14 Nov 2025
Tom Jennings
I didn't even know I made videos, yet here they are. Not exactly a prodigious rate, probably averages out to one every two years. Video is not my medium. I hate youtube.
I have a bad habit of making these large-ish complex projects, and when they are complete, sort of losing interest in them. I am beginning to go back and update the documentation (which I'm oddly thorough about) and put them on the web. All of the devices I made still work, 25 years on.
There are more videos, including three hours of public access TV I did out of Tucson AZ around 1998. Now those are cringe...
This video shows the Atomic Number Generator in operation. The video was made with a handheld 2007-vintage camcorder thingie with no smoothing like every phone has now so it's a bit jittery. In a decade or so I'll get around to fixing it or making another video.
This was video taken during a research project road trip to New Mexico. I had a huge document listing all known small, "entrepreneur" amateur uranium mines and was attempting to visit them; but of course 60, 70 years has past, most were impossible to find, roads change, and much of it was and is still private property.
The video here is of the Homestake Mining Company's old uranium milling site, which is now an active Superfund Site. It's nearly impossible to grasp the scale of things here; if you look closely you can see ants on that mound, with the water spray; those ants are huge 10-wheel earth movers. The mill and surrounds was bulldozed into a gigantic pile, and is being covered in soil; the water keeps the dust down. Needless to say everything in and under the pile is radioactive, and the dust is a good way to inhale alpha particle emitting metals. This is in the middle of native lands, of course. And tremendous amounts of water are being used, in a state without any large sources of palatable water. But it's arguably better that this is being done, than not. I do not know.
This is the 21-minute, short version, clipped from the full 90 minute original, which played at ISEA 2012 in Albuquerque NM. The faint text in the upper left is the contents of the book, "Table of Isotopes", Wiley and sons, 1996, 8th edition, 3200 pages in two volumes. Very pricey indulgence, it came with a CDROM of the book contents. The TOI (as it's known) is a breathtaking human endeavor, as science can be: a hundred years old, thousands of contributors from around the world, and the data is all free (printing costs money).
I took the video on a cold, blustery day, aside my parked Rambler station wagon and took a couple hours of this ambient video. Much later back home, that video loaded into Quicktime on a Macintosh computer, and drag-and-dropped the gigantic TOI PDF file onto it, and Quicktime turned each PDF page into a video frame.
Brett Doar and I built this Wilderness Machine, to accompany an Arcade Fire performance tour, in 2010. We put ourselves in the position of fixing up someone else's failure... but we got it built and running from nothing (flat sheets of metal and a hand-waved ideas) in eight weeks.
Here's Chris Milk's Wilderness Machine page.
There was a web component, a site that turned mouse drawing in a window into "turtle graphics" (a list of simple X,Y data points) into ball point pen motion on pre-cut post cards. A reverse-notation G-code interpreter drove the pen. The web app made a daily collection of postcard drawings, delivered to the Machine via USB stick.
A robot hand picked a blank card from a stack, carried it to a platen, the pen then drew what the the person scratched with the mouse. The pen handling is tricker than you'd think, there is force feedback to deal with because ballpoint pens are sloppy and the cards were very rough and lumpy, being embedded with seeds (you could plant the cards in the earth and the allgedly grew; I did not test.)
We relied heavily on those RC servo type things, which are a convenient but sketchy technology, not always reliable, but time being of the essence we made them work.
The completed cards were delivered to the audience using two robot arms, to get over the safety enclosure; the final arm we called the Ricky Jay, after that guy who could probably kill you by throwing playing cards at you. Our arm pales in comparison...
This video was taken in my lab probably minutes before it was dragged out to where the cabinet was built around it (literally adjacent to the truck to load it to the show).
Operation ARGUS was shockingly sloppy project to insert a large quantity of relativistic electrons up into the then-recently-discovered Van Allen radiation belt encircling the earth. The nominal goal was to test the effectiveness of Soviet exploitation of the Van Allen belt to cause widespread radio blackouts. So of course the Americans need to do this first.
They ultimately detonated a nuclear device in the upper atmosphere, and it did encircle the earth, and caused nake-eye visible aurora at points in the sky on the opposite side (sic) of the earth. My father saw this; he commuted from Franklin Mass. to Boston for work, did so on his 1960 Honda 125cc twin road bike, and saw the strange lights at 4AM.
Anyway they had no idea what they are doing -- you can see this for yourself as they attempt to wrestle some inappropriate missile into working, going so far as to bolt stabilizing fins onto the rocket to get it stable enough to fly, after losing at least one overboard. With nuclear device attached. Into the ocean.
The source of these videos -- in five parts as required by Youtube.com, which had a 10-minute play time upload limit in those earliest years, before they were bought by Google -- were tapes I purchased from the DOE in Nevada, that offered DOE-made 16mm films for copy cost (like $10 each) transferred to VHS. I still have a drawer of them; they were all later made available for download. I assume they still are. These films are all public domain.
These files are terrible. They are all far too long, and that scary dead-like narrator doesn't help. But the shipboard antics, if you pay attention and read between the lines it's obvious that they're under some pressure to deliver, and are winging it. Both dropping nukes into the drink and the "success" of spraying poisonous metals into the atmosphere are, frankly, insane.
Operation ARGUS, part 1 of 5.
Operation ARGUS, part 2 of 5.
Operation ARGUS, part 3 of 5.
Operation ARGUS, part 4 of 5.
Operation ARGUS, part 5 of 5.