Too Sad :(

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, January 21st, 2008

Holy smokes.

I remember poking aroun pages at MIT on Friday and I vaguely remember finding a page about Singh. Of course, there could be several people named Singh… but the cooincidence is unlikely. Now, much to my dismay… I read this less than 5 minutes ago:

Wired tells the quite sad but very interesting stories of Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh. Initially self-educated, both had the idea to create huge fact databases from which AI agents could feed, hoping to eventually have something that could reason at a human level or better. McKinstry leveraged the dotcom era to grow his database. Singh had the backing of MIT, where he eventually got his PhD and had been offered a position as a professor alongside his mentor, Marvin Minsky. Sadly, personal life was more troublesome for them, and the story ends in a tragic way.

It’s really sad! To read the entire article, click here.

I suppose there are several morals you could get out of this event… however, it is really depressing.

RIP <3

Link.

Posted in: News, Other News.

Robot Tees

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, January 21st, 2008

Interesting t-shirts…

50 here

45 here

Heheh!

Link.

Posted in: News, Other News, Robot News.

What time is it?

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, January 21st, 2008

Check out this awesome wath. In my opinion, it’s 10 times better than a rolex…

…because it’s BINARY!

The upper LED-row shows hours (8-4-2-1)
The lower LED-row shows minutes (32-16-8-4-2-1)

The time in the image above is 10:15…

This is too awesome. If I had the money, I would buy it. (But I don’t! Heh)

Link!

Tags: binary, watch, awesomeness

Posted in: News, Other News.

Bent Objects

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, January 21st, 2008

I saw a mind-perplexing article on Make the other day… check it out!

That one is pretty cute. The nail is running from the big hammer to protect the tiny hammer. =^-^=

Headshot much? I like the effect with the macaroni… however I don’t enjoy seeing anything getting their spaghetti brains blown out of them.

Eitherway, it is really creative!

Link and Link.

Tags: nail, hammer, tiny, cute

Posted in: News, Other News.

Mars Robot May Observe Asteroid Impact

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, January 14th, 2008

Scientists at NASA’s Near Earth Object Program updated the odds of asteroid 2007 WD5 impacting on Mars from 1 in 350 to 1 in 75. If the asteroid hits, the impact will likely be in the area that Mars rover Opportunity is in. The robot is believed to be outside the immediate impact zone so it should be able to safely observe the explosion that would result from the asteroid hitting at 13.5 km/s, releasing the equivalent of 3 MT of TNT. The resulting crater could be a half a mile wide. Impacts of this size are estimated to occur only once every one thousand years. The impact would occur near the end of January 2008. Data from additional observatories is being gathered now and scientists hope to calculate an updated trajectory that will tell them whether or not the asteroid will hit Mars. For more details see the NEO report or the JPL orbital diagram for 2007 WD5 (requires Java).

Yikes. It will really be a tough way for Opportunity to die, if this does happen. I really hope it doesn’t, but I also do. We could learn a lot more about asteroids if it did land on Mars… but then Opportunity will be moondust! Either way, only time will tell what will happen!

Link.

Tags: Opportunity, Mars, asteroid

Posted in: News, Other News.

2008!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Happy new year everyone!

I haven’t blogged in a very long time.

I didn’t do much this break, other than de-stress.

I went skiing at Mont Blanc… surprisingly, it really sucked! Grassy patches from the snowboarders, and TONS of ice! I cannot say that I wasn’t surprised. Plus, the people there were just plain rude. We got cut in line for their chairlifts, people just blatently bomb the hill and think they are the best skiers in the world, and almost got ran over 6 times! The slopes weren’t challenging enough, either. A lot of people make fun of Ontario’s ski hills- but the one that I went to all the time, Hockley Valley, was only at the most 30 minutes away from where I lived. It was really fun. When you skiied the backside of the mountain, you could just ski non-stop. No wait for the chairlift! And, it was a new squishy chair lift. They also had T-bars. Mont Blanc didn’t have T-bars, which also surprised me! What do the people do that are afraid of heights? Anyway, I’m just generally disappointed at this ‘Mont Blanc’. Next time we stick to the more english hills. February we plan to ski every weekend!

The view from Mont Blanc ^

What else have I been doing? Thinking about studying, but not really doing anything. We have a week to review anyway! Plus, what do tests REALLY measure? The amount of stress you can go through to try to memorize the entire book? How much you depend on outside resources? I just find it’s a really lame way to see if someone understands something. If there was a way to view the pictures in one’s mind when we talk about a topic, I could see that as being fair. I know that I think in pictures, and probably many more people do!

Hmph.

Tags: rant, school, Mont Blanc

Posted in: News, Other News.

Merry Christmas!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

Yay! Wishing everyone a great holiday!

Did you know Newton was born today too?
Food for thought!

Posted in: News, Other News.

Nice Bookshelf

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

We all know the Christmas lights controlled by music on a garage radio station that annoy neighbours to the extreme, but this is a different approach. I like it a ton since it is useful all year round.

Maybe during summer I could make things like this! That would be cool!

Link.

Posted in: News, Other News, Tech News.

The Holidays Have Officially… BEGUN!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, December 21st, 2007

Woohoo! At last, the holidays are here. This is the half-way point for this year at scool. I’m ecstatic. I always love Term 3 more than any other term… I think it is because of science fair and spring. Everything seems more positive… plus, 3 is my fav number.
This in mind, exams are still looming to wrap up Term 2, which really sucks! Exams SUCK! I hate memorizing things.
Anyway, who cares about school when there are thousands of articles and papers to be read about natural language processing and conversational artificial intelligence! AND hours of videos from iTunes U.
I’ll be spending most of my time researching & programming after the break, there will be no time to do anything. This also kicks off my BLOGGING BONANZA. I have oodles of articles that I want to add to my blog, so it doesn’t seem so desolate… the holidays have officially begun!

Posted in: News, Other News, Programming, Projects, Robot.

MIT DARPA Vehicle

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, October 25th, 2007

MIT has seriously modified the LR3 so that it can drive itself and perform basic tasks like avoiding obstacles and merging into moving traffic. It utilises state-of-the-art hardware like LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) range finders and vision sensors to view its surrounds and avoid anything that gets in the way.

We’ll see how it does! Link.

Posted in: News, Other News, Robot News, Tech News.