It felt good to walk the halls of the Media Lab again, and to participate in another sponsor event put on by Professor John Maeda's Simplicity Research Consortium. These photos are from last Thursday and Friday.

We started the first day with a board meeting in the new (to me) Wiesner conference room on the second floor. They converted Walter Bender's old office. Outside in the hall was an array of Ambient Orbs displaying the state of world financial markets in various coded colors.

The sponsor workshop was titled "Eat Your Media" with guest speakers doing talks on food and media in the Bartos Auditorium on the first afternoon. Speakers included Professor Dan Ariely on ir/rationality in food choice and perception. Dan has recently signed a book deal with Harper Collins to write Predictably Irrational, which will encapsulate for the popular audience Dan's experients in behavioral psychology--most fascinating and often bizzare stuff. Dan's book will likely be a best seller in the tradition of Freakonomics when it is released at the beginning of 2008. And noted blogger Meg Hourihan presented on the ills of industrialized food production as well as trends in food innovation such as molecular gastronomy. John's blog off the first link above has some re-cap.

The students and some of the sponsors were grouped in teams to do a project about food and technology Thursday afternoon and evening. Pictured are some food sculptures done for warm-up. I stopped in to grab some of the buffet dinner, but didn't go to the happy hour or join a student team as I was still nursing a cold and decided to go to bed early.

Friday morning, I met Erik Blankinship and Bahktiar Mikhak (former lab people) for breakfast at The Kendall Hotel. They showed me the hours-old first functioning build of the main digital camera activity on the OLPC Children's Machine XO. Kids will not only be able to take photos on their laptops and store them, photos can be shared to a Flickr-like picture stream consisting of any images submitted by kids nearby on the wireless mesh network.

The rest of the morning were presentations of the student/sponsor team projects. As always there were some wildly creative results. iPod shuffles were awarded to the top winners. John will also re-cap the projects in his blog.

Lunch was with Walter Bender, who brought his XO machine to show off the camera app and the music synthsizer. He was checking and answering Google mail pretty easily on the laptop's browser via wifi. After Walter, I had a fantastic mind meld with guys who worked on LEGO Factory. LEGO is a relatively new co-sponsor of Simplicity at the lab. With my brain quite beat up on radical new ideas, I called back to my office to join in on a two-hour design meeting. I had a good nap on the flight home...

- mike lee - enjoying our icy inch of snow - wheaton, md