JONATHAN LANSEY


I am the founder of Loud Bicycle, a research engineer at Aptima, an Awesome Foundation trustee, and a LanseyBrothers blogger.
I made this site to document a few personal projects, feedback is welcome.

PROJECTS

Loud Bicycle horn Thanks to 600 backers on Kickstarter, I'll be manufacturing bicycle horns that sound like car horns. Dec, 2012
Alt text
Faster to get there by bike? Demonstration that it is faster to get places in Boston by bicycle. Involved scraping ~1.4 Million Google Maps queries. March, 2013
Alt text
Concatenatez A fun website - just for the fun of it. Also good practice for php, jscript & css. April, 2013
Alt text
Awesome Foundation data crunch Curve fitting and a topic model I've made with/for the 21K+ grant applications we have in our database as well as information about which projects we have funded. August, 2012
Alt text
3D time-lapse Northern lights 3-D time lapse video from the ISS. Used edge detection to increase the contrast and improve the 3D effect. July, 2012
Alt text
Interactive museum exhibit of Boston waterworks Demonstrates both the history and the physics of how Boston gets clean water, built for the visitors of the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. December 08, 2011
Alt text
A grocery bag made from plastic bags Both recycled a lot of plastic shopping bags and simultaneously removed the need to get any more of them. Feb, 2011
Alt text
TV becomes a solar cooker Frying eggs with the sun and the Fresnel lens of an old TV. June, 2012
Alt text
Art with machine learning Some art created using the K-Means unsupervised learning algorithm, inspired by Andrew Ng. Jan, 2012
Alt text
Art with power spectrum estimation While tweaking a power spectra algorithm for work I found a way to generate some art. 2009
Alt text
Results of blind wine tasting This is why you should probably skip expensive wine. Jan, 2012
Alt text
How long it takes to get to work I recorded how long it took me to drive to work for 3 months. See the graph and frank discussion. April, 2011
Alt text
Single pendulum harmonograph Inspired by a bench swing I designed and built an pendulum apparatus to draw art. I derived the equations to explain the motion and compared results. 2003
Alt text
Party hosted on the Boston Subway Hosted the "Boston (T) Party" on the MBTA green line in an effort to warm the T atmosphere and facilitate connections between strangers who ride the T together each day. 2009
Alt text
Arches igloos and snow caves Below are a few examples of my efforts to make arches and domes out of ice, snow, toilet paper and chairs. 2000-2011
Alt text
Social snow-path-making How far out of their way will people walk in order to stay on the path? Real-world experiments. Winter, 2010
Alt text
View camera tricks A demonstration of the neat Focusing abilities of a modern view camera with a tilt-shift lens 2008
Alt text
Mechanical 3-way light switch Built several 3-way light switches over the years to workaround poor architecting. 2004-2012
Alt text
Lamp dimmer from a coke bottle Two hangers, duct tape and a coke bottle became a variable dimmer for my Styrofoam dishware lamp. 2003
Alt text
Catenary demonstration experiment A hands-on demonstration I conceived to demonstrate some amazing properties of hyperbolic cosine. First performed for the NJIT mathclub. 2006
Alt text
Paternoster video Short video of new students testing out a rare and exciting Paternoster lift, ~250k views. 2006
Alt text
No hot ashes gallery To combat the cross-cultural urge to throw Hot Ashes in with the garbage, trash cans worldwide are prominently labeled "No Hot Ashes" in the native language. 2007-Present
Alt text
Magic Eye stereographs Some Magic Eye stereographs I made with MS-Paint and Matlab. 2004
Alt text
Magnet levitation above superconductor Organized a superconductor magnet levitation demonstration for the the NJIT Mathclub. 2006
Alt text
Physical model for river erosion Built a physical model river erosion with my brothers to demonstrate how snaking formations develop. It worked! 2005
Alt text
Handmade hammock I got this crazy idea one summer that I could make a string hammock from scratch; then I built a frame and made the hammock. 2004
Alt text
Fun with Fractals Some art generated by my Matlab to draw fractals. 2006
Alt text
The minute hand fell off; so I fixed it This clock is a physical representation of a Demetri Martin joke. 2009
Alt text
Foucault's pendulum bowling ball My friend Ike and I built a working Foucault's pendulum in a stairwell at NJIT. It was an official NJIT mathclub event 2005
Alt text
Mechanical drawing of the leaning tower of Pisa I learned the geometry of point projection to draw the Leaning Tower of Pisa. 2002
Alt text
Bus reflection sketch A pencil drawing of a bus reflected in a store window. 2002
Alt text
Model bike out of wire A bike out of wire, made with pliers. Turning the pedals turned the wheel. 1998
Alt text
Frozen coke bottle experiment A coke bottle filled with water then frozen produced some interesting results. 2003
Alt text
Graphing in point perspective A quick experiment using equations to plot functions in point projection, made while learning mechanical drawing. 2003
Alt text
Tracking satellites across a map Plotting the path of satellite and the line between day and night. 2005
Alt text