) hysteresis which couldn't be ideal for some uses.
- saeranv 6y agoI believe I found the researcher and thesis that informed the window project here: https://resenv.media.mit.edu/#Projects#personalized-building-comfort-control https://resenv.media.mit.edu/#Projects#personalized-building... I don't think it's overkill within the context of his full work. Based on my brief skimming, he's coupling the window with a personal device to modulate his environment through reinforcement learning.
- wott 6y agoThis "Responsible Environment" website pegs my CPU...
- mkeeter 6y agoSounds like something coming out of the Responsive Environments group (https://resenv.media.mit.edu/ https://resenv.media.mit.edu/).
- saeranv 6y agoThanks for the link, I think I found our guy! https://resenv.media.mit.edu/#Projects#personalized-building-comfort-control https://resenv.media.mit.edu/#Projects#personalized-building... He published his thesis 2010, which aligns with when Ethan arrived at his office, and if you watch the video at that link, you can see the automated window control system at 1:47. (Also the video is kind of hilarious and awesome in its own right).
- mrgordon 6y agoHe’s a cool guy and you’re likely right
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y agoAwesome internet-search foo! I gotta talk with Ethan, I mean, it's cool the window opens automatically. He could have put his wood knob on the open (clockwise) and close (counterclockwise) buttons and achieved preserving the past, and making things easy to use for the present. All good.
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoThere's something so beautiful about a place so dysfunctional that you can't even replace standard office equipment; I know it was alluded to in the article, but in case anyone forgot, the MIT Media Lab played a part in Jeffery Epstein and he often leveraged it for good PR https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joichi-ito.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-je...
- PNWChris 6y agoSome quick additional info, since I wasn’t familiar with all the context. I am glad I looked deeper, I am ashamed to admit I assumed some wrongdoing given he had resigned! Wikipedia notes that he “...resigned from his position[19] as director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, in protest of the Media Lab's involvement with Epstein.”[0] [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Zuckerman#Career https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Zuckerman#Career
- nkurz 6y agoHere's Ethan's own explanation of why he left: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-media-lab/ http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2019/08/20/on-me-and-the-... He's landed on his feet very well. He has a temporary position at Columbia this fall, and then will be starting a tenured job at UMass Amherst next year.
- sbierwagen 6y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoIt was heavily alluded too in the article, I wanted to give readers full context, because I don't think Ethan wanted to explicitly call them out in his blog... If the mods have an issue with this comment I can take it down
- jeffrallen 6y agoParadoxically, publishing this blog post will no doubt result in the window knob being fixed and a new "no unauthorized modifications to HVAC" policy being out in place.
- roamingryan 6y agoI'd be surprised if that is the outcome. MIT facilities tends to be quite tolerant of stuff like this.
- Animats 6y agoIt's very MIT. It's also an illustration of what went wrong with the "internet of things" concept. Sensors are easy today. Actuators are hard. Most "IoT" things can't do much. Try to buy a home power window. They exist. They're an exotic luxury home item. Even controllable home HVAC dampers are rare. It makes good sense to have a system where windows, fans, dampers, heaters, and compressors are all coordinated to maximize comfort at minimum cost, automatically. Will NeXT sell you that? No. It takes too much installation. You might see that at a well run convention hotel. They have to keep customers happy, yet many of their big rooms are empty much of the time. So they'll have CO, CO2, temperature, humidity, and motion sensors tied to a control system that senses what the room needs for the current people load. There's real IoT, but it's under commercial building automation.
- squarefoot 6y agoYup. True home automation is something that changes your life, not gadgets for rich people. I will call true home automation for example when I can throw the trash into a hatch at my same floor in a bag with RFID tag so that it will send it down and sort out it for recycle. I recall when I was less than 10 (mid '70s) my grandparents having those hatches (minus electronics of course) in their building. They would leave the bag there and it would drop to a container in the basement that the litter van would retrieve later. Of course it was long before recycling legislation so with new laws it had to be ditched and people would have again to bring their trash bags to the bins, which weren't that close. So why the system can't be repurposed, and introduced where necessary, to be recycle friendly? That's what I would call modern home automation, not stuff like reading a sensor and opening a window, which could have been done 10 years ago with an Arduino, 20 years ago with any uC and X10 already did in the '70s.
- axaxs 6y agoFor some reason this reminds me. My old house, built in the 40s, had a mysterious small hatch in the closet floor across from the bathroom. One day I opened it and it was just a cutout of the floor, directly over the washing machine in the basement below. I'm not sure if that's lazy or genius, but it doesn't get much easier than that I guess.
- NegativeLatency 6y agoWayback URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20200815220615/http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2020/08/15/to-the-future-occupants-of-my-office-at-the-mit-media-lab/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200815220615/http://www.ethanz...
- m0zg 6y agoPeltier element is just about the worst solution for anything. The angel wings girl wasn't experiencing much "cooling" for sure. Form over function, I suppose - consumer market seems to prefer that, but as an EE I immediately know shit's not going to work, which robs me of appreciation of the "form". And I'd prefer a mechanized window, myself.
- vikramkr 6y agoIt's art
- m0zg 6y agoThen why bother with Peltier?
- vikramkr 6y agoIt's part of the art. Thats like asking why kinetic sculptures move. The whole generating energy from your own inner heat part is kind if part of it. It's not supposed to make enough current to charge your phone, it's art. You're way overthinking it.
- 082349872349872 6y agoWhy bother making costumes for Neptune Day? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLymNoVvC0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLymNoVvC0k (Но впрочем песня не о нем, а о любви.)
- hardwaregeek 6y agoWhenever I read stuff about this I get a sense of immense jealousy. MIT certainly has its issues but man, I'd love to be at a place where people exhibit so much joy and interest in creation. I've met my share of cool people but it truly does feel like MIT has this unique environment of technical skill and creativity.
- cortesoft 6y agoYou should join a maker group!
- imranq 6y agoMake a plan and get there too!
- gowld 6y agoThat the old MIT. For the past 15 years MIT leadership has been dedicated to destroying the creative hacker spirit.
- mrgordon 6y agoMelodrama much? It’s still one of the most creative and amazing places to meet hackers (or become one) in the world
- p_l 6y agoA lot of MIT "myth" for me, daj when I was trying to get in, was that they would do a lot of things internally and dogfood - for example, project athena, using that as basis for many other things, etc. Recently I heard from some fresh MIT grads that a lot of that is now pushed to outsourcing and same cookie-cutter approach.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y agoEvidence?
- 6y ago
- nangz 6y agoRemember when MIT media Lab gave a civil disobedience award to bethann mclaughlin for some nebulous #metoo bs who since disgraced herself by LARPing as a fake Native American academic who died of covid? https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/twitter-account-embattled-metoostem-founder-suspended https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/twitter-account-emba... Remember when they chased Aaron Swartz to commit suicide and never gave him a civil disobedience award? Remember their extremely close links to Jeffrey Epstein? Sorry but MIT media Lab is absolute trash and an embarrassment to the MIT name.
- saeranv 6y agoYeah, their treatment of Aaron Swartz was despicable, and extremely hypocritical.
- xdavidliu 6y agoI hope by "their" you mean "MIT's", not "MIT media lab's". MIT media lab wasn't particular responsible for the Aaron Swartz situation.
- sbierwagen 6y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nangz 6y agoSorry, but organisations need to be held to account.
- techer 6y agoBut rarely are.
- saeranv 6y agoI think the parent comment is relevant since the blog post (and subsequent comments here) praises the hacker/anti-institutionalist mentality of the Media Lab. Yet when Schwartz practiced altruistic, civil disobedience in line with that sentiment, MIT's response was to sue him until he killed himself. They've done a lot of cool things that I'm into, but let's not whitewash history.
- thecureforzits 6y agoActually, there's no such thing as "Vermont Maple". It's Sugar Maple or if you prefer the latin, Acer Saccharum.
- leetrout 6y ago> ... needs to be plugged into wifi and power That first one is going to be a challenge.
- Forge36 6y ago>If it start beeping, either it’s malfunctioning and needs to be rebooted, or there’s a significant radiation leak on campus. With no details on how it beeps I'm now anxious for beeping of a device many miles away
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Mizza 6y agoI've been thinking about some of these guys a lot lately. When are we going to collectively unpack the fact the Media Lab/Berkman Center project has been a complete failure? I worked at these places and mingled on the outskirts, and for a long time really believed all the bullshit they were spouting at the time - that the internet was a positive force, if we just connected enough people, surely their "stories" and "empathy" would "revolutionize" the world, etc., etc.. They were all wrong. Digital, networked technology seemed exciting for a brief and beautiful moment, but has turned into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - forget about your "global library" dreams. And yet - they persist, despite their ever increasing irrelevance. Spineless hucksters like a Zittrain still get wheeled out occasionally for their take on some hot new trend in Wired magaize, they still get private and government grant money, and, of course, they still keep taking on hapless graduate students. Just when will we call a spade a spade? EDIT: This little tirade made me go back and re-read some of the Cluetrain Manifesto - I feel almost ashamed of myself to reread something like "markets are conversations" and remember thinking it was ever good, important, or even valid argument. I now see this as evil thought.
- juped 6y agoIt's not for that, it's for giving people with prestige more prestige. The more irrelevant the work is, the better it is for its real purpose.
- an_opabinia 6y ago> into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - forget about your "global library" dreams. I don’t know, if you’re basically saying your stylized, hyperbolic, generalizing, imprecise, inaccurate discourse is better than theirs just because it’s negative and theirs is positive... I would rather have the positive?
- Mizza 6y agoI'm not saying that at all, I'm saying very specifically: The material conditions of people alive in the west today are significantly worse than they were in 1999, largely as the result of the ascendance of the digital platforms and economic arrangements that organizations like MIT and Berkman were taking money to promote. Ordinary people today are more lonely, overwhelmed, polarized and impoverished. The "new" economics they were promoting - gig economies, crowdfunding, "conversational" marketing - have only resulted in a new form of serfdom, upward movement of capital from the poor to the rich, and a completely collapse of dignity in public life. In fact, I'll even go a step further and suggest that what we needed was _more_ negativity. Techno-positivity and lack of critical thought is exactly how we got in this mess.
- teddyh 6y ago> When sleeping in this office, I found it helpful to cover the blue light on the box with a post-it note. Some people point to Richard Stallman having a mattress in his office at MIT as some sort of sinister sign. This, I should think, proves otherwise.
- ueli 6y agoCoincidentally I was just watching a talk from one of those two students that ran the breast pump hackathon: https://vimeo.com/354276137 https://vimeo.com/354276137
- digitalsushi 6y agoThis is the same reason I'm never going to be able to move into a nicer/bigger/cuter/better view house. I have my house and the barn behind it all laid out exactly as I see fit, and I know that if I ever sold this place, no amount of impassioned pleas to understand the nuisance and rationale will ever be heard. It's always going to distill into "great, but strip it all out, all of it, paint it white and make it able to store a boat". So much of my ego is programmed into the layout of the building that it would be a denial of self to let someone else have it.