The Tech Issue October 2011
Vermont Companies Compete to Find Qualified Tech Workers; Vermont’s Mad Scientist; Scoring E-Games; Draker Labs Powers Up
VIDEO: Get Spooked With Local Horror Flick
Some of us have been celebrating Halloween all weekend. But if you’re not bored of scares yet, check out the new horror short from local filmmaker Owen Mulligan, “Night of the Vampire.” Here’s some background info. While this “found-footage” flick owes much to The Blair Witch Project, it has the distinction of taking place…
Movies You Missed 10: Attack the Block
This week in movies you missed: Inner-city kids fight aliens in a summer ’11 movie that was not a remake, sequel, prequel or adaptation. What You Missed When it comes to landing sites on Earth, movie aliens — both nice ones and nasty ones — prefer suburbs full of sheltered, precocious white kids. That’s the…
Patrick Dougherty’s Sculptures ‘Inclined’ to Come Down
I miss them already. The strange-looking, twisty, teepee-esque sculptures, a grouping of botanical buddies that lean slightly, as if whispering secrets to each other. “So Inclined,” the installation in front of the Mahaney Center for the Arts at Middlebury College, is coming down. Talk about planned obsolescence. Renowned artist Patrick Dougherty created the site-specific sculpture in…
Democratic Mayoral Debates for Dummies
If Burlington voters thought they had killed off instant runoff voting once and for all, think again. It’s alive and well in the Democratic primary for mayor — and boy does it show. An upside to IRV is that it’s supposed to allow candidates to focus less on a winner-take-all strategy and more on taking…
What’s The Deal With the Pumpkin On the Cover?
Is this week’s cover pumpkin real or computer generated? Well, it’s a little bit of both. This year’s tech issue happened to fall on the Wednesday before Halloween, so we wanted a cover that combined the two themes. Our first thought was to carve the Tech Jam spaceman logo into a pumpkin, but we took…
Engineering Evangelist
John Cohn turns kids on to science with robots, rap and a pickle electrocutor
News Quirks
Curses, Foiled Again Stephen Frankie Daniel, 21, was caught robbing a gas station convenience store in Snellville, Ga., by police Lt. B.W. Brown, who happened to be waiting in line behind him. “The manager was laughing at the time he was putting the money in the bag because he was looking at me over the…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Life is not just a diurnal property of large interesting vertebrates,” poet Gary Snyder reminds us in his book The Practice of the Wild. “It is also nocturnal, anaerobic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark.” I call this to your attention, Aries, because according to my astrological reckoning,…
Scaling the Firewall
Vermont’s Pwnie Express sells a powerful new tool for cyber-security experts – and hackers
Ready, Set, Play
Dev Jana offers sound advice to Vermont’s growing game-design community
![Flying with “Vid” [244]](https://i0.wp.com/www.sevendaysvt.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/episode244.webp?resize=400%2C300&ssl=1)
Flying with “Vid” [244]
10/23/11: Pirogi-making pilot David “Vid” Miller takes Eva on an evening flight in a 1978 Cessna 172N that flies out of the Burlington International Airport and over the Champlain Valley. As a special treat, they fly through a hole in the clouds and catch a brilliant sunset. David is a flight instructor for the Vermont…
Letters to the Editor
Story Behind the Ad I pity Miss Johnson’s lack of vision [Feedback, “Irony on the Menu?,” October 19]. Her letter last week shows that when she looks at our ad featuring a 10-year breast cancer survivor — my wife, Betsy — she sees irony. I see more than that. I see happiness, gratitude, community, generosity and…
Q&A: University of Vermont Robotics Researcher Josh Bongard
How and why did life on earth evolve in the myriad ways it did? Would creatures evolve in the same ways, and with the same anatomical structures, if we could rewind time and replay evolution over and over again? And, can humans create robots that not only evolve and learn but eventually become sentient? These…
