Query results: aerodynamics

My talk at the Parisian Hacker Space Festival went well. The little event was popping with good ideas but seemed to obstinately refuse to make an impression. As if some hacker Freudian über-Ich kept the organizers from indulging into anything ‘ordinary’ —a coat of paint, untangled cabling, a working toilet— for fear that it might diminish their technology-fiddling identity. An amusing lot.

I am indebted to one person who lent me his laptop for the presentation and to whom I did not have the opportunity to talk to afterwards — thank you very much.

Due to the disparity of sources and room for misinterpretation, I only share my slides privately; but a package of source files is available (sorted by copyright license). A video is also provided, self-compiled from a multitude of proprietary bits¹. Caution though: contrary to other times, I wasn’t aiming for a wide diffusion. What you have here is an overly enthusiastic aerodynamicist talking to a group of geeks, with imperfect slides featuring a koala. You have been warned.

1. A proprietary flash plugin is required to download them from an external website. How convincing are you as a self-proclaimed free-culture-and-technology group, when you hand over your voice (proprietary storage, protocol and software) to a couple of corporations? Not very. [↩]

In two weeks I will give a talk titled Hacking Airflow: Ordinary Aerodynamics for Fun and Profit.

Although I currently have the privilege to work on quite an extraordinary project related to free software, I was previously heading for the aviation industry. I still am puzzled when I watch anything that flies, and it will be a pleasure to share some of that enthusiasm for forty-five minutes.

The talk is scheduled on Monday, June 16th at 16:00, at the Hacker Space Festival in Vitry sur Seine, near Paris, France. I invite you to come along — if only to check by yourself that hacking does indeed mean “creative use of technology” not “illegal computer break-in”. Or that these people are not (that) anti-social, and that the den actually does a whole lot of good for our society. Jérémie Zimmermann’s presentation about La Quadrature du Net is probably the best example.

My slides are currently in the making. The intended audience, and the somewhat contorting topic, make this quite challenging –and fun. For that extra layer of pressure, I am also preparing two additional talks, on entirely different topics, for the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre in July.

You get extra karma points if you recognised the legendary apparatus on the picture.