Last week started on a holiday, but Tuesday-Friday I had my first days on-duty as a "Fellow" at the Metro School ( Read more... )

As promised, selected photos from the 2007 FEH robot competition, plus two short videos ( Read more... )

I've been remiss in posting here lately, even though I've been doing an unsually large amount of stuff that I could write about. As I mentioned a couple posts back, there were a lot of events recently. Just since the beginning of May I heard Jorge Cham of PhD Comics speak on campus, saw a screening of the documentary Helvetica, judged at the ( Read more... )

First, a couple fun links:

Mystery cat takes regular bus to the shops - An article in the Daily Mail about a (lovely) cat which has started riding the bus by himself. This link was sent out by somebody on the Miyazaki/Ghibli mailing list run by Nausicaa.net; after all, Moon/Muta from "Whisper of the Heart" rides the train all by himself, too.

( Read more... )

A bunch of my friends took this personality test, so I figured I would too. I think it ended up way off in a few places, but I think the scheme it's using is sort of interesting. I like to see different attempts to span the space of human personalities. They all have their strong points and weak points...

My Personality

Neuroticism

10
( Read more... )

Sweet christmas! My favorite video game news site, Insert Credit, linked to this Livejournal post with pictures from a COMPLETELY INSANE used game store outside of Tokyo. Its enormity is staggering. I'm sure at least a few of you reading this will be awestruck like I am ( Read more... )

Freshman engineering majors at OSU can enter into a coordinated honors program called FEH where they take some special courses and have a bunch of their classes with the same set of ~150 people so they get to know each other better. In the spring of each year, the FEH students take part in a quarter-long competition to built a robot that will ( Read more... )

Sometime last week windchaser mentioned that she'd been using the satellite photos in Google Maps to look up the houses of friends she had addresses for. This reminded me that I'd been meaning to make a post about Google Earth. It only runs on Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X, but that still encompasses the vast majority of potential users. I first played ( Read more... )

I know I've seen some of these drawings before, but I don't think I ever read through it completely. A group of seventh graders were asked to draw and describe their idea of a scientist both before and after taking a tour of Fermilab and meeting some. It's so touching to see some of the after statements, like "Who knows? Maybe I can be a ( Read more... )

I saw this linked from Slashdot, and it's quite amazing. A "paintbrush" used to paint on a screen, but the bristles are fiberoptic, so it can "pick up" colors or even patterns, or moving patterns, from any object you hold it against. The movie demonstrates a bunch of the capabilities. My favorite is the running toy ladybugs. The movie's about ( Read more... )