I just stumbled upon Breck Baldwin in McCarren Park in Brooklyn. He had a flying
machine in his hand.
AskaNewYorker: Hi, how are you? What’s going on here?
Breck: Hey, what’s up?
Ask a New Yorker: You tell me.
Breck: I’m holding a giant gamete in my hand, a giant sperm that I’m
going to fly at Burning Man this year.
It’s an animated night flying object that will be the only thing in the
night sky seeking an ovum, an egg. It’s about four feet long and ways
1.3 kilos and has, what do you figure, an eighteen inch head on it? It’s
illuminated from the inside with LED’s with an L wire squirrelly tail
on the end. It’s going to be quite something out there.
Ask a New Yorker: A big sperm. How are your sperm doing?
Breck: Safely contained. Thank you very much.
Ask a New Yorker: Where do you live in the city?
Breck: I live on 26 street and 2nd Ave. But my office is in Williamsburg.
Ask a New Yorker: What kind of work do you do?
Breck: I have a small software company and we do a bunch of research for The
National Institute for Health and we are interested in trying to find better
ways for people to access information, particularly biological researchers.
Ask a New Yorker: Sounds interesting. Tell us some more about the research.
Breck: The company does a sub field of artificial intelligence called computational
linguistics also natural language processing, text analytics. Text data mining…all
kinds of little catch phrases. And what we try to do is model or emulate human
language processing capabilities, except on a computer. The idea is that if
we can get some deeper understanding of what the text is, more than like what
Google offers, let’s say, in a key word search, then we can do more advanced
extraction of information of presentation of information in our case medical
researchers. We also do a lot of work for Wall Street.
Ask a New Yorker: So what do you think of all these new condos springing up
everywhere?
Breck: Well, I’m kind of to blame. I moved the company into this artist
space 3-4 years ago. Artists couldn’t afford it any more but I could as
a software company. Now I’m getting a little annoyed other people are
moving in, hell I did it. What am I going to do?
Live by the sword die by the sword.
Ask a New Yorker: Tell us more about the giant sperm?
Breck: If I get this thing flying I’ll be super happy. It’s quite
the challenge. As you saw in my test flight I didn’t quite achieve critical
velocity to gain some altitude, but next time around.
Ask a New Yorker: What’s up with your wallet? It looks like it would
glow in the dark.
Breck: Everybody loves it except my girlfriend. But she is swayed by the crushing
hipness as it’s assessed by others. I had a nice little all sleek moss
brown wallet that I had and I lost it in my apartment. It just fell out of my
pocket. I went and replaced the credit cards and everything. And there I found
it under the chair and I resolved from then on…well I saw this wallet
and I won’t be losing this one in the apartment.
Ask a New Yorker: You’re styling.
Breck: I’ve got a software company, an airplane and a girlfriend, pretty
complete.
Ask a New Yorker: Where did you go to school?
Breck: I went to The University of Pennsylvania, where I got my doctorate,
and then went to Hampshire College before then for my undergraduate, where I
got really well trained. A freak out university but an excellent education if
you can manage it. I don’t know. I went to a fancy prep school. Dearfield.
Ask a New Yorker: That’s the prep school where the book A Separate
Peace was based, I think, maybe not.
Breck: That’s the one where he died from breaking his leg or arm from
like some weird disease, and I was always afraid of having a broken something
on me.
Ask a New Yorker: I’ve broken both arms and legs, though not at the same
time. Active child. My parents thought I had brittle bones…Have you broken
anything?
Breck: Heart. Maybe my finger. Do you want to look at my retard finger? See,
that’s as straight as it gets. I’ve been told I must have broken
it during some tree skiing.
