Spirit Scientists

I am in the possession of five Little Giants Action Figures for which I have a strong attraction but am only now learning how to use.

Little Giants by Alphie Northcote. My set includes Madame Curie.

Let's put a new face on toys—perhaps a brain too. Little Giants were designed to introduce young kids to real heroes in a fun way. kickstarter

Founded in 2008, FCTRY is a Brooklyn-based product design company that marries pop design to mass production, turning original concepts into brands. page

The creator, Alphie Northcote, keeps a low profile by that name online. His work is sometimes associated with Jailbreak Collective which declares itself like a record label for visual artists and designers. page

Northcote has a twitter presence since 2011 with one follower and one tweet citing Austin Kleon's How to Steal Like an Artist. twitter

# Spirits

I have been confronted with the question, what does one do with their scientist action figures?

Emily Hyland contemplates information processes in the presence of Darwin's spirit.

I tried sharing them at work individually and en mass. Nothing special happened. Then, after being lost in a drawer for years, I tried again.

Great scientists deserve some ritual.

I announced to a colleague, Emily Hyland, that we will select at random one scientist to supervise our day's collaboration. We had a week scheduled to work in a specific area but with no particular goal. We would be limited only by our curiosity.

Newton day one. Application, database and development tooling installs with occasional bump. A new datasource is tapped and integrated. Only once did I turn the plastic Isaac so he could see the screen. This helped.

Curie day two. How to speed the integration of new queries for new data into the application? Under madame's supervision Emily rewrite the application with queries as data. Then query for queries.

Darwin day three. The weakness in our previous linking mechanism becomes clear. What if the queries shaped a landscape that one traversed accumulating facts like treasure in an adventure game? I prototype this in graphviz while Emily hacks the new paths into her application. Natural selection of queries? Perhaps.

It has been a great week for experimental programming and it is only Thursday. I'm going to keep these little scientists and program with them again.