Meet A Woman Who Saved Millions of Lives

As I worked on my Inventor Portraits series, I began to realize that it was not shaping up to be very representative of the population. It was mostly a series of white men. The lists and articles that I followed to find inventors were mostly about men, which was frustrating. So I was very happy to discover Esther Takeuchi, who became the 31st inventor in the project.

Esther Takeuchi is a materials scientist and engineer who invented a long-lasting battery for implantable defibrillators, which can prevent certain types of heart attacks. There are approximately 300,000 of these implanted in people per year, which lead to an observation by Barack Obama, as told by Esther:

Esther was lucky to grow up with a father who was an electrical engineer and didn’t see any reason why girls couldn’t also be engineers. So she watched him work, and that sparked her interest. Now she serves as a role model for other women.

When I met her, she was teaching at the University of Buffalo. She told me that women professors in scientific fields are still a minority by far. So I asked her: How many of your current students are female?

“None.”

This lead to some interesting discussion on why the culture of science is more exclusive than inclusive, and why it’s so important that we have a culture of diversity in the sciences. To hear what Esther had to say, watch this video I made with her:

Virtual Oil Painting With Vermillion

There’s a new VR app I’ve been playing with this week that I’m quite enjoying. It’s called Vermillion and it’s an amazingly well done simulation of oil painting in virtual reality.

It dees have some limitations. The paint doesn’t act quite like real paint — you can’t scoop a little roll of paint on the edge of a palette knife, for example — and the export resolution isn’t as high as I would like due to memory limitations. It’s not as easy or as fast as illustrating on an iPad, and so there are a lot of “happy accidents” painting with Vermillion. But it gets a lot right, and the developer is already making improvements based on user feedback.

But most importantly, painting in VR turns out to be very relaxing.

The app has a floating browser where you can play Bob Ross paint-along videos on YouTube. Or you can use it to pull up some music to listen to while you paint, which is what I’ve been doing.

I’m not good enough to want to invest in real paints and canvases that I’d have to find room for, so this is just enough to scratch a creative itch I didn’t know I have.

Here’s a clip of me in the middle of a work in progress I call “Garfield Among The Fruits” (because I learned to draw Garfield when I was 9 and now for some reason he’s pretty much my test subject whenever I’m exploring a new medium):

You can see some of the incredible work people are doing in Vermillion in different styles and sharing on Twitter:

You can even export a 3D model of the painting so you can see the texture of the paint!

Does it feel goofy-as-hell putting on a headset and waving your hands in the air to make virtual art? Sure, but you get over that quickly. The tactile feedback in the controllers makes it feel almost like you’re touching the canvas, and you can believe that you’re really painting.

There are other painting apps in VR. There’s a completely free experience called Brushwork VR that runs in a web browser and is a good entry into VR painting, although it’s not as realistic as Vermillion. There’s an app called Painting VR that looks like it’s distinguishing itself by being more of a “fun” painting app. There’s one called Kingspray Graffiti that simulates painting on large surfaces with spray paint. And there are VR sculpting apps, and apps that let you paint in the air around you.

Vermillion is made by a single indie developer. It costs $20 for either the Quest or PCVR, which for me was $20 well spent!

Did you get this newsletter late? I send it out every other Tuesday at 11:55 AM. But this week I happen to be in a different time zone, and that’s when I noticed that Substack doesn’t ask me what time zone I want to use when I schedule it. So will it send it at 11:55 AM in my usual (Eastern) time zone? Or will it go out at 11:55 AM in my current (Mountain) time zone? I guess we’ll find out. So suspenseful!

David