Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Vixens, and Ceremonial Running Shoes

Wow... an entire month without adding to my blog. I have
an excuse! I was working like a maniac on the final draft
of a paper for
CADE-20
in Tallinn, Estonia. I was then in Banff for
a math conference,

Densest Packing of Spheres
. Tom Hales and Sam Furguson
were both there. I met
Noam Elkies .
While all his
mathematical, musical and chess accomplishments were
astonishing, my favorite trick was when
and he showed me how he could whistle and hum at the same
time... different voices of Bach fugues!.

Now I'm back in Pittsburgh, for about 10 days. I'm off
to Yellowstone with Barnaby and then home with my family for
a week. Why does the summer feel like it's almost over?
It's not even June.

I spent the last couple days putting my neglected cd
collection in my computer. I found a bunch of stuff I
hadn't heard for years that I forgot I love (the Bernstein
Mahler set), and some
things I owned but never listened to. One of these
is Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen. Amazing little
opera! This discovery alone repaid my work tenfold.

Here's an IM conversation I had recently. It made
me laugh.

"Do you have tennis/running shoes?"
"ummmm, yes but no"
"huh"
"i do but...they're more symbolic than anything"
"We could go running... with your symbolic running shoes"
"we could, but we will not. They're ceremonial"







Saturday, May 21, 2005

Attn: B.F. Skinner fans

(They couldn't resist the last sentence...)

"The latest issue of Make Magazine volume 2 from O'Reilly publishing has an article on a cockroach controlled robot. Roboticist Garnet Hertz has mounted a Giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroach that drives a small mobile robot around by walking on top of a Kensington trackball. There is a row of proximity sensor triggered LEDs that shine light in the roach's eyes, making him steer the robot since roaches instinctively avoid light. Garnet's web page 'Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine' details the project with several images of the roach in action. Debugging the project is inherently impossible."