“Beautiful Inside and Out” and “Passionate about Standards.” So, why does the advertising page display so poorly in Firefox?
; "Capture from http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Overview.aspx?key=web")
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Overview.aspx?key=web
Fun with Atheism
One of the things I’ve been able to do this year is teach robotics, using the Lego MindStorms NXT system, at the Academy for Science and Design chartered public school, in Merrimack, New Hampshire. I volunteer two mornings a week, and teach two different student groups, numbering about 10 each. Until December, the program focused on FIRST LEGO League, in which we were competing. Since then we have taken up building robots for an intramural robot Sumo competition.
A few weeks ago, we mentioned a requirement of ethical behavior in class. One of the kids pondered, “Why should I care about ethics?”
“Because God requires it,” I replied. (Just because I’m working in a public school, there is no reason to pretend I’m not a Christ-follower. I don’t beat them over the head with it—indeed, it hardly ever comes up—but it is the foundation for my moral beliefs, including why we need to behave in an ethical manner.)
“But I’m an atheist,” claimed the student, “so that doesn’t apply to me.”
“Well, then,” I suggested, “The FLL program requires it; your school requires it; and this class requires it. Will that suffice?”
A few moments later I asked the student, “So, you’re an atheist? Really?”
“Yes.”
“Honest to God?”
“Ye—waaaaaaaaiiiiiiiit a minute.”
We’re still laughing about it.
Glory
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1, ESV)
; "Colliding Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/NGC 4039)")
A sample: colliding Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/NGC 4039)
Check out the 2008 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar; a new HST image will be posted each day through tomorrow.
FIRST LEGO League: We Won!
Since the school year began, I’ve been teaching Lego Robotics two morning’s a week at Isaac’s new school, the Academy for Science and Design Chartered Public School, in Merrimack New Hampshire.
Many of you know I’ve been teaching Lego Robotics twice a week at the Academy for Science and Design, in Merrimack, N.H. As a function of the class, we had two teams competing in the FIRST LEGO League branch of the FIRST Robotics program, founded by Dean Kaman. (See http://www.usfirst.org/community/fll/ .) The ASD is a chartered public school, now in its second year of operation.
At the “MindStorms Madness” qualifying tournament in Merrimack, N.H., on Saturday, the two teams from the ASD came away with three trophies:
The team I officially coach, Robotic Revolution, won first place in the Technical category (Robot design and programming), and will go on to compete at the state competition on December 6 at Nashua South High School.
The other team I taught (but did not officially coach) won 2nd place in Technical, and got the top score during the seeding matches. (Sadly, they were eliminated in the finals.)
The photos from the slide show above are available here on PicasaWeb.
I’ll update this post with more details about the team and the event sometime in the next day or two.
Amazing Worldwide (Web) Updates
In a typical day, I come across many fascinating things that aren’t exactly well known. This is a list of things which interest me, and probably does not reflect interest in the general population. Of course, thinking about that alone is of interest to me, so … (Ah, recursion!)
Cyborgs Are Real
Way cool neuroscience.
Gizmodo Goes to Lego
Far more here than I could summarize, including a video tour of the Lego factory.
Star Wars is Nearer than You Think
Actually, Star Wars weapons fire charges of ionized Tibanna gas, but you’ll get the idea.
Microsoft 3D Modeler
And you thought everything from Microsoft was evil.
The Large Hadron Collider Rap
Almost as good as “White and Nerdy.”
ShapeWays 3D modeling
These aren’t quite replicators, but affordable 3D “printing” is now at our disposal.
Marketing and Stop Signs
What happens when the marketing department designs a stop sign? (Software and graphics design often go this way.)
The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer
Gamers will understand the reference. Others may learn something.
Keeper of the Star Wars Canon
Imagine having to hold the continuity of a universe together single-handedly. (Well, it helps to have some database skills.)
The Mythbusters Weren’t Allowed to Bust This.
What “the man” doesn’t want you to know about RFID.
I have Joined the Dharma Initiative.
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I Have Decided to Become President
What do you think of, “Grow up, you babies!” as a campaign slogan?
Why Is Programming Fun?
A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
That particular essay, and probably several others, is worthy of a separate discussion; but one Frederick Brooks eloquently expresses has been on my mind for several years.
To be honest, I love my job. (Now, this isn’t to say I wouldn’t rather be paid to travel the world, build with Lego, or quest in World of WarCraft.) I can’t think of anything I’d rather do as a career than be a programmer, except maybe astronaut or Supreme Dictator of the Western Hemisphere. I had been mulling over exactly why this is for a very long time. Frederick P. Brooks has expressed what I feel far more eloquently than I believe I am able:
The Joys of the Craft
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepearing nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
I also loved the way Brooks closes his preface: “Soli Deo gloria—To God alone be glory.” This isn’t a perspective one generally finds in books about software.
(Excerpt from Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)
Luke … I am Your Arm
Not much I need to say, but you absolutely must see these amazing videos of what Dean Kamen is cooking up.
The Wii Fit / Whee Fit
Again attacking the stereotype that video games are for people who only wish to exercise their fingers, Pretendo® began preorders for its Wheeâ„¢ Fit home exercise product, just in time for Mother’s Day. Get Fit and have Fun with this latest home fitness device for the Pretendo® Wheeâ„¢!
; "Nichelle is very happy with her Whee Fit")
Nichelle Wilcox, a personal fitness trainer and Mom in Nashua, N.H., loves her Wheeâ„¢ Fit!
; "The Whee Fit")
Enjoy these thrilling exercises:
Thank you for choosing the Whee™ Fit exercise peripheral from Pretendo®, for use with your Pretendo® game system.
Enjoy the following exciting exercises (we recommend starting with Dialing Panic, shown on page 2):
Snowboarding (core muscles, legs)
Play your favorite snowboarding game while standing on your Wheeâ„¢ Fit. Imagine the thrill of controlling the onscreen movements via your
Wheeâ„¢ Fit device.
Basic Balance (core muscles)
Close your eyes and try to balance on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit.
Advanced Balance (core muscles, cardio)
Close your eyes and try to balance on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit while in the middle of a busy freeway.
Shower Power (core muscles)
Close your eyes and try to balance on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit while taking a shower.
Advanced Shower Power (core muscles, cardio)
Close your eyes and try to balance on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit while atop a tall hill during a thunderstorm.
Bumper Jumper (hands and fingers)
While standing on your Wheeâ„¢ Fit, grasp the rear bumper or side mirror of a vehicle stopped at an intersection. The Wheeâ„¢ Fit will score points for each second you remain gripping the vehicle. If you hear the sound of approaching sirens, discontinue use.
Advanced Bumper Jumper (hands and fingers)
While standing on your Wheeâ„¢ Fit, grasp the rear bumper or side mirror of a vehicle as it enters the freeway onramp. The Wheeâ„¢ Fit will score points for each second you remain gripping the vehicle. If you hear the sound of approaching sirens, discontinue use. Game ends if an arrest is made.
Push ’em Up (arms, chest, and shoulders)
Place the Wheeâ„¢ Fit in front of you on the floor, and use it as a platform for performing push ups.
Advanced Push ’em Up (arms, chest, and shoulders)
Place the Wheeâ„¢ Fit in front of you on the floor, and use it as a platform for performing one-handed push ups.
Super Advanced Push ’em Up (neck and tongue)
Place the Wheeâ„¢ Fit in front of you on the floor, and use it as a platform for performing push ups with your tongue.
Press Stress (arms, chest, and shoulders)
While lying face up on the floor, grip the Wheeâ„¢ Fit in both hands, and press it up toward the ceiling.
Advanced Press Stress (arms, chest, and shoulders)
While lying face up on the floor, place a small child on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit device. While gripping the Wheeâ„¢ Fit in both hands, press it up toward the ceiling.
Super Advanced Press Stress (arms, chest, and shoulders)
While lying face up on the floor, place a small automobile on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit device. While gripping the Wheeâ„¢ Fit in both hands, press it up toward the ceiling.
Mallet Fun (arms and shoulders)
Using a 3-pound sledgehammer, strike the Wheeâ„¢ Fit directly in the middle. Try for 100 reps!
Luge Run (arms and shoulders)
Lay down on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit, and use your arms to propel yourself across the floor.
Advanced Luge Run (arms and shoulders)
Lay down on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit, and use your arms to propel yourself down a steep hill.
Super Advanced Luge Run (arms and shoulders, cardio)
Lay down on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit, and use your arms to propel yourself down a steep hill that bottoms out onto a freeway.
Luge Flight (arms and shoulders, cardio)
Lay down on the Wheeâ„¢ Fit, and use your arms to propel yourself down a steep hill that terminates in a ski jump.
Dialing Panic (fingers, cardio)
Using an ordinary telephone, practice dialing 9-1-1 and describing the current situation to the friendly emergency operator.
Yes, folks, this is what we gave Nichelle for Mother’s Day, along with a promise to buy her a real Wii Fit when they were available.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
While I am working on posts about “The Weaker Vessel,” and “Verbal/Emotional Abuse” (and looking into how a ‘bot hacked my BLOG files to include hidden Spam links), here’s a bit to get you thinking:
Clay Shirky published a lightly edited transcript of his speech at a recent Web 2.0 conference, entitled, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.”
You will definitely want to read the whole post, but here are a few noteworthy excerpts:
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
How much television do we watch?
[H]ow big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
This reminds me, I was listening to “This American Life,” episode 328, “What I Learned from Television.” In a live broadcast, Ira Glass announces to the audience that average Americans watch 29 hours of television a week. There is a loud, collective gasp from the audience, which is composed of course, of not merely NPR listeners, but NPR listeners who paid to go out and see a live presentation of the radio program. Twenty-nine hours is the average? Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about playing World of WarCraft.
As Shirky writes,
In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of WarCraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something.
But I digress.
As I write this, our pastor is speaking on “Reflections from the Back of a Bike,” noting how we prefer to ride in a car metaphorically driven by the pastor, instead of providing our own power on a bicycle, comparing the early church’s prayer to “speak the Word of God with boldness” as recorded in Acts 4:29 to our typical prayers of, well, whatever; of how we fail to really act on our belief in an Almighty God and actually serve Him with actions, every hour of our lives. How we need to embrace the mission of Christ and actually do something to reflect what we say we believe.
To be honest, I have heard many such sermons over the years, but this one is different. It’s Scriptural. It isn’t designed to evoke an emotional response. Its success won’t be measured by the number of people who raise their hands or “go forward” to the altar. Its success will, rather, be measured by how we let Christ give us boldness to use our associations and talents and burdens to change others’ lives. It’s real. It’s a reflection of how he actually lives in following Christ.
And the Word of God convicts me, that I ought to be so focused.
P.S.: Shirky makes some fascinating conclusions based on analyses of both current society and the Industrial Revolution, getting into such subjects as cognitive surplus, shared information projects, and participatory media. It’s one of the few must-read pieces I’ve encountered in the past year. He wraps up with a look into this gem (which in this context of excerpts seems disconnected, but in reality is not):
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Moondust and Duct Tape
This story about duct tape use on the moon was simply too good to pass up on cross-posting.
[I]n [the] Taurus-Littrow [valley, in the Sea of Serenity, on the moon] a missing fender was a potential disaster. The reason is moondust. When a rover rolls across the lunar surface, it kicks up a plume of moondust in its wake. (Astronauts called them “rooster tails.”) Without a fender, the rover would be showered by a spray of dark, abrasive grit. White spacesuits blackened by dust could turn into dangerous absorbers of the fierce lunar sun with astronauts overheating inside. Sharp-edged dust wiped off visors would scratch the glass, making helmets difficult to see out of. Moondust also had an uncanny way of working itself into hinges, latches and joints, rendering them useless.
; "Duct tape in use on the fender of the Apollo 17 lunar buggy.")
Cernan: “And I hate to say it, but I’m going to have to take some time to try … to get that fender back on. Jack, is the tape under my seat, do you remember?” (He’s referring to a roll of ordinary, gray duct tape.)