Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2023 20:35:18 -0700
From: Bret Victor
Subject: Re: CCC talk
One important idea that Shawn mentioned was to explicitly frame the talk as, "we are trying an experimental form of presentation, you are part of the experiment and we'd love your feedback".  (Rather than "behold the dynamic medium of the future", etc.)

(I remember an improv teacher talking about the difference between advertising an "improv demonstration" vs an "improv show".  People who think they're going to a show will adopt a judgmental posture, sitting back with their arms crossed, expecting entertainment, whereas people who think they're seeing a demonstration will feel more like they're on the performer's side, and be more open and accepting,)


On Jul 6, 2023, at 12:52 PM, Shawn Douglas <****************> wrote:

My notes from today's call:

Context

We discussed what context(s) to provide for the audience, starting with the talk outline item "Bret gives a brief background on Dynamicland and what Realtalk is, so people have some idea of what they're looking at." We recognized that it's impossible to convey any full context in an hour, and there's a tradeoff between building a "good" presentation vs building new capabilities. Some ideas that we covered:

- Providing a brief history of computing and context for Realtalk
- How meta should the presentation skew with respect to Realtalk?
- How to presenting the scientific context
  - Precursors to DNA nanotechnology (chemical DNA synthesis, sticky ends)
  - Guided tour of landmark papers (Seeman 1982, Seeman 1993, Rothemund 2006, etc)
  - Live reconstructing conceptual advances using a DNA workspace
    - Start with simple linear DNA, swap in or somehow build more complex primitives 
    - Introduce crossovers, tile-based assembly, DNA origami, while populating the paper timeline
  - Douglas Lab projects and collaborations 
    - Weiner lab: fabricating nanopatterned surfaces to probe cell shape
    - Rapid and scalable long ssDNA synthesis
- Constructing timelines and maps
  - Anything with a date can be added to a timeline
  - The timeline and map should be persistent throughout the talk
  - We could arrange papers into a "tree of evidence" (with projected lines indicating citations)
- Concluding with drawings of the molecular makerspace, to give a glimpse of a possible future


Venue and Logistics

- Photos at https://eoscenter.sfsu.edu/bcc/meeting-spaces
- What does the audience see on the main screen?
  - Overhead view of table (through Realtalk)
  - Front-facing view of the table
  - Over-the-shoulder camera view
- Shawn will contact Debra to plan an in-person visit


New Realtalk capabilities and kits

- RealCam
  - Camera on a cable
  - Small viewfinder screen
  - Luke will investigate camera streaming performance
    - test new portable hardware to upgrade existing NUCs
    - omit decompression steps seen in the console
- Operational papers: documents that fan out "usable" data and models that can be picked up, extended, remixed
- Bringing legacy publications into Realtalk
  - Scanned document recognition 
  - Dot-framed PDFs
  - Paper annotation kit: OCR text and data
  - Managing collections of associated information
    - text, figures, data, code, supplementary materials, cadnano designs


Main event

- Working with mathematical models on the table
- DNA hybridization modeling and predictions based on empirical evidence (SantaLucia)
- DNA looping using worm-like chain mathematical model
- Combining models and design tools
- Reconciling experimental data with models (gel and TEM data from autobreak paper draft)