Makers Read Online Free PDF Page B

flat and cut into gears, chutes, springs and other mechanical apparatus.
    “It’s a mechanical calculator,” he said proudly. “About half as powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to the product of the two values into this hopper, here.” He put three scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a slow, irregular rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel” while the hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. “It’s OK. They’re not from the trash,” he said. “I buy them in bulk.” He turned his broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms in her direction. “See, it’s a bit-bucket!” he said.
    Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. “You guys are hilarious,” she said. “This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff.” The gears on the mechanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like you could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished surfaces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned the crank until twelve more brown M&Ms fell out.
    “Who’s the Van Halen fan?”
    Lester beamed. “Might as well jump—JUMP!” He mimed heavy-metal air-guitar and thrashed his shorn head up and down as though he were headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. “You’re the first one to get the joke!” he said. “Even Perry didn’t get it!”
    “Get what?” Perry said, also grinning.
    “Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in their dressing room they’d trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid, I used to dream about being so famous that I could act like that much of a prick. Ever since, I’ve afforded a great personal significance to brown M&Ms.”
    She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. “Look, I hate to break this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly—crap, Kettlewell—said that you guys exemplified everything that he wanted to do with Kodacell. This stuff you’ve done is all very interesting, it’s killer art, but I don’t see the business-angle. So, can you help me out here?”
    “That’s step three,” Perry said. “C’mere.” He led her back to his workspace, to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated in webcams, like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. “Three-dee scanner,” he said, producing a Barbie head from Lester’s machine and dropping it on the scales. He prodded a button and a nearby screen filled with a three-dimensional model of the head, flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He moused on over the other until they lined up, right-clicked a drop-down menu, selected an option and then they were merged, rotating.
    “Once we’ve got the three-dee scan, it’s basically Plasticine.” He distorted the Barbie head, stretching it and squeezing it with the mouse. “So we can take a real object and make this kind of protean hyper-object out of it, or drop it down to a wireframe and skin it with any bitmap, like this.” More fast mousing—Barbie’s head turned into a gridded mesh, fine filaments stretching off along each mussed strand of plastic hair. Then a Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup label wrapped around her like a stocking being pulled over her head. There was something stupendously weird and simultaneously very comic about the sight, the kind of inherent comedy in a