We're having a great time at Maker Faire! We've been pretty darned swamped, but did have a little time to get a few pictures. Some of them are in my flickr set, like the one above from early this morning at our display area. We were lucky to have John Maushammer, the maker of the Pong Watch, hang out with us.

One highlight of the day was when the editor of Make: Japan dropped by and brought us a copy with the CandyFab article in it! We also got copies of the brand new Maker's notebook to play with. There are lots of Maker Faire pictures up on flickr now-- check 'em out!.

Coming to Maker Faire? Find us at the southeast corner of the Expo Hall. We look forward to seeing you!

We'll be there in force with (amongst other things) a tabletop BristleBot Arena and great progress to show off on a lot of our upcoming projects: Next generation interactive LED coffee table panels, the debut of Peggy 2.0, and the brand new design for the CandyFab 5000, all of which we'll be writing much more about this summer. Find us in the south hall, past the Tesla coils.

Great things are coming to Maker Faire, and you can come visit, get a sneak preview and chat.

Just a few choice picks:
• Learn how to hack things with microcontrollers
• Learn about Smart LEDs
• Chocolate
• Art Golf
• The Laser Harp
• The Pong Watch, now with Asteroids!!!
• Restored Pinball Machines
• Orb Swarm
• The Art of Motion Control
• The Heather Gold Show
• Nixie Clocks
• Bleep Labs
• MacGyver's dad, Lee Zlotoff
• Mod your brand new Maker's Notebooks
• Lego Art Car
• NYC Resistor Workshop
• Lee Krasnow and his amazing puzzles
• The Incredible Marble Machine!
• BlinkyBugs, and
• The World's Biggest Pez Dispenser

Yeah!

We'll sure hope to see you there. Advance tickets are on sale at a discount through Friday April 25.

The hole patterns continue throughout the plant, showing up in in the stalks and underground stems (rhizomes) of the lotus plant. The rhizomes, usually just referred to as "lotus root" are prepared as vegetable in many types of asian cuisine. Typically you'll find them served as thin slices through the root (a couple of inches in diameter), showing the distinctive pattern and prepared in many different ways-- I'm partial to tempura. (If you haven't had them, the taste is a bit like a more substantial and nutty version of a water chestnut.)

Another way that you can sometimes find lotus root prepared is as pickled lotus rootlets, which are immature and more tender lotus roots in brine (pictured here). You might find these in a salad or Vietnamese sandwich-- they are tasty like their bigger friends.

Appearances aside, the first bizarre thing about the Sacred Lotus is that it's one of only a handful of known plants that displays "warm-blooded" behaviour: It actively regulates the temperature of its flower to be at a near-constant temperature, even as the ambient temperature varies by a much larger amount. (

The second thing, which I haven't seen written about anywhere, has led me to ask: how can a lotus root be like a spider? If you bite into a lotus rootlet you're sure to notice this: a set of wispy strands of silk seem to come out of nowhere. Where do these come from? The obvious guess would be that they're plant fibers-- after all lotus roots do have a fibrous outer husk, but a quick experiment will show otherwise. Begin by taking a short segment of lotus rootlet and scoring-- cutting it partially-- it so that the two halves can snap apart. Then, pull the two halves apart and watch what happens:

Any plant fiber running down the length of the rhizome would be trimmed down to an inch or so when we cut the rootlet to size. And yet, the fibers drawn between the two pieces can stretch out to many times that length. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if this is not really a fiber that exists in the lotus root, but is instead a chemical-- a polymer-- that stretches into these strings when given the opportunity.

With a little more care to the preparation of the rootlet-- carefully scoring around the entire outer husk, you can pull many more fibers:

The fibers turn out to be quite strong and flexible-- probably the best model that I've yet seen for how spider silk behaves. Independent strands of the twisted fibers can be used to lift the rootlets or other strands-- they do not obviously stick together and it might be possible to even weave a fabric out of it. My impression is that the same strands occur with full-size lotus roots, although it may be harder to identify and observe them since the roots are usually much tougher and need to be cut cleanly with a knife.

So, here are some questions: 1. Do the polymer goo and/or the resulting strands have names? What is written about this stuff? 2. What is the purpose of this stuff? Is it a damage control agent for the air-filled roots, like silicone aquarium sealant? 3. How long of strands can you generate? 4. What are the properties of yarn woven from this stuff-- are there actual applications possible for it?

In any case, pickled lotus rootlets are cheap and you can probably find them at your local asian or indian market. It will only cost you a couple bucks to pick up a jar to play with-- and if you get bored, you can always eat them.