Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
This has been around for a while, but a browse around The Invisible Library is always fun. They’re creeping up on having 3000 fictional books – that is, books that only exist within the world of other pieces of fiction – listed. I wonder if there are any meta-invisible books – books which only exist within the story of invisible books?
Yes, it’s been slashdotted, but Google Moon is still cool (be sure to zoom in all the way). However, the Google toy that you must play with is Google Earth. You have to download their tool and it’s only working on PCs so far, but it’s even more amazing than their description suggests. You can get driving directions overlayed on a satellite map, and then watch a zoom-through simulation of the route. There’s not just pan, zoom, and rotate, but also tilt capabilities. Within the US, but not all other countries, it will label the roads on the image, point … Continue reading Satellite Surfing
The hot place to be on the web this week is the AAAI-05 Blog being maintained by students at this year’s national conference on artificial intelligence. Full of deep thoughts and robot pictures and speaker controversy and bitching about the beds at the nearby college dorms. Slap a nametag on your shirt and it’s just like being there! Seriously, I am having a good time at the conference, and it’s jump starting some ideas I had floating around in my brain that got pushed to the side by classes. It’s also nice to see some old friends from grad school, … Continue reading Window on AI
Summers are all about projects – like robot building! While I understand the theory of electronics, I’ve done very little hands on, and I have a mediocre intuition for it, so this is a good learning experience for me. Nothing too ambitious going on here, we’re just following along with the instructions for building a line-following robot from Cook’s Robot Building for Beginners. Here are some photos of the prototyping process to date: To start, we have just a simple switch on the breadboard to connect the battery to the buses and light an LED when the power is on … Continue reading Robots at Home