Don't get me wrong, I admire the hell out of this. But when you think about it, it's kind of sad that our civilization literally took until 2011 to get this far.

What marvels will the singularity bring us? Claustrophobic computers?

I designed and built the Tesla coils and there came along "The Hacking Gentleman"

The world needs more hacking gentlemen, with a monocle and their own mahogany-panelled laboratory.

Very cool, I really enjoyed listening too BrightArc's coils play music at the San Mateo stop of the faire. Now if you could just direct the beam to where you are pointing you'd be all set :-)

I had a go on this.

It was awesome fun.

It happened on a whim - it was noticed the tesla coils were powered by audio, and we could easily get audio output from a kinect.

Audio? What if instead of kinect, we used a microphone? Maybe voice activated lightnings or a continuous electrical background for your phrases.

A whole new meaning for "thundering voice".

it is driven by pure sine waves -- you can't have polyphony or voice spectra (easily...)

I didn't mean to talk using the lightnings, just to make a background sound. Maybe map to the wave frequency to the speech volume or tone (harder). It would still be sine waves, but sounding slightly different based on the microphone.

An original hack with great (if very geeky) humor. I'm much more interested in Kinect's application in this sort of stuff than in video games.

Extra points for tesla coils, too.

I so want one of these in my basement for those occasional moments when I'm plotting world domination.

World domination is such an ugly term. I prefer to call it world optimization.

It took me a split second to realize why you weren't citing the source.

So this phrase was just adapted into the book? I'm starting to fear you.

Sorry, which book? Feeling like I missed an in-joke here...

Oh yea, I remember that. Everyone should read that!

So uh, adapted into the book?

As in "I'm the mad scientist and I'll write a book containing my evil phrases". For specific definitions of "mad" and "evil", of course.

(Oops, that's the mobile formatted version. Normal version: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...)