I didn’t take many pictures on my New York trip, but I managed to snap a few interesting ones. One of the first things we saw in the city was this marquee. Todd had lots of fun at the MOMA, but I think he only looked at maybe 5 things while we were there. We had to tear him away. Central Park was pretty, and there were lots of people boating on the lake, and a barefoot musician with a guitar case overflowing with cash. We ate in Little Italy the day before the World Cup, and it was pretty crowded. The fried mozzarella there was excellent. We were in Little Italy because we wanted to walk around China town, and Little Italy is totally surrounded by China town. We had about an hour before our train left, so at the last minute we decided to run up to Times Square to check it out at night. It was a mad house, and was kind of a crappy way to end the day. But on teh bright side, I saw a Venture Brothers billboard across the street and snapped a picture. That must be costing Adult Swim a pretty penny, I hope it pays off for VB, because this season has been really good so far.

Best use of a disclaimer award, 2006

I’ll post Philly pics tomorrow. I apologize again for the lame cell phone pictures. This was the library/waiting room on the ground floor of the building I taught in. My building was East Pyne, and it was gorgeous. (You can’t see their faces, they could be anybody.) Thats my TA up at the front of the room. You probably can’t tell unless you squint your eyes, but this was during one of our many Heidegger lectures. You can just make out ready-to-hand and present-at-hand on the right, and some stuff about Nietzsche on the left. This was the fancy room we met the parents in on the first day. The picture doesn’t do the room justice whatsoever; it felt like walking into the UN. Each of those chairs are real leather . Here’s some more architecture from Princeton: Drinking on campus was sparse, and we had to make due with what was around. I visited two local bars, one pricey brewery called Triumph: And one local pub called Ivy Inn, that was a trashy frat hang out and smelled of puke and was playing “Sweet Child of Mine” as we walked in. And here are the infamous Tejas pictures. This was on the last Wednesday, I believe, when I finally had enough time to hang with the TAs. Tejas decided we needed a quick lesson in fencing. She fell down after each lunge, got back up, and insisted she could do it without falling. At which point she lunged again and fell back down. I was personally hitting the Old Granddad

Here are the rest of the pictures from the DC trip. After the White house, and walking past the hilarious Office of Thrift Supervision, we walked across the street to the Washington Memorial, which is huge and positioned nicely on the tops of a small hill that looks back over the rest of DC. The White House is dwarfed in the skyline, and the capital building sits majestically down the road. On the other side, towards the river, sit all the monuments, and flocks of tourists. The building was just too big to get in a single shot on my crappy cell phone, so I didn’t even try. In this particular shot, I tried to time it so that the low-flying jets overhead looks as if they were about to crash into the obelisk, but I snapped it half a a second too late. The shot you often see, of the reflecting pool mirroring the memorial, is deceptive. Its a good 200 yards between the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool, with the WWII memorial crammed in between. It was a serious trek to get to the other side, and we were already pretty tired. You can see the capitol building way off in the distance where we started. Directly on the other side of the reflecting pool, however, was the Lincoln Memorial, which Todd insisted we see. You have to remember, Todd is at least a decade older than me, but the cult of celebrity surrounding our 16th president made the poor Illinois boy push ahead. The Lincoln memorial was clearly the tourist hotspot, and there were at least a hundred people resting on the steps outside the building. Around the corner were a few more monuments, including the Vietnam memorial, which I though was really well designed and […]

So I’ve complained about the Lancaster site to a lot of people, but its hard to tie it down to a particular example that really gets across how annoying this place is. But maybe this will drive the point home: The instructional staff here has referenced Simpsons episodes in nearly every conversation I’ve had with any of them. That in itself isn’t horrible- it is exactly the reason I defend pop culture, after all. But what is horrible is that every one of these references begins with the question, “Do you watch The Simpsons?” It makes me want to bash someone’s skull in.

In case you haven’t been keeping up, all the interesting stuff is going down on the HTEC page right now. I’ll probably stay there until I return to Illinois, when I can fix the formatting issues on this page and get back to my regular posting schedule. Until then, there is plenty of robot stuff on HTEC to satisfy your inner robot enthusiast.

I’ve been working like a dog this whole week, and though its been rewarding, I needed a break. I definitely didn’t need to hang out with a bunch of high schoolers on a Saturday night, during their 80’s-themed party and Goonies viewing. So I called up Todd and arranged to meet him down in Baltimore for the weekend. Shawn apparently ditched town to go to a wedding, so he and I drove around downtown Baltimore to Fells Point to go drinking with a bunch of sauced up east coast types. The next morning, we planned to go into D.C. to check it out, since it was only a 40 minute Amtrak ride away and neither of us had been before. The Amtrak website quoted us $23 dollars round trip, but somehow it ended up costing over 40. Since we took the shuttle out to Penn Station, we were basically stranded in Baltimore (not the best place to be stranded), so we went for it. Here’s Penn station: It has one of them old-timey schedule boards that rotates around to display gate numbers and such, which was kind of neat. The station was fairly quaint all around. Outside the station is this monstrostiy: We saw it coming back from drinking the night before, but didn’t know what the building was for. It was a surprise to see it coming off the shuttle. Union Station, on the other hand, was fancy as all get out. As you can see, there is construction going on outside the building. Apparently all of D.C. is under construction to some degree or other. It was especially bad at the capitol building, which was almost entirely devoid of tourists. The place was completely empty, which was surprising only a few days before the 4th. These pictures don’t […]

Ok, I’m back, and I’m blogging my heart out. To prove it, I made this entire post through my PDA. That’s right, shitty cell phone pics and everything. I am currently bound to my PDA, since my room here at Princeton does not currently have the internet. I feel like half a man. I was planning on making this post yesterday, but T-Mobile wont allow a PDA to view on line photo albums, so I was stuck with no way to access the pics. And, since I had been up for about 50 hours at that point, I didn’t have the heart to make a half-assed pictureless post. But today is the day, my friend, today is the day. I just realized that I can beam a picture from my cell to my pda via infrared. I made this discovery today, and it is one of the most exciting discoveries I have made in my adult life. So this is Princeton:www.http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/pics/prince.jpg At least, its one of the buildings here. Lots of fancy architecture. Lots of stairs. Lots of other summer camps running around at the moment, including an small army of sports camp kids I have to share a dorm cafeteria with, and this fun little group: This weekend is instructor orientation and training. Our students don’t arrive until Sunday afternoon, and I begin teaching on Monday. I’ve seen the room I’m teaching in, and it is rather impressive. Wood paneled walls, padded seats, the works. I didn’t take pictures (I hadn’t made my breakthrough discovery), and I can’t get back into the room until Monday, but I’ll show you soon enough. My TA Neal shares a lot of my interests, which means the students will be getting a summer’s worth of unshaven nerds talkin bout robots. Hopefully this goes […]

Alright, I’ve been slacking for too long, which is just not wise when so much stuff is coming down the pipe. For instance, I just got a tip on the following post on Language Log, a seemingly active linguist’s blog (thanks, dgamble). Geoffrey K. Pullum, a linguistics and humanities professor at UCSC, writes the following in response to a NYT article casually asserting that Google “understands language.” The very least one has to admit about machine understanding is that there is a big difference between a search engine algorithm and a genuine understander like you or me — and I’m not saying it necessarily reflects well on me. If you switch a Google-style search engine algorithm from working on English to working on Arabic, it will very largely work in the same way, provided only that you make available a large body of Arabic text from which it can draw its frequency information. (I have actually met people working at Google on machine processing of stories in Arabic. They do not know how to read Arabic. They don’t need to.) I, on the other hand, will become utterly useless after the switch. I will no longer be able to classify news stories at all (I don’t even know the Arabic writing system, so I can’t even see whether Iran is in a paragraph or not). Call the machines cleverer, or call me cleverer, I don’t care, but we’re not the same kind of animal, and it seems to me that the verb understand is utterly inappropriate as a term for what Google News algorithms do. |Link| What kinds of activities are appropriate for the verb ‘understand’? [Scanners] don’t read for content, get the drift of the story, compare the sense of the paragraphs with their background knowledge and common sense, […]

Engadget reports on Airbus’ plan on intalling robots to control planes in emergency situations. Emphasis is original. Pilots, not suprisingly, are none too pleased with the move; Air Line Pilots Association safety offical Larry Newman says it’s leading to pilots getting further and further away from the process of responding to emergencies themselves (well duh). Not to mention the whole, you know, robots making decisions that could directly affect hundreds or thousands of human lives thing. For its part, Boeing has said it will continue to rely on human pilots in case of emergencies.

Link via BoingBoing

Two items: Asimo turns to telepathy Japanese automaker Honda has developed technology that uses brain signals to control a robot’s moves, hoping to someday link a person’s thoughts with machines in everyday life. In a video demonstration in Tokyo, patterns of the changes in the brain taken by an MRI machine, like those used in hospitals, were relayed to a robotic hand. A person in the MRI machine made a fist, spread his fingers and then made a V-sign. Several seconds later, the robotic hand made the same movements. Further research would be needed to decode more complex movements. At least another five or 10 years are probably needed before Asimo starts moving according to our mental orders, according to Honda.Right now, Asimo’s metallic hand can’t even make a V-sign. The catch: Japan’s industry ministry plans to compile safety guidelines for next-generation robots as they will be providing services in the future in areas like nursing, security and cleaning, ministry officials said Saturday. The guidelines will require manufacturers to install enough sensors to minimize the risk of the robots running into people and use soft and light materials so they do not cause harm if they do so, the officials said. They will also be required to install emergency shut-off buttons, they said. Both links via Robot Gossip.