Iron / Wool / Paper / Bits

Making.

I'm a hacker in the old-school sense of the word and love tinkering on projects. This page is the fun stuff outside of work: some of it compiles and some of it rusts. The day job is on Work and the academic side on Research. Code lives on GitHub.

Atoms

Not everything I build compiles. The forge is a propane forge with a 40 lb travel anvil. The knives are Damascus steel made from bike chain, my current interest is in historic architectural blacksmithing techniques. I also cast metal. Commissions considered as capacity allows. No wedding bands, though; fine jewelry isn’t my calling.

Three hand-forged Damascus knife blades laid on a white sheet — 01 / knives, from bike chain

A head of garlic cast in metal — 02 / cast garlic

Rug hooking

Wool strips pulled through burlap with a hook, one loop at a time. It's slow, it's portable, and it's the only craft I do that works on a couch. Photos coming once I finish something I'm willing to show.

A hooked rug in progress — 03 / rug, in progress

Art

Fermentation

Things that are alive and bubbling

Sauerkraut
Mead
Studied yeast flocculation at Hampshire
Brewed beer, in the past
Helped Portico Brewing produce a foraged Spruce Tip Beer and consulted on wild fermentation

Bits

How to stop academic dishonesty

Most people cheat out of panic. Most people cheat. I worked on a GSR one summer on how to reduce cheating after a disturbing incident where a student copied blatantly on an exam and school policies made it difficult to punish him. I built automated detection scripts around MOSS and came up with a workbook of best practices for faculty. These include having rolling deadlines, and ensuring education accurately builds mastery separate from assessments of knowledge. Read it here →

Foiling facial recognition via makeup

A side project with friends. Facial recognition works by detecting and measuring the distance between points on your face, often with an infrared (IR) light shown at your face at specific points along a grid. I work to change those distances by using makeup that reflects in the IR range to make your face appear a different size than it is. So far, drag contouring has been the most effective method.

Detecting IMSI catchers

IMSI catchers (Stingrays) are cheap and quick to make, and a vital part of many police departments. Unfortunately, they can be used for mass surveillance and interception of honest text messages, as well as potential violation of the 4th Amendment. Leading a team of undergraduates, we used time difference of arrival to geolocate cell towers and cross-referenced them against a database of known towers to flag the fake ones.