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        <title><![CDATA[@lachlanjc/edu]]></title>
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        <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com</link>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 1 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[But that’s what I did. I started coding every day, making little websites for myself, then apps, then open source projects, then hackathons.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-04_cc_week_1_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 1 Group Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In the fairy tale, the protagonist tries to bring food to her sickly grandmother, but in the forest on the way there, is intercepted by a wolf dressed up as her grandmother.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-05_cl_week_1_group_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Switch Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[As a very young child, ages 1–2, I was fascinated by electrical switches of all kinds. I would turn on lights, fans, lamps, & anything else connected to a switch, for hours, just for the fun of it. My mom reports that before I could speak, I had a “word,” “Aa-taa,” which seemed to mean “turn on or off the switch.” My parents would hold me up to the switch, & I’d flip it while watching the light/fan. Apparently, not yet being able to make things happen on my own, I liked making something happen with the switch.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-07_cc_switch_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 07 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 1 Single Stories]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Though I’d heard the argument a few years back, I found Adichie’s TED talk far more compelling this time. The story the media tells about a topic is often, at least and especially at the beginning of its cultural relevance, is more culturally important the reality. It can have extreme, sometimes debilitating effects on those implicated by these single stories.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-09_cl_week_1_single_stories</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[12 Photo Story]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[After making & publishing this story, my dad mentioned the artist David Hammons, specifically his work Phat Free, which is a video project including a man kicking a can down a road, commenting on the realities of being black & poor in the US.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-11_cl_12_photo_story</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Intro to DSLR]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-12_cc_intro_to_dslr</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Scott Mccloud & Digital Storytelling]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Humans have been drawing and writing for awhile. As McCloud references, 17,000 years ago we painted the caves at Lascaux, and early written languages used images, then a combination of words and images. Cartoons, just over a century old, and emoji, only two decades old, both major cultural phenomena, are just modern incarnations of this combination.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-15_cl_scott_mccloud_and_digital_storytelling</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Portfolio 2]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The idea of casually walking by the origin of the modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement, two blocks from where I live, has still not really sunk in since I moved to New York. I did this again walking to the Whitney recently, to see the 2019 biennial, the 79th installation of the longest-running regular survey of American art. It features a few dozen artists (2/3 of whom are women), spanning several floors of the museum.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-16_wte_portfolio_2</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 2 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Though computers are ostensibly “universal machines,” a computer with no inputs is just a useless device, not a universal one. These inputs give the computer something to compute and ways to communicate with users. I strongly believe we should]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-17_cc_week_2_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 2 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The “universal machine” is a long-promised device that can do anything. An iPad is pretty close, if you ask me. But today we’re just building an LED connected to a button—perhaps the most simplified essence of what an iPad is!]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-17_cc_week_2_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Sound Storytelling]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-23_cl_sound_storytelling</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Portfolio 3]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[How do we understand art? Matthew Goulish’s essay “Criticism” considers the meaning of art through the art form of criticism. While one might assume a critic would have decided an answer for such a fundamental question, he in no way tries to decisively answer the questions the essay ponders. Instead, over the course of three sections—the main idea of each not crystallizing itself immediately either—he poses open questions, draws connections, and creates a space to explore meaning alongside the reader.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-23_wte_portfolio_3</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 3 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Computers are useless if they can’t remember information. In the short-term, while software runs, variables store little bits of information in memory. After each interaction, many programs save their data  to databases, which are vast catalogs of connected records. Underneath both of these is the file system, where documents are stored more or less permanently.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-24_cc_week_3_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 3 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week we’re combining analog input & output, stepping toward creating a meaningful interaction with a device.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-24_cc_week_3_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Self Portrait]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-26_cc_self_portrait</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 4 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[One of my favorite songs of last year was “Make Me Feel” by Janelle Monáe. It’s a pop masterpiece, and Monáe expresses her queerness beautifully in the music video.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-29_cc_week_4_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 29 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Essay 1]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[As Carl Sagan famously once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Human knowing is similarly self-contradictory—if each human begins their knowledge “from scratch,” from where does knowledge originate? Plato’s dialogue Meno, Thucydides’ groundbreaking historical account, The Peloponnesian War, and The Gospel According to St. Matthew answer this question indirectly, but uniquely. While at first glance seeming disparate texts from two millennia ago, with deeper analysis, their similarities in “ways of knowing“ become clear. In the face of an endlessly-subjective reality, both Plato and Thucydides utilize grounded evidence and logical fact to reach conclusions about reality. Meanwhile, the Gospel relies on faith over evidence to know things.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-29_obj_essay_1</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 29 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 4 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[It’s hard to overstate just what impact photography has had on every part of society that has gained access to it. At the start, its use for portraits and historical documentation ushered in a new medium with deep, wide-ranging impacts on many other forms of art. It relatively short order, even a concept as simple as war documentation was transformed:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-30_cc_week_4_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Blink of an Eye]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[As someone who has never seriously edited film before, I rarely even notice cuts in a good film. That’s because a great editor knows exactly where to cut and what to cut to such that the cut barely registers, the film just makes sense.\[^1] It feels continuous instead of wrong.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-09-30_cl_blink_of_an_eye</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 5 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, I’m jumping into using React and a server-rendering framework called Next.js to make an app to track the level of CO₂ in our atmosphere. Before the apocalypse arrives, may as well enjoy some data visualizations!]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-10-04_cc_week_5_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 5 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[It doesn’t even need to be stated that the web has utterly transformed every part of the world it has touched. From e-commerce to stock trading, from crowdfunding to advertising, from texting to political campaigns, from memes to insurgencies, none of us can escape its deep effects. But one remarkable interpretation of the “global village” is the significance of it literally—how the web has changed how we connect.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-10-06_cc_week_5_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 06 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Animation Style]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[One film with an animation style I respect deeply is Wall•E. Each segment of the film takes place in a drastically different environment—first the post-apocalyptic, trash-heaped remains of Earth, then a robot-filled gleaming starship, and finally the recovering earth—and the animators render the very different worlds with unique styles.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-10-09_cl_animation_style</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 6 Post]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-10-13_cc_week_6_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 13 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 6 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week we’re using a combination of p5.js & the Arduino hardware to make something. I got inspired by the auto-brightness functionality on my laptop/devices—it automatically senses ambient light, then dynamically, subtly adjusts my screen brightness in the background.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-10-13_cc_week_6_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 13 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 7 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week I'm using the p5.speech library to make something fun with web speech recognition.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-10-20_cc_week_7_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 20 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Midterm Animation Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[By Lachlan & Joey]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-10-30_cl_midterm_animation_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Midterm Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[With two classmates, I made a frightening physical photobooth experience for Halloween. Under a cloth tent, you crawled in and put your head through a cardboard cutout of a clown. On the screen of a laptop in front, you saw yourself through a creepily-filtered tint, with the facial features of the Joker overlaid. Words you said aloud were transcribed (with the Web Speech API) live onto the photo’s caption, but your audio was played back at the same time through the headphones, distorted and echoing. The experience was completely overwhelming, with a bright blue light shining in your eyes, creepy, reactive, laughing noise playing in the headphones, and the wild screen experience, all in a dark, enclosed space. You could click an onscreen button to capture a photo of yourself, enter your email address, and have it emailed to you.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-01_cc_midterm_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 9 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[It seems like every week, the public discovers a new case of rampant data collection from another tech company—Google, Uber, ~~Facebook~~ FACEBOOK, it never ends. Even two years ago, much of the American public seemed blissfully ignorant of the unbelievable scale of the data collection. Instagram listening through your phone’s microphone was just a conspiracy theory, right?]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-04_cc_week_9_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 9 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week I made a bizarre balloon simulator. Tap/click to release new “balloons,” which will rise up into the distance, bouncing against the walls until they fling themselves into oblivion.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-04_cc_week_9_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Essay 2]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[When he published his novel, Robert Montgomery Bird satirized antebellum American society through his Sheppard Lee: Written By Himself. But the novel’s satire applies just as well to our contemporary American society, shaped by Instagram and other social media services. In fact, much of the novel’s plot seems allegorical, warning future audiences of their perpetual lust for their limited visions of others’ “success” as well as their propensity to be manipulated. In these ways, Sheppard Lee parallels a world revolving around social media.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-09_obj_essay_2</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 10 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Machine learning is a much-hyped, but nonetheless truly unprecedented technology. Based on sufficient training data, it can create models to answer questions humans or traditional algorithms could never. The industry’s marketing certainly promises a bright future powered by artificial intelligence, and every major tech company is trying to speed towards that future as quickly as possible.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-10_cc_week_10_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Week 10 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week I’m making a simple website to find your Congressional Representative, using the Google Civic API + Next.js/React.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-10_cc_week_10_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project Proposal]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[For the final project, I’m making a website called Gun Funded. It’s a social action project that visualizes the gun lobby’s funding of the US Congress, built with Next.js & vx.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-14_cc_final_project_proposal</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Projection Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Today I created the Apple Pencil-based drawing app for our project.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-15_cl_projection_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 12 Post]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I feel a profound and continuing compulsion to make.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-17_cc_week_12_post</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 17 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 12 Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, we’re using Google’s Teachable Machine with ml5.js to use ~machine learning~ to identify if you’re a human, a phone, or a human holding a phone 👀 & speak the result aloud!]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-17_cc_week_12_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 17 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project Check In]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’m making great progress on Gun Funded.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-21_cc_final_project_check-in</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[AR Exploration]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’ve used Blender in a minimal capacity for modeling/3D animation in the past, so I decided to try it out to model some new props for my AR scene. They had completely redesigned it since last fall, and the design is much more intuitive, even if everything I remembered was no longer applicable.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-25_cl_ar_exploration</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Watch my demo: (37:00)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-11-26_cc_final_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Enter Autovendor: We made a small vending machine with a screen and physical keypad. Three typical snack items rotate in the showcase. Then, upon entering the accompanying code for an item, the machine shows a stop-motion animation, such as the machine eating the food itself with sound and video. (The self-consumption particularly is a joke since the vending machines at IMA have a reputation of unreliability.) Afterwards, users can enter their phone number to be texted a receipt, with a pun based on the animation they saw. It’s a humorous and slightly subversive piece.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-12-02_cl_final_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Essay 3]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I recently published an essay, “One Day This Kid Will Talk,” about queer coming-of-age. It uses the work of several artists, as well as my very personal experience, to try to build a broader understanding of the topic. I published the piece as an interactive website, accompanied by an audio recording of me reading the essay aloud. How could I try to represent my queer coming-of-age experience with a single photograph? Its reality is one of a deeply nuanced, complex, and storied journey through and of my life. Though I have lived that experience, it took weeks of careful work to authentically represent it through the essay. For a photograph, what moment could I choose? Is there even a moment?]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2019-12-18_obj_essay_3</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 1 Bios]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Vannevar Bush was one of the most important scientists/engineers/administrators/inventors people of the 20th century. He firmly believed military strength was critical for preserving democracy. A professor at MIT in 1931, he built the first analog computer for solving incredibly complex differential equations. The U.S. Navy hired him to build more war technologies as WW2 was beginning.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-01-31_bit_week_1_bios</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Digital Accessibility Options]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[To enable VoiceOver on iPad, open Settings, then tap Accessibility in the sidebar, then it’s the first option. Flip the switch to enable it.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-01_ast_digital_accessibility_options</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 1 Responses]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This quote particularly hit home for me:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-01_ast_week_1_responses</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 2 Exercises]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” over the course of seven dense pages, attempts to come to some “practical conclusions” for the “responsible person” about creativity, emotion, criticism, and art-making. Artists, he argues, acknowledging the inherent contradiction, must simultaneously experience the world both passively and actively. We exist as “receptacles for seizing and storing” our surroundings, so “impressions and experiences” can “combine in…unexpected ways.” At the same time, we must be “conscious and deliberate” in channeling those into art, or we risk fake or nonresonant art. Much of my most resonant art, similarly, came…somewhat obviously. Words that, once I arrived at the right opening, just had to be put down. Assembling my recent essay “One Day This Kid Will Talk,” featuring David Wojnarowicz, I at one point described some common experiences living as a queer and nonbinary person. Perhaps it is only a retelling of the old adage “write what you know,” but however much the particular technical choices of my writing were “conscious and deliberate,” many decisions in the writing process, personally, had obvious answers. The “impressions” from my being a “receptacle” of my surroundings streamed out.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-04_wte_week_2_exercises</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 2 Utopia]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The future society I want to live in runs on freedom, inclusion, and sustainability as basic principles. All repetitive manual labor will be automated, allowing the release of humans from inhumaine working conditions. Everyone will be guaranteed healthcare and basic housing, though of course everyone is welcome to buy/improve their own housing. Free, unlimited 5G(+) will blanket the country/world. All electricity will be from renewable sources. I could go on for every other area of society, but mostly, I believe that since we’re so rich & we’ve developed so much technology & thought about aesthetics so much, there’s no reason not to do all these things. They’re about freeing us up from worrying about all these dumb issues—from our basic human rights being eroded at every turn to problems like healthcare that we both know the solution for and have the resources to solve. True freedom starts with liberation from needing to continually fight for the basics. We can then engage in more humane capitalism, centered on self-determination, where we’re all creators, of every variety of thing.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-05_bit_week_2_utopia</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 2 Creative Process]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[A few years ago, Jon Gold wrote about design being a process of divergence & convergence, and it’s influenced my design/creative process massively ever since reading it.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-09_bit_week_2_creative_process</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 2 Responses]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The field trip to the clinic was wildly cool. I had no idea occupational therapists were makers—previously those seemed like totally separate domains to me. There’s a narrative in the technology industry that all the innovation is happening from startups (Capsule, Zocdoc, etc), but it’s actually coming from people like occupational therapists who are using technology intentionally and directly to improve individual people’s lives. While startups are optimizing for profits, health care professionals can (disregarding the insurance companies…) optimize for actually caring for people, often with much more innovative uses of technology, like some of the ones we saw.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-11_ast_week_2_responses</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Sufjan Stevens Timeline]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Sufjan Stevens is a singer, songwriter, & composer—one of the most important of this century, and one of the most private & shrouded in mystery. His music, though paying homage to Elliot Smith & others, is unlike any one other artist’s. He is originally from Michigan (Detroit), but has lived in Kensington, Brooklyn since 2010. He identifies as Christian. This timeline is far from a complete list of his albums & work—there’s an enormous catalog of it.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-11_wte_sufjan_stevens_timeline</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 3 Optimism]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In class, we drew a spectrum, from complete optimism to pessimism about what various figures in technological history thought computers could do for society. Now, since computers & society are so closely intertwined, we’re more discussing the human character—using computers is just an extension of what we’d do with any other technology (e.g. printing press, atomic bomb) or without.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-12_bit_week_3_optimism</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 3 Responses]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Disability often means a reduction to pay that intersects with the reduction to pay that can come from being a woman or gender minority and/or being a person of color. On top of that, everyday-necessity services for people with disabilities mean higher costs:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-17_ast_week_3_responses</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 3 Connections]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Of course, Parable of the Sower wasn’t written in 2020, it was written in 1993, nearly 30 years ago, which makes author Octavia Butler’s foresight remarkable. It was written before the internet was widespread or social media or smartphones had been invented, but a slightly-updated version would surely include devolving versions of these critical constructs.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-17_bit_week_3_connections</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 4 Coastlines]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[People have been lured to cities for centuries, chasing opportunity, culture, & better living. But with the climate crisis, we’re facing the reality that many of the world’s largest & most influential cities sit on coastlines, the rising sea levels not far away. From Ho Chi Minh City to San Francisco, Bangkok to New York, Miami to Alexandria, cities will go under, literally. We can spend billions to put up seawalls (like in Miami & New York City), but all evidence points to them being exceedingly temporary.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-23_bit_week_4_coastlines</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 4 Responses]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The idea of the “minimum viable product”, popularized in the startup community by Eric Ries, describes the simplest functioning version of your product. Launching at this stage (sharing working prototypes in public to gather feedback, the opposite of an approach like Apple’s where everything is behind closed doors) has many advantages for design: gathering general feedback, foreseeing side effects, or even seeing what could potentially be offensive/insensitive. But an under-appreciated aspect of prototyping in public I realized during this reading is accessibility. As diverse a team as one could build, especially in a small organization/company, no team can ever personally test for every kind of condition & ability & background. (That said, most companies don’t try nearly hard enough in this area, but setting that aside…) Prototyping in public allows gathering feedback specifically on the accessibility of a product from a much wider range of users in a much wider range of life situations. Especially if you’re creating a product especially for the purposes of accessibility, that’s invaluable.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-24_ast_week_4_responses</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 5 Change]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I really believe in this—those we look up to in society (MLK, Steve Jobs, etc) mostly weren’t otherworldly smart. (“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.” —Steve Jobs) But these people had an unending obsession with a better version of the world. They worked their way toward their vision of it, adapting as the world changed around them.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-24_bit_week_5_change</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Over the weekend, Plum, David & I gathered to create a functional prototype of our new design. After consulting with Cara, we decided to use cardboard for this week while we figure out the structure, then move to more expensive/difficult to manufacture materials like acrylic for our final product next week. We bought the necessary suction cups and used hot glue & cardboard from the IMA Shop.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-29_ast_final_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 5 Responses]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The sobering irony of this story and reflection of the reality for wheelchair users is so gross and unfortunately unsurprising.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-02-29_ast_week_5_responses</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 6 Adaptation]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Who is the “we” here? I’m thinking about this as an American, so I think the American public, but I think especially young people. Even with this election, we can continue down the road of fear of change & promises to bring back previous decades, or we can stake out a big, bold path into the future. But in our everyday lives as well—we can resist denial, lower our own impacts, lobby our elected officials to pass the Green New Deal (+ Blue New Deal), and push forward. We have to.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2020-03-02_bit_week_6_adaptation</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Rube Goldberg Machine]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Since this class is at 9am, I don’t wake up early enough to make breakfast. By yanking a cord on this Rube Goldberg machine (still from bed), a variety of breakfast ingredients could move in the kitchen to ultimately depress the handle on my toaster & begin toasting a bagel.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-01_pcomp_rube_goldberg_machine</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Classmate Life Visualization]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-07_ind_classmate_life_visualization</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Grandma at Mcdonalds]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Watching this video is an eye-opening experience as a designer. No doubt the intention of the wide range of hardware engineers, product designers, salespeople, & many others was good in building an order kiosk for their restaurants; that doesn’t mean the experience ends up working equally well for everyone.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-07_pcomp_grandma_at_mcdonalds</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Wearable Switch Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The three of us came into building a switch with little experience in wiring, schematics, conductivity, or wearables. Nonetheless, from the start we established a stretch goal of building our switch into a jacket, (slightly) illuminating your pathway ahead once you zip up the jacket.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-08_pcomp_wearable_switch_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 08 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Representation in Type & Design]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In type design, think of the most notable developments & releases in corporate typography in the last decade: Roboto & Product Sans from Google, San Francisco & family from Apple, the IBM Plex family, & even bespoke corporate fonts like Airbnb Cereal, Netflix Sans, & their peers. They’re exceedingly similar variations on a theme. These projects—though I respect their leadership & output deeply—were nearly all led by men, by & large white men. They’re all in a style descending from Helvetica, which descended from Swiss style & Bauhaus design. Homogenous groups tend to celebrate the same ideals & centralize work around those, & modern corporate type remains deeply entrenched in that legacy of exclusion.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-08_ptf_representation_in_type_and_design</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 08 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Florence Nightingale]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[One note this excellent episode touched on was how charts can misrepresent data & mislead viewers absurdly quickly (in under a second). This isn’t news to anyone spending time on e.g. Twitter: I regularly see graphs on Twitter that contradict what the poster is claiming, & it’s sometimes not clear if the misleading claim is intentional or not.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-12_ind_florence_nightingale</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Personal Environmental Issue]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My hometown, State College, PA, in central Pennsylvania, resides in one of the gloomiest areas of the United States\[^gloom]. Most years, snow starts in October & continues through April. In October 2009, we received more than snow, & got a massive ice storm, early enough that nearly all the foliage remained on trees. Layer after layer of freezing rain, snow, & ice combined on still-green leaves & branches, weighing them down. My house is surrounded by trees, & the storm caused one of our largest oaks to collapse onto the house, crushing through the roof of one room.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-13_gw_personal_environmental_issue</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Arduino Input & Output]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week’s project was an absolute rollercoaster. I came up with my idea quickly: I wanted to combine a variable resistor potentiometer with 2-3 multi-color LEDs, allowing the user to rotate the dial & change the hue of a tiny lamp, preferably complete with a home-brew lampshade.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-19_pcomp_arduino_input_and_output</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[New York Times Visualization]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In August, after President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, the NYTimes made a visualization of the budget changes the law puts into place. It groups the changes into two categories: spending & tax cuts, then savings & new revenue. It uses what I would call a clustered bubble chart but is technically a “clustered force layout” to then visualize, to scale, the funding amounts in each category, with labels on all but the smallest circles. (In the digital version, the small circles can be hovered to view their label & funding change with a tooltip.) Across both types of spending changes, the circles are categorized with pastel background colors for taxes, energy & climate, & health care.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-20_ind_new_york_times_visualization</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Tactile Controls]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[From arts spaces to the US Navy, there’s been much discussion in recent years of where touchscreens belong in our lives versus tactile buttons & controls.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-20_pcomp_tactile_controls</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[September Notebook Entries]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-20_ptf_september_notebook_entries</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[How Tides Work]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[For this project, inspired by the Figma ice cream truck this week, I used Figma. Though I’ve used Figma for both visual design & product UI for years, I’d never tried any of its prototyping or animation features, so I’m happy to have added their basics to my creative toolbox.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-21_ind_how_tides_work</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Blue Sky Day]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[It’s surprisingly non-dystopian of us to mark the moment in history before we change the sky color to white, with a holiday we’ve creatively coined “Blue Sky Day.” I would’ve expected us to simply start the geoengineering process (regardless of not having consent from many indigenous tribes & nations who are not onboard), gaslighting everyone on earth who didn’t pay close attention to the UN CAC (Climate Adaptation Committee) news breifings. The majority of people don’t care about the CAC, because they’ve been yapping about climate adaptation for more decades than most people’s attention spans; this day broke through to the regular news cycle, since even with our post-caring world, this is undeniably a major milestone in human history.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-23_gw_blue_sky_day</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Servo Motor]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I successfully wired up a Force-Sensing Resistor to my Servo motor:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-25_pcomp_servo_motor</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Scrollytelling Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, I custom-coded a website telling the story of 51 deaths of migrants in San Antonio, TX from last summer.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-26_ind_scrollytelling_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Interactive Object Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Kline & I are looking to make a Halloween-themed musical chairs game.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-28_pcomp_interactive_object_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 28 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Researching an Assumption]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Before returning to NYU, I was working at a startup called Watershed, which helps large companies measure their carbon footprints, make reduction plans, & invest in carbon removal. We got to work with organizations invested at a deep level in decarbonizing their operations, measuring ever-more accurately & coming up with industrious, creative ways to reduce harmful emissions. The entire team worked incredibly hard to stay up-to-date on the latest science & ensure we were driving true reductions, not becoming a box companies could check for greenwashing.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-09-30_gw_researching_an_assumption</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Photographic Visualization Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Standing outside a boba shop with my roommate recently, I was accidentally blocking a nondescript door I hadn’t noticed existed. I remarked that “every door in NYC is used by someone.” Beyond that, the doors you use say a lot about your life: whether they’re fancy, glass, padlocked, service, formal, electronically-controlled. They reveal class, occupation, habits. For this project, I wanted to photograph doors I pass through in my NYU life.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-03_ind_photographic_visualization_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[All Technology Is Assistive]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[While I didn’t read Sara Hendren’s 2014 Backchannel column until a few years after she published it, I’ve subscribed to the ideology she presents for awhile. (I likely soaked it up via accessibility-in-design advocates on Twitter.)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-04_pcomp_all_technology_is_assistive</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 04 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Housing Shortage as Environmental Issue]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Growing up in a suburban town, new housing projects were always accompanied by groans from the community: we’d be put in the shade by huge buildings from greedy developers looking to house all the new residents moving in. Unfortunately, new housing projects in my hometown too often consisted of replacing productive farmland with cookie-cutter, poorly-insulated, single-family-zoned, car-dependent houses on endless suburban sprawl full of pesticide-greened lawns & cul-de-sacs. While building housing can be environmentally destructive—human activity on an acre of farmland produces 66x less greenhouse gas emissions than developed land—the alternative, trapping a growing population in a not-growing housing supply, ends up being worse for the climate, through many deeply interconnected avenues. There’s a multitude of well-understood environmental issues, from fossil fuel usage to the countless disastrous effects of climate change, but housing remains a key driver terrifically mis-identified & understood as a vehicle of societal change.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-06_gw_the_housing_shortage_as_environmental_issue</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Charting Billionaires]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-11_ind_charting_billionaires</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Connecting Arduino to P 5]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Following setting up humidity & temperature sensors on the Arduino, I wanted to show the current temperature in my web browser, since without external hardware web browsers don’t have access to that information. (MacBooks have many thermometers across the system for monitoring their wellbeing & moderating the fans, but their readings are not available with browser APIs, partly for fingerprinting reasons.)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-13_pcomp_connecting_arduino_to_p5</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Environmental Sensing on Arduino]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I decided to try out the Sparkfun SHTC3 temperature & humidity sensor on my Arduino.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-13_pcomp_environmental_sensing_on_arduino</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Road Monocropping as Environmental Issue]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, we briefly discussed the phenomenon of monocropping agriculture. Monocropping contributes to our dependence for harmful pesticides, depletes the local farmland’s soil, and increases crops’ susceptibility to pests & disease. But the human tendency to monocrop has spread across American roadways, causing massive harm to human lives, human health, human independence, natural habitats, carbon emissions, and air & environmental pollution. Luckily, other cities demonstrate far more successful models from which we can learn.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-16_gw_road_monocropping_as_environmental_issue</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[For my final project, I wanted to tell a story that’s about data & numbers, & one that brings me great optimism for the future of climate solutions: solar power. The price of photovoltaic solar has come down 99% in the last 4 decades, 90% in the last decade, & many experts expect that trend to continue. This trend is dramatic enough a few numbers don’t tell the story, so I wanted to illustrate them.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-17_ind_final_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Physical Virtual Artwork]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[While a runway show by definition requires onlookers to look at the models, I appreciate how Farahi created this installation as a one-off opportunity for viewers to contemplate their gaze, sometimes for the first time. The magnified camera feeds say a lot on their own, but if stationary, might provide yet more surface area for onlookers to stare at. By adding the interaction of tracking the subtle movements of the model & magnifying them with the robotic arms, the movement trumps the visual of the eyes themselves, reversing the feeling of looking. The software running includes Unity (C#), Rhino (Grasshopper) for the arm movements, and OBS Studio for managing the video feeds.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-26_pcomp_physical_virtual_artwork</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 26 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[October Notebook Entries]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-27_ptf_october_notebook_entries</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Midterm Project Presentation]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[As The Great Derangement made the case, there is not nearly enough art grappling with climate collapse, the greatest challenge & opportunity humanity has ever faced. Of what we do have, there’s too much dystopian fear-mongering, and not nearly enough imagination put to how society could look in the best cases. Guilt & fear are terrible long-term motivators, and we need something better to work forward to.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-28_gw_midterm_project_presentation</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[System Fonts Midterm Paper]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Sixty years ago, nearly all typography was both designed and printed through manual processes. Today, while plenty of typography gets printed or extruded into the physical world, designers produce nearly all of it digitally, and much of its consumption takes place on high-resolution displays, with devices capable of showing any and every typographic possibility with negligible overhead. The most common fonts we read every day on those displays are system fonts: how operating systems natively display buttons, menus, and text. Though computers have revolutionized how typography is both made and consumed, we recycle, or at least keep returning to, the same ideals: namely, derivatives of Helvetica, chasing an ideal of modernist Swiss beauty from before any of these devices existed.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-28_ptf_system_fonts_midterm_paper</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Physical Virtual Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[It’s 2032 & there’s a record-setting drought—so drinking water has become scarce & expensive. In this game, the price of water rapidly fluctuates, you have a limited budget, and you need to decide when to buy the water you need to survive, buying 4 liters per day but no more. In the end, there’s no winning: once we’re bidding against each other for human necessities, we’ve collectively lost.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-10-31_pcomp_physical_virtual_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Turning On & Off]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, I made a pressure-enabled flashlight using a CR2032 battery & a blue LED. I disassembled one of my AirTag trackers to extract its battery, and got the LED from the shop. My first step was jamming one onto the other & pressing it with my fingers to realize how the device would work—it’s simpler than I thought! I checked the voltage ratings of each & with a blue LED, no resistors are needed.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-06_fab_turning_on_and_off</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Midterm Presentation Response]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[It is a lot! I spend an enormous number of hours making my websites—while I sometimes compress those hours into too-few days, there’s no getting around that like any other substantial piece of art, dozens of hours have to go in. Looking back at my best projects from 2020, the majority were similarly substantial.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-08_gw_midterm_presentation_response</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 08 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Five Identical Blockheads]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week I made Blockheads: 5 men who’ve held up progress on climate action around the world, rendered as identical rectangular wooden heads on sticks, mounted together.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-13_fab_five_identical_blockheads</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 13 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Motor Driver Experimentation]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Today I experimented with connecting a motor driver to the Arduino. Here’s the circuit I used:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-15_pcomp_motor_driver_experimentation</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Laser Cutting]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Laser cutting allows drastically more precise drawing/cutting than could be achieved by hand. The most precise drawing is data visualization, so I thought I could leverage the qualities of the laser cutter to produce a physical data visualization. One of the most remarkable stories of scaling in the last decade is the cost of solar panels: the price has come down 99% in the last 4 decades, and 84% in just the last decade. I wanted to visualize how large the relative panels one could buy for a  given amount of money in 2010 vs 2020.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-18_fab_laser_cutting</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project Idea]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Gameplay:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-21_pcomp_final_project_idea</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Enclosing a Magnet]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, I wanted to mount my extra wooden solar panel from last week on a stand, enclosing a magnet in the base so it could become a piece of a magnetic board game.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-27_fab_enclosing_a_magnet</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2022-11-27_fab_enclosing_a_magnet</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 27 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In the upcoming decades, the US needs to both dramatically grow the capacity of our electric grid while simultaneously transitioning it to carbon-free energy, including solar and wind. In this interactive board game, you’re in the driver’s seat: install electricity to meet demand while keeping carbon emissions and energy prices down.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-11-29_pcomp_final_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 29 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Reflection]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In the upcoming decades, the U.S. needs to dramatically grow the capacity of our electric grid while simultaneously transitioning it to carbon-free energy such as solar and wind. I created an interactive board game where you as the player are in charge of the grid: installing electricity to meet demand while keeping carbon emissions and energy prices down.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-12-06_gw_final_reflection</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[November Notebook Entries]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-12-06_ptf_november_notebook_entries</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Kinetic Diorama]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Humanity has emitted enough greenhouse gases that Earth will continue warming—with all the disastrous effects that entails—even if we stop emitting tomorrow. (And we’re not.) Thus, recent UN reports conclude that not only do we need to drastically reduce emissions, but we need to scale up technology to pull carbon we’ve already emitted out of the atmosphere and put it back in the ground. These carbon removal technologies have gotten off the ground in just the last decade, and aren’t yet part of the popular imagination when it comes to climate change. They feel nebulous, as industrial-scale equipment with effects not immediately visible.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-12-10_fab_kinetic_diorama</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Final Portfolio]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Over 6 weeks, I became comfortable using the band saw, laser cutter, drill press, and more, making 5 projects exploring the theme of climate, all with no new materials.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-12-11_fab_final_portfolio</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Digital Typography Final Paper]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Sixty years ago, nearly all typography was both designed and printed through manual processes. Today, while plenty of typography gets printed or extruded into the physical world, designers produce nearly all of it digitally, and much of its consumption takes place on high-resolution displays, with devices capable of showing any and every typographic possibility with negligible overhead. Surveying the last twenty years in digital type, derivatives of Helvetica dominate, chasing an ideal of modernist Swiss beauty from before any of these devices existed. Only in the last five have we begun to see new ideas gain momentum, in the form of variable fonts and multi-color fonts, to reimagine typography for these devices.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2022-12-16_ptf_digital_typography_final_paper</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Research Topic Selection]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I have two potential topics I’m not sure which to choose of, so completed the exercise for each & would appreciate feedback on which better fits this project.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-01-30_envp_research_topic_selection</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Research Topics]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My hometown, State College, PA, is a college town in central PA with Penn State University, so it has a somewhat urban core, a lot of suburbs, and is surrounded by rural, agricultural land. Our transit emissions are north of 160 MT CO2e annually, which is contributing to climate change.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-01-30_envp_research_topics</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Resource Systems]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The International Whaling Commission is the primary governance body in charge of conserving and managing whale populations and habitats. It was created by the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling in 1946, and now has 88 member countries. In addition, the Antarctic Treaty System specified in the Treaty of 1959 that “the area south of 60° South Latitude”—Antarctica and surrounding waters, which includes significant whale habitat—would be governed by international cooperation. (The participants meet yearly, in Australia.) Since 1982, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) oversees the conservation of Antarctic marine life and managing fisheries. At the national level, many countries have government organizations with relevant purview, notably Japan.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-01-31_envp_resource_systems</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 3 Readings]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’ve seen The Story of Stuff dozens of times in my life. I’ve seen all the spin-offs many times, I read the book over & over starting in fourth grade. It catalyzed my interest in environmental issues beyond climate, and I’m grateful for the excellent storytelling they’ve done.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-01_dis_week_3_readings</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Actors]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Last March, the SEC announced rule changes to require publicly-listed companies to disclose carbon emissions and climate risks alongside other financial information to investors. The goal is for large corporations to 1) measure their carbon footprints and 2) make a subset of that information public to investors.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-07_envp_actors</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-02-07_envp_actors</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 4 Readings]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Essentially the first memory I have from my move to NYC is one of garbage: as my parents were driving up to my dorm, we stopped to wait for a garbage pickup. The workers loaded the truck, then started the compression, and gallons and gallons of garbage juice squirted out onto the street in the August heat. It’s an utterly ungracious/inelegant way of collecting trash.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-12_dis_week_4_readings</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Kinetic Project Sketch]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-12_nrg_kinetic_project_sketch</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Clean Air Act]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Starting a new policy with ambitious statements sets up a policy area for better success long-term, even if not in the short term the goals are difficult or impossible to achieve and the press looks bad. Looking back at the Clean Air Act, even though the initial standards and timetables were unrealistically optimistic, the wide-ranging, strong language stating the intent of the Act has given it fantastic staying power.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-13_envp_clean_air_act</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Measurement Project Topic]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’m studying the ever-elusive “smart grid”—how can we make appliances use energy more in tune with its peak production times, such as in tandem with home solar? While many customers don’t care, solar owners, especially in states that don’t allow net metering, increasingly want to make the most effective use of the energy they produce. Unfortunately, appliances & electric devices of all sorts don’t use. In an electrified home, charging of large battery banks like cars, stoves, & lawn care equipment (EGO etc) are frequently not time-dependent, and even tasks on computers like backups, content downloads, syncing, software updates, and more can be micro-scheduled for cheap, grid-friendly power usage.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-21_nrg_measurement_project_topic</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Acid Rain]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[To tackle environmental problems, market-based solutions, such as emissions trading, have gained popularity in our decreasingly-conservation-focused political environment as an alternative to strict command and control regulation. Proponents of market-based solutions argue that such mechanisms provide economic incentives for companies to reduce their pollution levels, whereas command and control regulation imposes fixed standards and penalties.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-22_envp_acid_rain</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-02-22_envp_acid_rain</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Research Paper Notes]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Key observation: none of the major stakeholders would weigh climate goals over military expansion.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-02-27_envp_research_paper_notes</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-02-27_envp_research_paper_notes</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Water Quality]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The US Clean Water Act has faced litigation for decades surrounding the legal definition of what it protects: namely, which waters are “the waters of the United States”? Under different presidents’ EPAs, the Army Corps of Engineers, and changing majorities in the Supreme Court, the answer has varied. The essential issue is what constitutes “navigable waters” in the Clean Water Act: whether it applies to ephemeral or intermittent streams, isolated wetlands, and other bodies of water that do not have a direct or permanent connection to navigable waters.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-01_envp_water_quality</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Endangered Species Act]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In the 1980s, the Northwest U.S. rural economy relied heavily on logging. Ever since Europeans came to North America, the gorgeous old-growth forests appeared to stretch out infinitely, with a sense of endless abundance. Thus, they thought, cutting down parts of it could never endanger the ecosystems and species in any permanent way; this thought continued well into recent history, and the argument continues to this day with Republican policymaking. Unfortunately, while the forest reserves were vast, no solid natural materials are infinite. (Solar and geothermal power, compared to our harvesting, are, but that’s another topic.) The logging, mining, and agriculture supporting a large percentage of jobs in these Pacific Northwest towns were living off the natural bounty inheritance, and were not sustainable to continue long-term. Whether the stopping came from environmental protection before the ecosystems collapsed or after, the scaling down of billions of board-feet of logging these forests was inevitable.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-08_envp_endangered_species_act</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Kinetic Energy Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Inspired by an interactive experience from the Our Choice eBook from 2010, this installation lets you explore producing wind electricity yourself, and the role battery storage plays in a renewable grid.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-09_nrg_kinetic_energy_project</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-03-09_nrg_kinetic_energy_project</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Climate Museum]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[On the Climate Museum: I found it incredibly disappointing. For a nonprofit museum that’s received $500K-$1.5M in funding per year for the last 4 years (as reported to the IRS), they had the funding to do something great. The space features a nice, but singular, piece of art about climate, and not one I found emotionally impactful. The wall text informs viewers of one singular fact, the “supermajority” of Americans interested in climate action. Of the 3 interactive installations, there’s the film-yourself station, the postcard station (I would venture most visitors are not equipped to write a compelling postcard about specific climate policy to legislators), and the stickers, a disposable plastic-based interaction that did not imprint much on visitors, who’d written meaningless phrases like “I will consume more responsibly” on the wall. They hinted at genuine climate issues like banks’ funding of fossil fuel projects, but did not explain a single one; no one leaves this museum more educated on this complex issue most Americans cannot describe articulately. There were excellent climate books but nowhere to read them, so no one engaged more than flipping through a few. Every inch of the space was a missed opportunity to create something meaningful, and contributes to this generic “activism” concept where if Americans had a vibe of “awareness” this problem would be solved, with no hints of science, policy, structural solutions, or concrete actions beyond the postcards. I was excited to visit but can’t recommend it to anyone, and left with no pertinent or memorable lessons other than the all-consuming need to do more than this organization in pulling carbon from the atmosphere.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-22_dis_climate_museum</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Love Canal]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, following an explosion, released approximately 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean, decimating local ecosystems. The sensational media coverage elevated it to one of the key news stories of the era. The neighborhood of Love Canal, in Niagara Falls, New York, discovered toxic chemical waste in the late 1970s, leading to a public health crisis and the eventual evacuation of over 800 families. Both events garnered long-lasting media attention and prompted various legislative and regulatory actions.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-22_envp_love_canal</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-03-22_envp_love_canal</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Research Paper]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The U.S. military is the largest institutional user of fossil fuels and polluter of carbon emissions in the world (Zarook). Additionally, the military acts as a massive subsidy to the oil industry through violently maintaining access to foreign oil for private extraction and use, which emits yet more carbon. Through this cycle of fossil fuel extraction, they are arguably the largest organizational contributor of carbon emissions causing climate change. This resulting atmospheric warming is causing planet-wide environmental havoc, including more frequent and intense natural disasters, extreme weather, habitat loss, and species extinction. This wide-ranging wreckage is current, compounding, hurting the country the military was founded to protect, and its allies, damaging ecosystems spanning land, air, water and all inhabitants in irreversible ways.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-22_envp_research_paper</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-03-22_envp_research_paper</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Fisheries]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The ocean is vast, full of deeply-intertwined ecosystems, dramatically under-studied, and a common area for enjoyment and exploitation. This makes monitoring and regulating it incredibly challenging—seen most recently that it took two decades to write an initial draft of an international high seas treaty. Even when we know our most vital resources are in danger, convincing each other to tackle the problem proceeds slowly.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-26_envp_fisheries</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-03-26_envp_fisheries</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Hyperobjects]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects provides a framework for understanding entities such as collectives of materials on long time scales: for instance, the use of fossil fuels for energy and the greenhouse gases they create. Most greenhouse gases are invisible and not immediately toxic to humans, which make them difficult for human brains to comprehend, but over a long time scale suffocate the earth. Thinking of the massive collective of carbon atoms—a hyperobject—previously buried deep in the earth as having been pulled into the atmosphere, forming a blanket over us, is a more visceral and intuitive way to understand this transformation of carbon. When you hold a piece of coal in your hands, it’s not singlehandedly causing climate collapse, but the 500 million tons burned in the U.S. annually are. The coal is a local manifestation of a larger whole that exists all over.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-26_nrg_hyperobjects</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-03-26_nrg_hyperobjects</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Measurement Project Sources]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-03-27_nrg_measurement_project_sources</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-03-27_nrg_measurement_project_sources</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Fracking]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I grew up in central Pennsylvania in the 2000s, in a town called State College, home to Penn State University, surrounded by and central to the fracking boom. In 2007, a Penn State professor estimated the amount of natural gas fracking could extract from the Marcellus Shale, and the fracking began. The nearest permitted gas wells to my family’s house are 8.8 miles away, and the nearest active fracking is 15 miles away. But my town, State College, is in the eye of the storm; while my county has primarily conventional natural gas extraction, the surrounding counties quickly became covered in fracking. Republican state leadership through the 2010s was incredibly supportive of the fracking boom, promising major economic development that came and went in the form of unstable, low-paid work in the service and gas industries. Looking at a map of wells today, the pins crowd the landscape, mapping not only the Marcellus formation but levels of economic desperation, which fracking did little to solve. Since the drops in oil prices, fracking has collapsed too, leaving communities across Pennsylvania with a sparkling legacy: highly polluted water, a Department of Environmental Protection that “did not take sufficient action”, and drops in dairy production in my county. Penn State did receive a massive new ice rink with the largest gift in their history via a fortune made on mineral rights, in exchange for our neighbors’ plight.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-04-02_envp_fracking</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-04-02_envp_fracking</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Measurement Project Glossary]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-04-02_nrg_measurement_project_glossary</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-04-02_nrg_measurement_project_glossary</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Smil Reflection]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[A few years ago, my parents switched my house to electric heat pumps, away from a fossil gas furnace with an off-the-charts low level of efficiency. My room has a Mitsubishi MSZ-GL Wall-Mounted Indoor Unit, which I just looked into the energy usage of, and didn’t know any of the terms used to rate heat pumps:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-04-09_nrg_smil_reflection</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-04-09_nrg_smil_reflection</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 09 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Policy Brief Draft]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Title: Toward Open Military Carbon Accounting Transparency / Carbon-Reducing Advance Market Procurement (TOMCAT/CRAMP)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-04-12_envp_policy_brief_draft</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-04-12_envp_policy_brief_draft</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The United States is the country of climate change. Many of the core industrial processes enabling climate change, from the first drilling of oil and fracking to our massive interstate highway expansion, in addition to the scientific research of climate change, occurred here. Westerners’ arrival at this expansive bounty of abundant natural resources coincided with, and perpetuated, the Industrial Revolution. Today, 4% of the world’s population emits 18% of the greenhouse gases. Our lasting political power has manipulated political decisions on all facets of energy, industry, trade, and global economics in favor of the United States’ interests. A global storm of climate action would struggle to take hold without interest from the U.S.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-04-16_envp_climate_change</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-04-16_envp_climate_change</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Measurement Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Title: Box of Rocks: A DIY Thermal Battery for Decarbonizing Industrial Heat]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-04-19_nrg_measurement_project</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-04-19_nrg_measurement_project</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Bunny Is a Rider Analysis]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Produced by Danny L Harle and Caroline Polachek, “Bunny Is a Rider” arrived July 2021 on digital streaming platforms as a single. Two years after the release of her debut album under her own name, this enigmatic song came with a quick tease on social media but no context until interviews later emerged. Marking a sonic departure from her debut album’s moody, futuristic electropop, “Bunny Is a Rider” is warm, sexy, and mysterious. Earlier this year, it became the third track on Polachek’s second solo studio album, “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.”]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-04-26_daf_bunny_is_a_rider_analysis</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-04-26_daf_bunny_is_a_rider_analysis</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 26 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Solar Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Under a (wildly overpowered) solar simulator, it recaptures a small fraction of the energy, spends it on uploading a measurement of that energy to a server, then an energy-intensive website pulls that measurement using a collection of servers, before running JavaScript to continue downloading its current state and shine an animated display visualizing the measurements.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-05-04_nrg_solar_project</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-05-04_nrg_solar_project</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Remapping Our Landscapes]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I love maps. I’ve spent uncountable hours exploring the world on Apple Maps; I rely on apps like Citymapper to get everywhere I need to go; maps underpin a myriad of apps I rely on like Airbnb, Lyft, bike share, weather, package tracking, photos. Paired with GPS, our digital maps are one of humanity’s best-ever creations.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-05-15_dis_remapping_our_landscapes</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-05-15_dis_remapping_our_landscapes</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Policy Brief]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Title: Toward Open Military Carbon Accounting Transparency / Carbon-Reducing Advance Market Procurement (TOMCAT/CRAMP)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-05-15_envp_policy_brief</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-05-15_envp_policy_brief</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Chapel of Reconciliation]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Listen to my reading this essay aloud:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-10-02_barch_chapel_of_reconciliation</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-10-02_barch_chapel_of_reconciliation</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Floating University]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-11-06_barch_floating_university</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-11-06_barch_floating_university</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2023-12-11_barch_haus_der_kulturen_der_welt</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2023-12-11_barch_haus_der_kulturen_der_welt</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Low Tech Immersion]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’ve just started moving into a new apartment, and step one was buying a bed. I unwrapped it Monday, and still had the box laying around, which inspired this project: an immersive cave viewing, all in a cardboard box.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-01-31_imex_low_tech_immersion</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-01-31_imex_low_tech_immersion</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 1 My Mind]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My thoughts, by default, stream in without my control, continuously circulating, wandering, re-remembering, forgetting. I surprise myself constantly while speaking in classes that I have a vague intuition of a point to make, then when I start speaking, something comes out decently formed. But if I don’t write it down while I think of the thrust of it, sometimes the discussion in class causes thoughts to fade out. Ideas are fragile: “At the start of the process the idea is just a thought – very fragile and exclusive,” former Apple CDO Jony Ive said, about the design process.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-01-31_shm_week_1_my_mind</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-01-31_shm_week_1_my_mind</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[360 Video]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The use of the 360-degree footage felt great to explore. I enjoyed having the camera constantly moving in space, but it was subtle enough to not induce motion sickness. I always knew where they “wanted” me looking, but felt like I could pan around a bit too. Perhaps I did too much, because in combination with the distracting headset UI, I didn’t follow the story well.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-07_imex_360_video</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-07_imex_360_video</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 2 Spatial]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[If UPS keeps their promise, today is the last day before I try my first spatial computer: my Apple Vision Pro delivers tomorrow. My social media feeds have for days been covered in people’s impressions as they try it out, and begin to adapt to computing in 3D. To start, Apple has made the majority of its apps simpler 2D experiences translated into 3D space, and the majority of app developers lack the skills/resources to produce immersive 3D experiences, and will instead port something more resembling an iPad app to 3D space. Yet even with 2D experiences, I’ve seen many comments about accidentally leaving windows in random places around the house, needing to retrace physical steps to find virtual objects. (There are software accommodations for this as well.) It’s notable that Apple’s first ad since the release of Apple Vision Pro centers the unexpected delight of having tactility of digital objects, watching how they interact with the physical spaces we’re well-accustomed to.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-07_shm_week_2_spatial</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-07_shm_week_2_spatial</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Taming Manhattan]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My primary takeaway this week: New York City’s formalized systems have notably trailed the desires and expections of residents since the city began. Today, we continue fighting a myriad of environmental and infrastructure problems—trash containment, litter baskets, composting, toxic air pollution and grime in subway stations, rats, housing access—but historically, these facets of the city have never been better. Starting from the human and animal waste lining the streets, free-roaming dogs and hogs, lack of clean water, resulting cholera outbreaks, lack of a trash disposal system, spoiled meat-making then meat-packing, to access to parks and street trees, New Yorkers’ fight for a clean, safe, mechanized/systemitized urban environment has never been easy or straightforward. Today, when we see the Department of Sanitation blasting “Empire State of Mind” while showing off mechanically-liftable dumpsters for trash, while we can & should laugh (Ohio had this technology fifty years ago…), we should also keep in mind it represents enormous progress. When we ponder the legacy of Dead Horse Bay and how to handle the environmental justice story there, we’re no longer fighting offal-boiling piggeries poisoning our air inside city limits.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-14_fnc_taming_manhattan</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-14_fnc_taming_manhattan</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Dear Angelica & Drawing]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I find the app model of Meta Quest, where apps immediately take over your space with no warning or indication, jarring. Before my room changes suddenly around me, I’d love to say yes to a 360º video. There were also no discernible controls for pausing, recentering, changing settings, or seeing the time. Meanwhile, I still haven’t figured out how to close the dock of apps, which prevents me from forgetting I’m in a VR operating system with this randomly-placed rectangle of apps somewhere in my field of view. At the same time, the superimposed hand outlines & rays from the controllers, none of which I was touching or attempting to use, distracted from the content.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-14_imex_dear_angelica_and_drawing</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-14_imex_dear_angelica_and_drawing</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 3 Draggable]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[After writing about waiting for my Apple Vision Pro last week, I’ve since spent a lot of hours using spatial computing, enough that my body has requested me to please stop. Thoughts on that fascinating but overstimulating and nonsensical device aside, the concept of spatial computing I find compelling. Using visionOS is like having an infinite number of scalable iPads in the room around you. The core interaction of the OS, as I wrote last week, is about dragging & resizing windows—just like we’re used to on a Mac—in the 3D, augmented space around you. The windows are each interactive yet draggable.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-15_shm_week_3_draggable</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-15_shm_week_3_draggable</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Encounter Dinosaurs]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’ve had Apple Vision Pro for two weeks now, and it’s simulatenously an obviously-breakthrough piece of technology and yet I feel surprisingly ambivalent about it. I love Apple’s VR-hardware, AR/MR-first approach to software: when you put on the device, you see the world around you, then digital content is layered on top as you add it. visionOS keeps you grounded, and your expectations of your physical space are never broken. The dial on top of the device lets you gradually immerse yourself in a 3D environment up to a full 360º, but you’re in control. Apple Vision Pro uses a combination of eye tracking and hand gesture recognition to interact with the software. Neither are perfect, but are incredibly intuitive and work smoothly enough.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-19_imex_encounter_dinosaurs</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-19_imex_encounter_dinosaurs</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Seeing like a State]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The concept of legibility at different scales was my primary takeaway this week. Le Corbusier-favored right-angled streets and geometric divisions of land make cities and communities legible from a government office or an airplane; last names make people legible for population accounting and tax purposes. Our interstate highway system, while the right-angles were adapted around where population centers into a constellation, makes cities and states legible, offering predictable routes and expectable travel times. Standards—from S.I. units of measurement to documented specifications of dog breeds—are a key component of legibility. One level up from the interstate system, airports utilize standardized IATA codes and physical infrastructure including runways make all shipping and travel legible. Passports being standardized within each country provide their value inside countries, and the standards between countries provide their international value. Inside the U.S., the USPS standardized addresses across all of the U.S. and networks them with its mail service. People often first resist standards, but looking back, imagining life without them seems chaotic and impossible. Logic—what Le Corbusier referred to in his own work as the “prodigiously true” and “incontrovertible”—appears to have been the prevailing reason in hindsight, but in the moment, they were often to settle conflicts, such as feudal landlords’ grain sacks.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-20_fnc_seeing_like_a_state</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-20_fnc_seeing_like_a_state</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 4 Shareable]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My friends are spread across the country and globe. I spend a lot of time on FaceTime, but sometimes I want an async way to let them know I’m thinking of them.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-21_shm_week_4_shareable</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-21_shm_week_4_shareable</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Hello Vibrating Motors]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Following this circuit diagram reference, omitting the TIP 120 transistor & diode since they weren’t available:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-24_hap_hello_vibrating_motors</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-24_hap_hello_vibrating_motors</guid>
            <pubDate>Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Awe in Immersive Experiences]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Established categories of computers—laptops, smartphones, tablets—are in a stasis, where they’re the best they’ve ever been but rarely that notable. Most startups are trying to execute well on ideas that aren’t very exciting, and many of the “exciting” ideas like web3 haven’t panned out. While VR isn’t new, the successive leaps in my experiences of Google Cardboard to HTC Vive to Apple Vision Pro over nearly a decade each awed me in new ways, from (somewhat) filling my field of view with low resolution on Cardboard to the stellar eye & hand tracking setup on Vision.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-26_imex_awe_in_immersive_experiences</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-26_imex_awe_in_immersive_experiences</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 5 Social]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, I took last week’s project and made it joinable: under the hood, I moved the static friends data to Liveblocks, then added an authentication flow through GitHub using Clerk, all from React Server Components. After you authenticate, it uses your browser’s geolocation to add you to the globe, and you can send vibes.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-02-28_shm_week_5_social</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-02-28_shm_week_5_social</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Theorizing Global Urbanism & Citizenship]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In nearly every country, people are rushing into cities—over a million people per week. Though cities globally are growing, they can never be prepared for the change these new residents will bring. Physical, social and political infrastructure must continuously evolve in order to continue serving growing and evolving populations. But cities are reflections and products of the citizens who live in them. Citizens have always been, and must always remain, ahead of the formalized rights, systems, and infrastructure in their countries. As hotspots of talent and connections, concentrations of wealth and power, nations require the constant pushing of citizens in cities to move progress forward.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-03_cici_theorizing_global_urbanism_and_citizenship</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-03-03_cici_theorizing_global_urbanism_and_citizenship</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Shareable Haptic Experience]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Though native iOS app developers have a full framework for complex, LRA-powered haptic effects, among a host of other missing features, Safari for iOS lacks support for any haptics. As a web developer, why should I miss out on this dimension? This is exacerbated on Apple Vision Pro, where you have no surface to tap your fingers against when you use direct manipulation of virtual UI.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-04_hap_shareable_haptic_experience</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-03-04_hap_shareable_haptic_experience</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[How the Other Half Ate]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The descriptions of diets throughout  How the Other Half Ate were fascinating. It’s massively under-appreciated that only in my parents’/grandparents’ lifetimes have middle-class diets in America become decent, not to mention the conditions around food: safe, efficient electric stoves over exploding gasoline and dirty coal ones, home refrigeration and freezing accessible to nearly all. While I have a ton of thoughts on the book, this week I wanted to continue the story, and add a bridge to where I am now. Following the trend of everyday food not seeming to be worth documenting, I interviewed my grandmother for hours this past summer, filming video as I asked her about plastics/synthetics, computers/internet, clothing, transportation, and economic progress in her lifetime, but it didn’t occur me to drill into what she was eating in each phase of her life. So today I called her, plus my aunt and my dad, to understand how diets progressed from the Great Depression to my life.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-05_fnc_how_the_other_half_ate</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-03-05_fnc_how_the_other_half_ate</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Paper Proposal]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Every time I Dig Inn to my sweetgreen or CAVA, it’s getting shoveled into my face. It’s obligatory to watch YouTube on your phone while at one of these restaurants—they are refueling joints for humans, with an aspirational brand. They cater to a specific audience: progressive Americans with income who care about their health and might care about the environment. The companies represent a new type of food company: tech-first (2/3 of sweetgreen revenue comes from digital orders), venture capital-backed (and unprofitable; sweetgreen loses tens of millions per quarter), nutrition-first, sustainability-focused. And it always, always comes in a bowl. (Sometimes PFAS-ridden, often compostable, rarely composted.)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-05_fnc_paper_proposal</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-03-05_fnc_paper_proposal</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 6 Dimensions]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, I took my 3D visionOS concept from week 3 (draggable) to use it as an app environment. I first dropped the 3D effect, as the effect didn’t work amazingly on a 2D screen, and added significant graphic/code complexity. I then made the windows closable, with a visionOS-styled close button next to the drag handle, and added a dock control (which visionOS does not have) to be omnipresent UI. The dock features an app launcher menu as well as an Environments button. (Make sure to click the plus button to open apps, then try closing/rearranging them.)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-06_shm_week_6_dimensions</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-03-06_shm_week_6_dimensions</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Empathy in Virtual Reality]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Chris Milk argues in his TED talk that virtual reality is an unparalleled tool for creating real-world empathy. His 360º videos (which were presented in virtual reality, though I disagree that that’s synonymous with the entire medium of virtual reality) showing the lives of people in the Global South to powerful people in the North may be emotionally impactful, but they cannot create true empathy, as Erick Ramirez argues for Aeon. Tugging the heartstrings of power brokers with new technology is not an effective long-term strategy to change our political course.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-13_imex_empathy_in_virtual_reality</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Midterm Project]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[We tend to think of energy and waste as two separate streams. But producing (useful) energy produces waste. I read this article on solar waste a few months ago, and began wondering about waste from burning coal.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-13_imex_midterm_project</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 7 Implicit]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My visionOS demo keeps growing, and these week, it’s going all-in on questionably-useful, shoved-down-your-throat generative AI everywhere. But I learned about streaming from edge functions!]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-13_shm_week_7_implicit</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Accessible Immersive Experiences]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Everyone deserves to be able to experience immersive content and software. To make that happen, responsibility is shared between the platform owner and app developers. If the operating system doesn't provide the foundational tooling, no matter how much work an app developer or content creator puts in, their means of accessibility must be custom to that experience, which contradicts the point of accesible features.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-20_imex_accessible_immersive_experiences</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-03-20_imex_accessible_immersive_experiences</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Freedom Farmers]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The theme of Freedom Farmers was undoubtedly the power of collective ownership. While White describes three themes in unnecessarily academic language—commons as praxis, prefigurative politics, and economic autonomy—she successfully avoids getting lost in framing and theorizing. These themes are visible in each of her case studies: collectivizing systems of ownership/consumerism, creating “everyday utopias”, and economic autonomy (page 8). The book offers an illuminating history I had little prior knowledge of, tracing the resistance of African-Americans through gardening and farming from the times of slavery to modern Detroit urban gardening. The latter has received more focus in the years leading up to the book, with coverage of the Georgia Street Community Collective in Gary Hustwit’s documentary Urbanized and the standalone documentary Urban Roots in the early 2010s, among other press coverage.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-26_fnc_freedom_farmers</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Rigging an Avatar]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I started by using Polycam 3D Scanner for a classmate to scan me using LiDAR. I got this disfigured model out of it:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-27_imex_rigging_an_avatar</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-03-27_imex_rigging_an_avatar</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Anxious Generation]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Yesterday, I walked across Union Square, only to discover a 10-ft milk carton sculpture with a nutrition label about Gen Z’s sky-high anxiety and suicide rates. Expecting it to be the new fact of Got Milk, more dairy industry propaganda in the strangest place, I took a packet of stickers from the weary attendants. It was a promotion of Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation. Meanwhile, startup Humane is retweeting his The Atlantic article, NYTimes podcast Hard Fork and a longtime favorite newsletter Platformer are writing about him. Jonathan Haidt has become inescapable this week, and honestly, I applaud his career strategy/media team.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-27_shm_the_anxious_generation</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 8 Search]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I wrote recently about why I open source all my schoolwork, and one of the reasons I mentioned is because I constantly refer to my past work. However, my site has been lacking a search feature, so I thought it’d be fun to build one. This week was my first time ever playing with embeddings. (Here’s a great explanation of the concept.)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-03-27_shm_week_8_search</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Week 9 Search Canvas]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[We’re surrounded by vertical feeds, scrolling vertically for many hours per day. Occasionally a designer mixes it up with a horizontally-scrolling page or component, but it’s not much to break up the tedium.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-03_shm_week_9_search_canvas</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-04-03_shm_week_9_search_canvas</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[New Frontiers in Global South Urbanism]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Brasilia's design and construction represented a high point in the expected triumph of humans over nature, of men's rational thoughts over the natural chaos cities breed. Dreamed, designed, and built at breakneck pace, it served as a literal and figurative symbol of new technology, fossil fuels, and impressive engineering. While the daring designs of monuments remain remarkable today, its approach of social engineering through imported architecture and urban planning ideas today feels dated.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-07_cici_new_frontiers_in_global_south_urbanism</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-04-07_cici_new_frontiers_in_global_south_urbanism</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Pure & Modern Milk]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In many of the books we've read this semester, at the start I’m not sold by the premise that the topic is worth investigating for a few hundred pages. I quickly go all-in and leave the book feeling unhappy with the many sides of the topic the author couldn’t fit into two hundred pages. In this book, the ice cream chapter felt thin on substantive argument, while the latest thirty years (in which milk market change has accelerated from the periods more investigated) were crammed into an epilogue, with stories such as rBST providing narrative of more lasting importance. I was surprised the book didn't directly face the enduring connection to children: the cultural perception of milk being for kids, Michelle Obama’s school lunch rules, the Got Milk ad campaign, the national cheese stockpile, and federal subsidizing of dairy farms. The book chose to focus on milk and skim milk and butter and ice cream over other dairy products, though personally I purchase oat products for fluid milk and ice cream (while defaulting to olive oil for cooking), even if I continue buying cow-based cheese and yogurt. (Gen Z doesn’t drink skim milk; my grandma does.)]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-09_fnc_pure_and_modern_milk</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-04-09_fnc_pure_and_modern_milk</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[AR vs VR for Art]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Virtual reality is full immersion: appropriate when a story needs a viewer's full attention, or you want to teleport viewers to another world, whether photographic or rendered. It makes the experience heavier weight, as teleportation can be jarring. You don't want to dip in and out of entirely different virtual environments frequently, and when you're in one you likely want to be there for a longer period.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-09_imex_ar_vs_vr_for_art</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-04-09_imex_ar_vs_vr_for_art</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Spelunking WebXR]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My work this week began with a deep-dive on WebXR. WebXR is super cool, but the open source scene around it is struggling, in a cyclical pattern with device and browser makers of disuse.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-10_shm_spelunking_webxr</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-04-10_shm_spelunking_webxr</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[State of Immunity]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The narrative around the smallpox & diphtheria vaccines mirror the COVID cycle remarkably. At first, many people are enthusiastic to line up and make any sacrifices to receive vaccination, with a "we're all in this together" narrative. Press heralds the incredible accomplishments of production, as the bobsleds to Nome, Alaska did. Later, institutions (like NYU did) make inoculation mandatory, which implicates another percentage of the population. A vocal minority continue rabble-rousing about the vaccines and are proud of their "free thinking." As the threat of the disease wanes, people stop getting boosted, institutions give in to public pressure and stop requiring it, and the disease gets more dangerous over time. Institutions like schools and universities do not provide true choice because they once required a vaccine and continue to require others, but we pretend the dropping of these requirements is some sort of social good in recognition that fewer people are dying.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-16_fnc_state_of_immunity</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Starting with React Three Fiber]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’m making a spatial interface for OldNYC to build my first real project with WebXR. Here’s where I’m at so far:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-17_imex_starting_with_react_three_fiber</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-04-17_imex_starting_with_react_three_fiber</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Heat Wave]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In Heat Wave, Klinenberg argues that a range of forces, including increasing isolation, privatization and cost efficiency mindsets in government services, and stark economic inequality have injured our social fabric, which becomes most visible through disasters exacerbated by climate collapse. The deployment of recent trends to explain modern failures leaves the impression disaster response is now worse than in the past. There are aspects of disaster response that seem better in the past, namely in a more collectivist mindset; I recall my dad telling the story of his family carrying elderly neighbors into their house to survive a brutal ice storm upstate together in the sixties, and community interventions like that feel few & far between these days. However, there are more forces at play than Klinenberg lets on, and his analysis allows readers to falsely believe turning back the clock on disaster response would solve our problems.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-23_fnc_heat_wave</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-04-23_fnc_heat_wave</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[City Unseen]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Finally! A book that uplifts nature as above/surrounding humans, after a semester centered on humans or food or cities. Nature, we learned this week, is in cities after all. Food appears more rarely, as an incentive to bring the humans and animals closer together (the pecan cookies for the ants, for instance), or in a description of an animal. The narrative exists mostly outside money & power, purposefully trading the typical lenses for opening ones’ eyes to our surroundings. The book regularly reminded me of A Walk Around the Block, a 2020 short-format nonfiction by a similar character, a dad in Minneapolis who begins investigating the systems of city infrastructure around his home. The books overlap on the topic of squirrel-watching.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-04-30_fnc_city_unseen</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[NYC Immersive Time Machine]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[NYC Portal is a WebVR experience to see what the city looked like a century ago, centered in three places I spend the most time in around NYC. A 360-degree photosphere grounds viewers in each location, but focuses on an interactive 3D carousel of photos. Viewers can rifle through the deck of photos, organized in a chronological timeline, and see the photos up close, with details like the year, the exact location, and captions of the photos transcribed from the archives.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-05-07_imex_nyc_immersive_time_machine</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-05-07_imex_nyc_immersive_time_machine</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Spatial Semantic Twitter Search]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I’ve combined my 1) desire to re-surface content from my Twitter feed 2) embeddings & semantic search and 3) my love of infinite canvas UIs:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-05-07_shm_spatial_semantic_twitter_search</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-05-07_shm_spatial_semantic_twitter_search</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Crucible of Oil in Georgetown]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The commodities and industries that accelerate economic value—namely through the raw materials for industrialization, including energy—shape who globally holds power. This was true of timber, metals, and most notably in the last century, oil, which has led to invasions and coups, modern miracles and environmental destruction, and forged superpowers; who controls oil controls the world. These industries and patterns have all converged in the past decade in Guyana, a small, historically colonized and poor nation on the Northern coast of South America.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-05-09_cici_the_crucible_of_oil_in_georgetown</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-05-09_cici_the_crucible_of_oil_in_georgetown</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Unpacking Fast Casual]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Last fall, sitting in the Tisch student lounge, I watched several classmates pull fiber bowls out of bags bearing the brand DIG, rendered all caps in a condensed sans serif font on the bags. In one flash of the logo, I intuited the brand behind these bowls as one that hired a branding agency, therefore a chain that had corporate funding instead of homegrown, and its bags were optimized for takeout, probably digital orders. Instead of searching my maps app or Google or DoorDash, I searched the iPhone App Store to find the brand, downloaded their app, and later that week tried the food, all without speaking to humans. The logo did all the talking to me.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-05-10_fnc_unpacking_fast_casual</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-05-10_fnc_unpacking_fast_casual</guid>
            <pubDate>Fri, 10 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Truly Useless Machine]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-06_um_truly_useless_machine</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-09-06_um_truly_useless_machine</guid>
            <pubDate>Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[My Own Wearables]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[As far as traditional tech wearables, my setup is super popular: Apple Watch, AirPods Pro 2 out & about, AirPods Max when I’m at the office/in deep work. Apple Watch & AirPods (Pro) once communicated (since I bought all of the above on launch day) I was a super early adopter, and incidentally indicated a level of status. But they don’t communicate much these days, as they’re so ubiquitous, especially on the NYU campus. And I’ve written previously about what AirPods Max communicate—namely that they’re a fashion accessory as much as they are headphones. You’ll regularly see me use gestures like Double Tap on Apple Watch and squeeze on AirPods.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-11_wear_my_own_wearables</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Machine That Resists]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-12_um_machine_that_resists</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-09-12_um_machine_that_resists</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[View Out My Window]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Soft vine charcoal drawing:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-16_draw_view_out_my_window</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Very Specific Machine]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-16_um_very_specific_machine</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Homemade Heartstopper Zap]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In Heartstopper, a queer YA Netflix show, whenever the main characters’ hands touch each other, animated lightning bolts & zap sound effects play to emphasize the steps along their relationship.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-18_wear_homemade_heartstopper_zap</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-09-18_wear_homemade_heartstopper_zap</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Lovebird Agave Cabinet]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[At the Brooklyn Museum today, I was taken by this cabinet, “Lovebird Agave Cabinet,” designed by Fernando Laposse in 2021 in Mexico City.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-19_um_lovebird_agave_cabinet</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-09-19_um_lovebird_agave_cabinet</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Fasteners & Knitted Plastic]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I attached a snap, a rivet, and a grommet to this piece of polyester felt, which were all new techniques for me this week:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-23_wear_fasteners_and_knitted_plastic</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-09-23_wear_fasteners_and_knitted_plastic</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Apples]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-24_draw_apples</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-09-24_draw_apples</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Garment District]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The other fabric stores were more industrial, less friendly, and harder to navigate. Spandex House, whose latest interior renovation might’ve been to put up a “Like us on Facebook” poster when I was in elementary school, had little organization I could discern other than patterns on the ground floor and solids up above (if you can find the stairs). Mood’s multi-floor structure and intricacies make it especially tiring. The range of options is stunning, but if you’re buying materials for a specific project, you definitely need a game plan going in, because a day of browsing in the Garment District will not take you to any specific destination.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-09-27_wear_garment_district</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-09-27_wear_garment_district</guid>
            <pubDate>Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Snapback]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I love taking photos with my iPhone, but all the other things on my iPhone distract me from taking photos. With the iPhone 16 Camera Control, I want a case that turns my iPhone into purely a point-and-shoot.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-01_um_snapback</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-01_um_snapback</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[How Not to Be Seen]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Resolution defines what is visible/documented in a photograph—so what if you could hide details in plain sight?]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-03_um_how_not_to_be_seen</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-03_um_how_not_to_be_seen</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Trees]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-09_draw_trees</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-09_draw_trees</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Equirectangular Glitch]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Last spring, investigating using AI image generation tools to make immersive media, I tried getting Adobe Firefly to make me equirectangular imagery for the backdrop of a VR experience. I was surprised by the results, because they vaguely looked like equirectangular photos, but the AI system had no understanding of the requirements of that format (seamless wraparound, for instance, or the precise geometries of the distortion pattern). Here’s a “forest in Sweden:”]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-10_um_equirectangular_glitch</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-10_um_equirectangular_glitch</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Berlin Optionality Clock]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[In America, the least-bougie businesses that are open the most hours of the day. I’ve never been anywhere in Asia, but I’ve heard there’s more kinds of 24-hour businesses than we’re used to here. When I lived in Berlin last year, I found the time of week to dramatically influence what you could do: retail (including grocery stores) are near-universally, by law, closed on Sundays there, so you have to plan your weekend carefully.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-22_um_berlin_optionality_clock</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Grapes]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-23_draw_grapes</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-23_draw_grapes</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Waffles Recipe]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-23_draw_waffles_recipe</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Skeletons]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-30_draw_skeletons</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-30_draw_skeletons</guid>
            <pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Lying Search Engine]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I've become a daily user of Perplexity in the last year, a so-called “answer engine” that uses traditional search results combined with LLMs to offer instant answers to questions. Google’s Search Generative Experiences are offering a similar result to even more people, though dogged by issues and frequently accused of plagiarism. My roommate & I refer to AI search engines (including Perplexity & Arc Search’s Browse for Me) as “the lying machine,” and frequently place bets on whether we think their results are true. But we rarely confirm with reputable sources, because the convenience is too hard to pass up.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-31_um_lying_search_engine</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-31_um_lying_search_engine</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Mylar Circuit Enclosure]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This week, I learned to cut a sheet of mylar and use a heat press to create inflatable pouches. I wanted to try the simplest possible version of inflating a material then putting a circuit inside it.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-10-31_wear_mylar_circuit_enclosure</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-10-31_wear_mylar_circuit_enclosure</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[How Income Affects Health]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey dataset – abbreviated NHANES – is a collection of data that follows individuals and tracks how different aspects of their health change overtime. This data is collected by the Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics (2023), and the overall survey has been performed starting in the early ​​1960s, but the particular dataset we are analyzing contains data collected from 2009 to 2011. It collects demographic, socioeconomic, dietary, and health-related information from an attempted representative sample of Americans, across age groups, over-sampling persons 60 and older due to their significance in the U.S. population (CDC, 2023). The subset of NHANES that interested us the most was how (or if) economic factors, such as income, influence different health outcomes/behaviors.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-11-05_psd_how_income_affects_health</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-11-05_psd_how_income_affects_health</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Junk Mail Generator]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[I recently got some junk mail from the ASPCA, encouraging me to write out my credit card number by hand on paper to sign up for information regarding, in order:]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-11-05_um_junk_mail_generator</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-11-05_um_junk_mail_generator</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Indoor Drought Plant]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[It finally rained in the New York area this weekend for the first time in many weeks, after the driest October we’ve ever seen. Yet most New Yorkers are unaware of our water trends, because city-goers experience dry spells as a lack of the daily inconvenience of rain. We keep watering the plants in our apartments, and the landscaped plants outside get watered by other humans. Yet with Brooklyn’s brush fires and New Jersey’s full-on forest fires, and our low levels in our drinking water reservoirs, these climate swings affect our lives nonetheless.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-11-12_um_indoor_drought_plant</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-11-12_um_indoor_drought_plant</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Spatial Semantic Bluesky Search]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Every day, I like more posts across the social networks I use, leaving behind a trail of valuable data about what resonates with me: nearly 5K likes on Bluesky already, and over 300K from a decade of daily Twitter use. Social networks use these likes as high-value signals toward showing me an ever-more-attuned feed of content I might like, but they leave us powerless to make use of this data ourselves. Searching likes has been a top feature request of mine on Twitter for a decade. I guess it doesn’t drive engagement sufficiently though, since no popular social network has ever done even the basics to make these like streams digestible. Yet they remain filled with gems I regularly wish I could revisit.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2024-11-26_um_spatial_semantic_bluesky_search</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2024-11-26_um_spatial_semantic_bluesky_search</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Abstracts]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Generative AI has risen to massive popularity in recent years, taking over the umbrella label of “AI” that also encompasses technologies including neural networks and semantic search. The latter I believe to be one of the most powerful innovations in the area, able to make using our personal computers closer to their original vision as a “bicycle for the mind.” It stuns me that the first wave of AI rollout from companies like Apple and Google includes all kind of generative boondoggles customers did not ask for, but not 10x better search using embeddings. We’ve all struggled to find files in Finder and emails in Mail countless times.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-02-04_caps_abstracts</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-02-04_caps_abstracts</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Frame Proposal]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-02-18_dfab_frame_proposal</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-02-18_dfab_frame_proposal</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Prototypes]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[An ambient shopping companion Chrome extension.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-02-25_caps_prototypes</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-02-25_caps_prototypes</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Superfund Map Concept]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[America has over a thousand sites that are so contaminated with toxic matter they have been taken over by the federal government for cleanup, under the CERCLA designation started in 1980, also known as “Superfund sites.” New Jersey, California, and Pennsylvania have the highest concentrations of contaminated sites—all states where my family and I live. These are former and current ports, mines, landfills, factories, sewage treatment plants, power plants, etc. Since in most cases private entities caused the damage, the federal government attempts to get those entities to pay for cleanup costs, but public money is used as a backstop. Because of this, there is extensive documentation on why sites deserve the Superfund designation, inspections, and cleanups, all available to the public, but it is housed in websites designed for those with a Ph.D. and EPA employees, using a long list of jargon and acronyms, coupled with inscrutable visual design, running on high-bandwidth, low-accessibility websites. The information is available, but not realistically accessible, to the public. Moreover, many sites have hundreds of pages of documentation that take hours to comb through even for readers who can understand them.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-03-04_caps_superfund_map_concept</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-03-04_caps_superfund_map_concept</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Pissarro & Monet]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Camille Pissarro’s 1896 painting Morning, Overcast Day in Rouen portrays the center of the town of Rouen, France, on a thoroughly grey day. A cast iron bridge arches across the center of the painting, carrying a procession of pedestrians, a meek yellow bus, and horses. Underneath, the Seine river shimmers, conveying three steamships, one prominent in the foreground with a thick smokestack. This ship is unloading onto the visible quay of the riverbank from which the scene is painted. On the opposite bank stand dozens of buildings, densely packed, mostly two to four stories, all with chimneys. One brick-colored smokestack towers over the city, belching dark smoke into a bright sky composed of subtle shades of grey and white, where steam, fog, clouds, and smoke mix, reflecting in the river below.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-03-06_mart_pissarro_and_monet</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-03-06_mart_pissarro_and_monet</guid>
            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Superfund Map Draft]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[There are over a thousand “Superfund” sites in the U.S., which are the most contaminated toxic waste sites being cleaned up by the EPA. Many of these sites have hundreds of pages of technical documentation available, but there exists no realistic tools by which regular interested citizens can learn and engage about their surroundings—digital maps by major tech companies exist to drive commerce, not educate. I am making an easily navigable map of hazardous Superfund sites with clear summaries of their histories/impact on local health. To accomplish this, I’m archiving the dwindling documentation from government agencies about these sites, and training an LLM using embeddings of these documents to be able to answer questions through a novel spatial interface.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-03-11_caps_superfund_map_draft</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-03-11_caps_superfund_map_draft</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Production Timeline]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[My project relies on the assumption that feeding the accessible documents about Superfund sites to an LLM results in easy-to-understand, grounded-in-truth, useful summaries and answers. I need to test this hypothesis first to de-risk the project.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-03-18_caps_production_timeline</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-03-18_caps_production_timeline</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Production Update]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[This weekend I ran Hackstone, a hackathon for my classmates in Capstone, which was a great success. 13 students came over spring break to lock in on our projects, including me. We ran Checkpoints, demos modeled off Purdue Hackers, and had pizza.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-04-01_caps_production_update</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-04-01_caps_production_update</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Presentation Draft]]></title>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-04-08_caps_presentation_draft</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-04-08_caps_presentation_draft</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Lachlan Idea Generator]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[An analog portfolio turned idea generator with three wheels to spin, for tone, subject, & medium. I’ve seemingly made half the combinations as art projects & the other half sound plausible coming from me. It makes fun of how systematic, practical, & non-personally-attached my art is by reducing my projects to these core keywords, & re-systemizing them into this lime green contraption. I designed, 3D-printed, spray-painted, & assembled this custom device.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-04-14_dfab_lachlan_idea_generator</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-04-14_dfab_lachlan_idea_generator</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Superfund Installation Draft]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[There are over a thousand “Superfund” sites in the U.S., which are the most contaminated toxic waste sites being cleaned up by the EPA. Many of these sites have hundreds of pages of technical documentation available, but there exists no realistic tools by which regular interested citizens can learn and engage about their surroundings—digital maps by major tech companies exist to drive commerce, not educate. I am making an easily navigable map of hazardous Superfund sites with clear summaries of their histories/impact on local health. To accomplish this, I’m archiving the dwindling documentation from government agencies about these sites, and training an LLM using embeddings of these documents to be able to answer questions through a novel spatial interface.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-04-15_caps_superfund_installation_draft</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-04-15_caps_superfund_installation_draft</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[My Egypt]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Charles Demuth painted My Egypt, now hanging in the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1927 (Whitney). Living most of his life (1883–1935) in Lancaster, PA, he chose a subject close to home, one crucial to the town’s skyline and economy, a grain elevator in the center of the city run by John W. Eshelman & Sons. Painted looking up from a low vantage point, gleaming in the sunlight, “the most striking feature of the painting is the monumentality of the central structure” (Marling 33).]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-04-15_mart_my_egypt</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-04-15_mart_my_egypt</guid>
            <pubDate>Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[PFAS in Renewable Natural Gas]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[At Newtown Creek Wastewater Resource Recovery Plant, New Yorkers’ biosolids are mixed with compost in heated digester eggs to produce methane. This methane is purified by National Grid and fed back into New York’s gas lines (NYC DEP “Data Reporting”).]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-05-02_nyg_pfas_in_renewable_natural_gas</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-05-02_nyg_pfas_in_renewable_natural_gas</guid>
            <pubDate>Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[American Toxics]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[There are nearly two thousand “Superfund” sites in the U.S., which are the most contaminated toxic waste sites being cleaned up by the EPA. Many of these sites have hundreds of pages of technical documentation available, but there exists no realistic tools by which regular interested citizens can learn and engage about their surroundings. I made American Toxics, a website with an easily navigable map of hazardous Superfund sites with clear summaries of their histories/impact on local health. To accomplish this, I’ve extracted dwindling documentation from government agencies about these sites, and used retrieval-augmented generation with an LLM to summarize the histories and answer questions. I then built a gallery show with a collection of physical installations around the database, visualizing this government program through sound, sludge, maps, photography, paper documentation, and a hanging mobile. It addresses the personal story of my preschool’s direct proximity to a Superfund site, the scale of waste across the U.S., and uses technical, design, scientific, and fabrication methods.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-05-09_caps_american_toxics</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-05-09_caps_american_toxics</guid>
            <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Landscape vs Landscape Happy]]></title>
            <description><![CDATA[Jean Metzinger’s Landscape (1912–14) hangs in the main room of Cubism at the Museum of Modern Art, which is fitting given the artist being a salon Cubist. The painting, likely painted somewhere in the French countryside given the artist’s life was spent there, shows the promised landscape, though the exact contents of the landscape are not clear. Trees dot the landscape in red, green, and blue. A red parallelogram of a field at the center draws attention, seemingly glinting under an unclear light source on its left. Houses in the lower left, with flat brick patterns and birdhouse constructions, alternate between primary colors at random. While the concept of the landscape is clear, its origins are impossible to trace, shrouded under bright color, patterns, and bizarre geometries. These are classic Cubist constructions with the saturation slider turned all the way. The color is eye-catching, but veers cartoonish or oversimplifying, landing to my eyes a century later basic for the movement. The placement among many other Cubists lets viewers judge it as one entry in the lineage.]]></description>
            <link>https://edu.lachlanjc.com/2025-05-09_mart_landscape_vs_landscape_happy</link>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">2025-05-09_mart_landscape_vs_landscape_happy</guid>
            <pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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