Bench Talk

I had an environmental monitoring project at Salt Creek in Aspermont, Texas, a few years back. If you have never been to Aspermont, you can get the total experience with a video of a slow tumbleweed. Salt Creek in Aspermont has off-the charts salinity. There’s a huge salt dome that contaminates the spring source for the creek, and this super-salty water eventually meets up with the Brazos River. The group that owned the property wanted to know the flow, volume, and salinity of the creek. We were to set-up monitoring at the base of a small valley, near a concrete bridge.

When I lived in Austin, the phrase “Keep Austin Weird” meant to me that Austin was special in a weird, quirky way. And I feel that way about open source, because as a means for expressing one’s self, there’s a project for everything. Seriously, open source hardware is branching into everything from prosthetics, clothing, and drones to dead cats...

One of the most fascinating developments to me is open source. The internet is the ultimate in open source. Everyone considers the internet to be “free,” but the cost is borne by every server that is connected to the internet, and open source is like that. A few make it possible for the unknown many.