In 1762, Rousseau wrote in Émile, or On Education, that smell was the sense of the imagination; as it gives tone to the nerves it must have great effect on the brain. Little did Rousseau know that the olfactory nerve was the only cranial nerve besides the optic nerve that does not route through the brainstem.

He continues: Smells by themselves are weak sensations. They move the imagination more than the sense and effect us not so much by fulfilment as by expectation. Smell as a cue to a memory, which may draw whimsical or visceral responses.

An extremely sensitive reflex may result from these memories, at least in rats: apparently they can smell down to 0.04 ppt of 2,4,5-trimethylthiazoline, which happens to be an odorant exuded from the anal glands of cats and red foxes (Laska et al. 2005). Analytical instrumentation pales in comparison, only managing to detect odorants at ppb levels at best (with ideal sample presentation, slow analysis, and no masking odorants present).

Even now, smell experiments (e.g. for determining permissible odour levels around landfills) are often conducted with panels of experts instead of with instrumentation alone. (In fact, some legislation around smell is based on number of complaints reported, because detecting the smell levels directly is deemed too complicated/expensive.) TSA dogs are sniffing your bags for bombs or apples. But to be able to measure things like how long it takes to detect the smell or where the smell is stronger, people have been inventing funny machines at least since the early 19th century.

In 1895, Henrik Zwaardemaker, professor at Utrecht University, published Physiologie des Geruchs, a treatise on olfaction and odorants. In it, he details different methods of presenting odorants to subjects in a controlled fashion:

Zwaardemaker’s olfactometers, or Riechmesser. The second is an improvement upon the first, with an interchangable odorant chamber. From Physiologie des Geruchs.

A set up for measuring time taken to detect a smell? Not sure where the big pointy thing goes to… From Physiologie des Geruchs.

But the most funny man-chine is preserved for the present day! Might I share the NASAL RANGER™:

Look at how SCIENTIFIC these people look! They must be so AUGMENTED! These images are all lifted from a google image search for Nasal Ranger.

The Nasal Ranger™ does nothing more than provide some ratio of active carbon filtered and non-filtered air. So you can just smell the air, or just smell nothing, or something in between. You can decide if there is a big difference between filtered and not-filtered air. It’s not that fancy. Yet it evokes TECHNONOSE, or BETTER-THAN-YOURS nose. Here they even describe it as a “mobile artificial nose”, even though the nose part actually belongs to the person holding the retrofuturistic contraption (which apparently costs 1500 USD).

Another silly instrument, another day. Next thing you know, they’ll be measuring odorant levels in Degrees Brix.

addendum

Marco points out that the Nasal Ranger looks surprisingly similar to something already invented by Professor Farnsworth:

The SMELL-O-SCOPE! “The Smell-O-Scope allows the user to smell odours over astronomically long distances (”If a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet I won’t be out of the loop”). The degree of odour can be measured on a meter called the “Funkometer”. It is unknown how the device functions, but it apparently has a lens and a stench coil.”

addendum ii
I wanted to include this excerpt too, to point out what a funny guy Dhr. Zwaardemaker was:

Teehee, Fäcalgestank.

Dan Barber is a chef and restaurant owner, operating the Blue Hill restaurant in NYC ($40 entrées, yowser), and to some extent it seems also the Blue Hill Farm in Great Barrington, MA. He’s apparently served Mrs. Obama as part of her campaign of better food and health (see this), and on his website claims he advises on some executive branch food and farming policy. He’s also oddly skinny for a chef.

He spend the first hour of his cooking lecture talking about dirt. No joke. He even drew a picture of a SUPERNEMATODE eating other nematodes (not super) on the blackboard, to illustrate the infinite possibilities of flavour production in the ecology of topsoil.

The main point he made with his ode to dirt was that without an entire ecology providing a variety building blocks (like flavonoids and flavonols?) for plants to grow from, the plants would grow flavourless and undesirable. If used to then feed animals, those animals would also grow up to flavourless and undesirable. While the development of synthetic fertilizers and the work done during the green revolution for increasing crop yields and thus preventing famine was utilitarian, Dan Barber claims that the green revolution was also the downfall of flavour. Subsequently, lack of flavour and overfarming high-yield soy, corn and wheat crops leads to our unhealthy relationship to food.

Now I shall pause the chef-talk for an interlude with Annemarie Mol, an amazing researcher/professor (hoogleraar, en haar oratie wordt op donderdag in de UvA aula gehouden) at the University of Amsterdam. Some of her previous research was focused on the social practices of healthcare, and now she is researching food and the body. She is the principle investigator of the research project ‘Eating bodies. The eating body in Western practice and theory‘, which encompasses four subcategories:
(1) the eating body’s health: limiting calorie intake versus maximising satisfaction;
(2) the eating body’s sensitivity: on tasting in various practices;
(3) the eating body and other eaters: on different ways of relating individual and collective;
(4) the eating body and its environment: on absorbing food, excreting waste and different bodily boundaries.

In Tasting Food: Tasting Between the Laboratory and the Clinic, Mol questions how the function of taste relates to the relevance of taste. In fact, whether researching the function of taste would lead us to understanding its relevance at all. Mol discovers that according to ‘taste scientists’ (observed on their now seeming defunct website tastescience.com) flavour is more than taste, and flavour can guide our eating bodies positively or negatively, thus helping us either enjoy the food or find out if it is poison. But where, asks Mol, can one find eating bodies (especially in the targeted Western regions) that are confronted with poisonous food? Especially often enough to be able to identify poisonous flavours? Mol suggests that much of the research that backs up these utilitarian findings on the function of flavour are based on laboratory experiments using models of human bodies– those models being rats. And indeed, that rats are astute test-tasters, but perhaps not so closely tied to common social practices of western eating bodies.

In the paper Good Taste: The embodied normativity of the citizen-consumer she contrasts citizens ’serving common good’ to consumers ’seeking pleasure’. Instead of taste being cultivated by bodily concerns such as avoiding disease or gaining enough nutrients, taste is now a construct of desire shaped by advertising and society. She proposes that instead of allowing the consumer-citizen to be shaped by the questionably developed notion of ‘bodily pleasure’, we acknowledge the shaping of taste and interfere with how it is currently done.

This brings me back to Dan Barber. His conclusion was that we must SEIZE flavour by developing and using new ‘modernist farming’ techniques. To some extent they may look back at pre-green revolution farming, but mostly we must understand how to harness science and technology to support a teeming topsoil and genetically diverse foodcrop. At the end of his ode to flavour (with dirt prelude) he points to the leadership of the gallant foodie in restoring the importance of flavour and its healthful side effects.

It is difficult for me to separate Dan Barber’s story from all this heritage-breed heirloom-crop (which is often conflated with the sustainable-green-local movement) whole-foods expensive feel-goodery, even though he explicitly rejected conforming to the-past-was-better food critics. Both Dan Barber and places like Whole Foods declare they will save the western world from its staggering obesity and diabetic problems. Because obviously, the citizen-consumer is responding to the flavours of these alternate foods, which similarly obviously correspond to their health benefits. The citizen-consumer is certainly NOT responding to newly effective marketing, and that marketing is certainly NOT forming the desire and enjoyability of the citizen-consumer’s eating body.

But perhaps at times the obvious doesn’t seem as obvious as we might like, and heirloom/heritage/local farmers may decide to turn to science to solidify their claims. Thus the second interlude, visiting some units Dan Barber mentioned during his lecture: degrees Brix.

In his lecture, Dan Barber mentions working with one of his farmers on organic carrots, and going outside one February and measuring 17 degrees Brix in one of the carrots farmed in Blue Hill. He explains that degrees Brix corresponds to the sugar content, and we’re looking at a carrot that 17% sugar. Ecstatic, he then takes an organic Mexican carrot he’s using for stocks from the kitchen fridge and measures 0 degrees Brix. Then he concludes that his methods for farming are vastly superior. Hm. Before we get into the assumptions and methods used in this experiment, let us examine what exactly this degrees Brix is:

Brix scale n [Adolf F. Brix 1870: a hydrometer scale for sugar solutions so graduated that its readings at a specified temperature represent percentages by weight of sugar in the solution [Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary]

So a hydrometer is a little thermometer-looking thing filled with something of known specific gravity that you float inside another cylinder containing your sample to measure its specific gravity. The line on the hydrometer that then is at the surface of the sample is read off. The reading that will follow is a ratio: you are comparing e.g. grams per ml to grams per ml.

Degrees Brix is one of the tables used to compare these ratios to ratios obtained using samples with certain amounts of dissolved solids. Brix is mostly used in the grape juice/wine making industry, specifically for measuring sucrose solutions. Other common tables include the Plato scale, used for brewing, and the Baumé scale, used in pharmacology. As far as I can tell, they all seem to be almost exactly the same.

Apparently, it is now much more common for viticulturers to measure degrees Brix in their grapes by using a refractometer, and there is some conversion scale that allows you to go from the index of refraction to the degrees Brix. A refractometer is easier to use, because you can just take a drop of liquid (in the field) and measure its index of refraction on the spot.

But what we learn from all this is that the degrees Brix measured are only going to correspond to the dissolved amounts of sucrose if there is nothing else in the sample that is affecting its specific gravity. And that’s probably never going to happen with a bunch of juices produced by random plants. Or other random liquids. But it turns out to correspond kind of to sweetness in grapes, supposedly because the dissolved solids in grape juice are apparently mostly sucrose, glucose and fructose. But I actually haven’t found any studies that empirically back this up using different analytical instrumentation. And that effect (of degrees Brix somehow corresponding to ‘goodness’) is readily multiplied in many other food science studies. Here are are two of the many examples:

An evaluation of Brix refractometry instruments for measurement of colostrum quality in dairy cattle, Bielmann et al., Journal of Dairy Science, Vol 93, Issue 8, August 2010:

[…indicating an appropriate cut-off point of 22% Brix score for the identification of good quality colostrum. …]

Read: we randomly find that the milk of cows that have just given birth is best if it measures to have 22% dissolved solids.

Use of the refractometer as a tool to monitor dietary formula concentration in gastric juice, Chang et al., Clinical Nutrition, Volume 21, Issue 6, December 2002, pgs 521-525:

[…We found that distilled water, minerals, and vitamins had low Brix values of 0±0, 1.2±0.1, and 0.4±0.1, respectively. On the other hand, because carbohydrate (17 g/100 ml), protein (5.3 g/100 ml), fat (4.1 g/100 ml), and full-strength polymeric diet had high concentrations of dissolved nutrients, they also had high Brix values (12.1±0.6, 6.5±0.1, 6.0±0.1, and 23.5±0.1, respectively)…]

Read: water’s specific gravity is just like that of water! Also, when we dissolve things in water, the specific gravity goes up! Who would’ve thunk.

Then there seems even to be pro-Brix propaganda. Here’s a pamphlet that seems to be targeted at farmers published by an organic fertilizer company: http://www.nutritionsecurity.org/PDF/Brix.pdf, which on its first page unambiguously states that BRIX=QUALITY. Further along it states in the same bullet list:

• BRIX is a measure of the percent solids (TSS) in a given weight of plant juice—nothing more—and nothing less.
• BRIX varies directly with plant QUALITY. For instance, a poor, sour tasting grape from worn out land can test 8 or less BRIX. On the other hand, a full flavored, delicious grape, grown on rich, fertile soil can test 24 or better BRIX.

So percent solids of plant juice varies directly with quality? A shriveled old grape will have a higher percent solids, corresponding to a higher Brix reading, but not necessarily be more delicious. Why are they trying to convince farmers otherwise? The pamphlet also includes 3 pages of tables of ‘good’ Brix values for different foods. What do these refractometer pushers think they mean? More importantly, why aren’t they showing what exactly is the Brix data they’re measuring?

Left: the cover of the pamphlet with the logo of the fertilizer company and an odd graphic of produce with a molecular structure overlay which seems to indicate it is the molecular structure of sugar? Right: an infographic depicting YOU taking refractometer measurements.

Then near the end of the pamphlet there is the calling out to the farmer/citizen-consumer:
YOU, not some scientist in a lab coat, can test the food you want to buy.
YOU can determine QUALITY at the point of sale.
YOU will gain back a little control over YOUR life.
Why are they trying to pretend that a handheld refractometer for measuring specific gravity is somehow magically going to give us control over the quality of produce we consume? Does their fertilizer increase the TSS of the plants that grow with them, and therefore would this show that plants grown with their fertilizer are much better? Are they really convolutedly trying to sell more of their fertilizer to farmers through with technobabble?

But I am getting carried away in this interlude, and will now return to chefs. Dan Barber also seems to be eating this proverbial dog food, and is probably encouraging refractometer use for Brix measurements amongst the farmers that supply his restaurants. Situated against a background of factory farming and highly optimised growing processes, it makes sense for small-scale farmers and citizen-consumers to reach for small-scale instrumentation to try to measure quality and optimise their crops/livestock. But so far we haven’t proven that we are optimising anything. We haven’t proven that the percent solids in plant juice is an indicator of flavour. We haven’t proven that flavour, as tasted by western eating bodies, is any indicator of the healthful qualities of food. While I’m in no way a proponent of the current bioindustry and its factory farming processes, I think we need to refine our argument.

What are types of small-scale analytical instrumentation that can be used to determine crop and livestock health? How can they be used by farmers in the field? How can we educate ourselves on healthful farming practices without having to piggyback on the marketing efforts of companies trying to sell products (like fertilizer)? How can we get more delicious produce and meats in supermarkets?

I think Annemarie Mol would try to bring the questions back to the western citizen-consumer, or the eating body itself. Can we modify ourselves by modifying the socio-material constructs that form our desires? I.e. can we counter advertising that has as a goal sales with an environment that forms the normative (healthy) foodie? How can we propagate knowledge and skills through a loosely interconnected network of farmers, citizen-consumers and restaureurs?

addendum
A different type of question from an admiring audience member at Dan Barbers talk still questioned the feasibility of only ‘modernist’ farming: “Dear Dan, Most of us cannot afford to be foodies. What do we do?”. And here is where Dan Barber managed an it-really-IS-better Bill-McDonough answer. He pointed to synthetic fertilizers and mentioned they were a petroleum product, and with current soaring crude oil prices, fertilizer was becoming more expensive, which was making livestock feed more expensive, which was making the copious amount of meat we eat more expensive. He mentioned that Pilgrim’s Pride (one of the world’s largest poultry farmers, NYSE: PPC) had been losing billions of dollars because of this.

I casually tried to verify the causality that Dan Barber was pointing to by comparing a chart of crude oil prices to the stock prices of Pilgrim’s pride, but I didn’t really see the inversely proportional relation I was looking for. In fact, it looks more like when oil prices are high, Pilgrim’s Pride stock is high too.

From http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:PPC with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brent_Spot_monthly.svg

Urban feeds es un workshop de 4 días dedicado al desarrollo de dispositivos de captura de datos en la ciudad. Equipados con sensores y antena GPS, estas interfaces permiten relacionar valores de nuestro ambiente “no visibles” con la localización de actividades, personas y eventos. Urban feeds nace del workshop Smart Geometry 2011 en Copenhague (http://issuu.com/fablabbcn/docs/ urbanfeeds). Allí se desarrollaron workflows a través de diferentes plataformas open-source para el uso y análisis de información personal en la ciudad, y su aplicación como herramienta de diseño y de influencia en el comportamiento de los ciudadanos.

Read more here.

Lima has an electronics market district called Paruro where you can buy anytime from regular ol’ through hole components to weird USB connectors to stepper motors harvested from printers. It’s in the center of the city, and not exactly the kind of place a tourist should be sampling local cuisine, which didn’t stop a new friend from trying some type of tea called emolliente and peacing out with with a severe case of the shits.

Ordering a press and peel etched board, a.k.a. ‘planchado’

nice etching work conditions…

But to the order of business. Last time Jeff and I were here we taught a workshop at Escuelab, and I had an arduino with me which caused some excitement amongst the participants. Technically ironic, as there were a bunch of microcontrollers already there, but arduino also offers access to a slightly more exciting curriculum and community than your typical 101 interesting 555 timer circuits crowd. Also, not everyone carries an avr programmer in their purse. Or two. Ahem.

the first prototype parurino!

So this time around, we looked into making an arduino from locally sourced parts. Since FTDI chips are an ass to solder and it’s hard to find SMD parts here, we went with the RS-232 based Arduino Severino as designed by Adilson Akashi, and for all those serialportless laptops out there (like, every single one, even though usb->serial converters are probably THE WORST THING EVAR… oh cry) we figured people could buy a dongle.

passive components

bill of materials for small parts

So I made my first angel investment of 100 USD (to the total investment of 400 USD) to make 50 kits (incl. locally made PCB), explanatory posters and um, some antibiotics for the aforementioned ill-fated. Now you can get a Parurino kit (with atmega8) for around 40 soles.

Click on the poster for more information!

I’m in Argentina, but everyone else is doing a Parurino workshop now on the last day in Lima. Fun times, yeah.

MTM Snap, the Tricolour edition! Downstairs in my dungeon office.

Next one will have wheels

A long time ago, Willem Velthoven and I went to one of the funniest sewing machine stores in Amsterdam zuid to buy a digital embroidery machine (you might know it: the one with all their merchandise in the window). We also had to buy some 700euro software to go with it so that we could have the programmable embroidery machine embroider what we wanted, I think it was called PE-Design. It outputs a custom file format called .PES, which apparently works on both Brother machines and Babylocks. It only ran on Windows, it was full of bugs and didn’t give a lot of control. The designs were stored on a memory card with a branded memory card reader and thus transferred to the machine. Even with all this adversity, we managed to make this rather nice 404 for the Picnic conference’s website:

Now, many years later, I have found myself in the northern-most fablab, in Lyngen, Norway. Here there are 2 embroidery machines, which were sitting in the corner collecting dust, so they asked me to revive them. I found a computer that ran windows to install the software on, found a hoop to embroider with and went about digitizing their logo of a Viking king.

So actually, the software that I found to install on the machine was not digitizing software per se. With PE-design, I remember being able to draw shapes and true-type fonts and have them fully embroidered. To my surprise, what I thought was the equivalent for the babylock, CustomWorks, was not able to. I could make an outline (like the logo shown above) but no multi-color creations. What was the point?

I did a bit of research on the internet, and found that all the software (all 2035 USD worth of it) did not digitise! Each of the different *works softwares did something inane for an extremely high price!

CustomWorks: a separate program so you can copy, paste and resize from parts of other embroidery designs. Cost: 480 USD.

SizeWorks: resize your design. That’s it. Cost: 150 USD.

DensityWorks: reduce stitches per square cm. Cost: 150 USD.

Studio III: shows you thumbnails of your embroidery. You can organise things into folders without actually moving folders. Cost: 360 USD.

Hoopworks: make embroidery that can span multiple hoops. Cost: 150 USD.

Somehow, the package including all of this software (and some other simple bits of single-purpose software, like add text from these few pre-selected fonts), but no design creation software, was sold to this lab for 2032 USD, not sure how they did that math. Miserable.

This software company, DesignersGallerySoftware, also makes a digitising suite called MasterWorks II. It’s 2500 USD. I haven’t been able to find it in this lab though so I haven’t been able to create any custom non-outline .PES files for their machine. But again, what justifies this exorbitant pricing?

Furthermore, the card and card reader that comes with the machine is some proprietary Babylock business, which looks just like a compact flash card reader and card except that the cards cost 70 USD for 10 Mb of space.

Imagine. To be able to create custom embroidery, these companies are charging somewhere around 7k USD: 2k for the machine and 5k for the software. Not to mention that you will need a Windows machine to run all of this. And people are happily forking over this cash for their hobbies, because how are they supposed to know that this software SHOULD REALLY BE FREE? That keeping them locked to a brand with proprietary embroidery formats is REALLY EVIL? That if there was a slightly different demographic for this stuff we would have haXX0red them to hell and back by now?

I’m glad my grandmother is into the delightfully open hobbies of gardening and painting, and is not being abused and manipulated by these nefarious businesspeople.

Norway is offering me a whole new series of licorice types I have not tried yet… so in my short stay up here at 99°N, I am sampling all these different kinds thanks to Thrine and Frode of Fablab Høylandet. I know food-blogs are a far cry from sampling these yourselves, but at least you can imagine them…

1. Kick is a toffee-like licorice that comes in a chewy bar, also available filled with lemon. Like toffee, makes my teeth hurt, but so good too…

2. Salte biler are, according to the package, Norway’s most sold car. They are kind of like the dutch salmiakschuim but small and covered in sugar/salt crystals. I’ve been eating these for dinner.

3. Salt Sild! Classic, almost exactly like zoute haringen. Some might say too literal of a candy– salty herring is not far enough away from the food it is depicting. Well, stop thinking about it, start eating some.

4. Turkish Peber. Hard licorice candy, filled with ammonium chloride powder. Indeed quite spicey, I suppose hence turkish pepper.

5. Ego. This one is very adventurous: licorice filled chocolate? Called ego? I haven’t tried it yet, but am intrigued.

There is one last thing I tried which is not licorice-related: Kvikklunsj. Somehow in this country it is branded in such a way that everyone associates it with ski touring. Imagine, a country where ski-touring is so normal the nation’s candy bars represent it. I’m having fun up here, yes.

Mt. Elliott Maker Space and Jeff Warren on little skateboards.

I visited the wonderful Jeff Sturges, who used to have the original 2007 Mobile FabLab before it went to DC last year. He runs the Mt. Elliott Maker Space now, at the corner of East Grand and Lafayette, together with equally awesome Ted Sliwinski. There you can learn about soldering, bike fixing, video editing, synth playing, and soon I think also things about cooking, canning and commercial food production.

Jeff and Ted also run OMNICORPDETROIT (I think it requires all caps) the hacker space at Eastern Market. It’s a huge space where people can join, get a desk and work on fabrication/design/agriculture/whatever without being lonely at home or running up a huge coffee bill at the local laptops-and-yuppies cafe. They also have parties and more awesome things and when I grow up maybe I’ll work there too.

The street where all the bike polo goes down yes, next to Eastern Market.

OMNICORPDETROIT is also where I learned to play Bike Polo, during a Battle of the Bits concert. In case you have a terrible imagination or are unfamiliar with elitist equestrian sports, bike polo is like street hockey on bikes with smaller sticks. It is more fun than whatever that old DJ Shadow song is about in which you bash balls. I think Ted is captain of the Detroit division, but I’m not sure what the deal is in Cambridge– I need to find out. Email me with any info, this is important.

We also visited Blair Evans at Incite Focus, a full-fletched Detroit fab lab + permaculture + appropriate technology + experiential learning center located in the Samaritan Center– a charter school on Connor. Blair is the superintendent of 9 charter schools in Detroit now, including recently Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school for pregnant teenagers and teen mothers. The Samaritan Center makes me want to go back to high school– they have 2 large-scale ShopBots, laser cutters, photovoltaic stuff everywhere, green houses outside, and more triple-booting computers than I could count. There is a full-time fab lab staff and the school lunches even look good. I just remember having old books, a junky cafeteria and ten communal awful Windows computers. Well at least there was ISDN.

The only non-fuzzy picture I have, and everyone looks sad. I think we were tired from bike polo.

Mostly I know Blair from my advisor’s fan-rants about how well he has been doing in Fab Academy, but now I’m impressed with everything he is doing BESIDES Fab Academy. He’s only going to start running Catherine Ferguson Academy in September, but I think he’s going to do an amazing job. I’m really happy that at least some talented people like Blair (who could have continued his comfortable life as a serial entrepreneur) are trying to make education better in the US– sometimes when I hear stories from the kids at SETC about the state of public schools in Boston, I almost want to cry.

I don’t think fab labs are going to take over classic STEM education in the US, but for now at least it can be some kind of return to fabrication and manufacturing for a society floundering in this information age. It would be awesome if some illustrator reading this could make a drawing about how using facebook/twitter isn’t really ‘doing’ anything, and that by now, with computers more powerful than what we got to the moon with in teenage pockets everywhere, we really should be able to do more than ‘tweet’.

Anyway, like Jeff Sturges likes to say, EVERYONE MOVE TO DETROIT! It’s great out there.

I was up in Maine at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts again, which now has a permanent Fablab thanks to an anonymous donor! I was there for the first session of the summer, laser-cutting, CNC-milling, eating mussels. I also got to hang out with my favourite Ilan Moyer, who came up for the weekend, and James Rutter from AS220, the cool space in Providence, besides the amazing Haystack crew: Mis, Stephen, Doolan, Stu, Susan, Ellen, etc. etc. So much fun. You really probably don’t understand how much.

Here’s James with a laser-cut hand-made felt beer cooler made in the lab, and also where we went swimming even though the water was only 11 C.

We took the forms of these mussels and made them into a die for the metalsmith’s tea infuser workshop.

Pretty cool beginning of a marriage with Haystack, you can read more about the collaboration in this month’s American Craft. I’m quoted too, but I sound a little silly.

We’re still working, but some make-your-own files up here:
http://mtm.cba.mit.edu/machines/mtm_snap-lock/