Author: AMH

Roving Mars

By AMH

I have been doing a lot of reading about robots this summer in preparation for a couple of classes I am teaching in the fall. The most recent selection I finished off, which I don’t intend to use in any course but thought might be good for background, was Roving Mars by Steve Squyers, the principle scientist for the current Mars rover missions with Spirit and Opportunity. I thought this might be a slightly dry but informative read. In fact, the book was quite engaging. While there is a ton of detail about the rovers and what they do, the … Continue reading Roving Mars

ISS Sightings

By AMH

I somehow hadn’t realized that the International Space Station was visible from Earth, but it is, particularly if you are at an angle to catch the sun’s reflection of its solar panels. NASA has a tool to help you figure out when the ISS or the shuttle will be overhead wherever you are – use the “Sighting Opportunities” pull-down menu on the left-hand side to select exactly the town you are in for a list of times and how long it will be visible over the next couple of weeks.

Math as Art

By AMH

A Mathematician’s Lament was Slashdotted weeks ago, but I finally sat down and read my way through the whole thing. Lockhart, a math professor who returned to elementary and high school math education, writes about the fundamental flaws he sees in how we approach teaching math, particularly at the youngest levels. He opens with two stories that describe in his view what music and art education would be like if they were taught in the same way math is taught: I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint. “Oh we don’t … Continue reading Math as Art

The Megastore killed the Traveliing Salesman

By AMH

I spent a fair bit of time not only reading the content of this weblog post applying Traveling Salesman to the transportation of produce, but also the extensive comments. The idea is that one hears people say that locally grown produce has less of an environmental impact, but when you consider the transportation of food for all people, you probably ought to be minimizing the fuel spent across the entire community, which may not be the same as minimizing the fuel spent to get food to a single individual. Essentially – that distribution centers add fuel efficiency. I think it … Continue reading The Megastore killed the Traveliing Salesman

25 Years of Falling Blocks

By AMH

I love the Google logo for the day – not just because it looks great, but because it kept me from missing Tetris’s 25th birthday. Like, well, everybody I remember losing hours and hours to playing Tetris. I remember exactly where I first played it – in the summer of 1990 I was at the PA Governor’s School for the Sciences on the CMU campus, and Tetris was installed on the computers at the tiny computer cluster just down the hill from our dorm. It was an odd little computer cluster, shoehorned into a storefront space next to a laundromat … Continue reading 25 Years of Falling Blocks

Robots will kill them all!

By AMH

Science fiction sometimes seems to simply pick between whether it is the robots or the aliens who are going to kill us all, so it is refreshing to see a headline warning us that the robots are killing the aliens. It is actually not a particularly fear-mongering story though. Instead, it is a nice article talking about how the fact that there is has been a complete lack of any organic found on Mars is in fact odd given the likelihood of transfer by asteroids or comets. This had let scientists to speculate that the perchlorates on Mars, when heated, … Continue reading Robots will kill them all!

Not nearly as cute as Aibo

By AMH

I defy you to watch this video of a, sort of, robot dog and not be creeped out: I have only heard of the uncanny valley being applied to people, but this has that same feel of being just natural enough as to be disturbing. In the first shot of the thing walking up the hill I wasn’t entirely convinced it wasn’t some poor real dog with a few artificial legs. It’s an impressive feat of engineering though – watch through to where it gets kicked while trying to walk on ice. The recovery it goes through to avoid falling … Continue reading Not nearly as cute as Aibo

Not really a recipe

By AMH

I have been trying to get into the habit of taking a real lunch to work with me, and making up a batch of brown rice for the week that I can top with stuff seemed like a good idea – it would be filling and easy to throw together in the morning. Unfortunately, while I know brown rice is much better for me than white, I have not yet come around to liking the taste as much. So I decided I needed to make something aggressive enough to put on brown rice, while still being compatible with its flavor. … Continue reading Not really a recipe

Yeah but assignment operators are cheap…

By AMH

Coding Horror is often fun, and a good read, particularly for aspiring techies who want an inside glimpse of some of the details that would make up your life if you pursue that path. But when I read Jeff’s post on spaces versus tabs in code formatting I both cracked up and immediately thought of one of my Data Structures students who has to reformat any piece of code he is given before he starts working with it. With my students deep into their team projects, I wonder if they are running into the conflict that Jeff claims is inevitable: … Continue reading Yeah but assignment operators are cheap…

My Body My Data

By AMH

Medical databases are one of the huge trends in IT right now, and there are a lot of people looking at how to make national, integrated personal medical information databases a reality. There are also a lot of people looking at the special requirements for accuracy and privacy when building such databases. I like this person’s comments, from a patient’s perspective, on the importance of sharing ownership of the records with the patient. The comments were triggered by someone commenting that they signed up for Google Health and found it to be a combination of inaccurate and with troubling omissions … Continue reading My Body My Data