Life

I'm currently at the FIRST Robotics Regional playoffs in Milwaukee with Southwest High School's team 2129 Ultraviolet. (See: Robots! and Robot Shipped and More Photos for more information.)

Here are a few of the photos in the gallery from day one. Click on any of them to see the gallery.


These are all the robots in their shipping crates waiting in the pits for the teams to arrive. Ours is the purple one.


This is a long shot of the arena.


Here is team 2129 working on the robot.

We are having a lot of fun even though we have not been doing so well. But we think we have found most of the bugs and hope to do better tomorrow.

Will over at Hack-a-day went to the Kansas City FIRST Robotics Challenge Regional Competition and really liked what he saw.

Team 2129 is heading to the Milwaukee Regionals next weekend. It's going to be a blast!

The Minnesota Regionals will be held March 27th - 29th at Williams Arena and it's FREE to get in.

Come and check it out - it's going to be a great time!

The robot that I have been helping the Southwest High School Robotics Team build shipped today. This means that we are all done building it. Right. Actually there is very little that we will need to do once we arrive at the regional competition in Milwaukee.

(In case you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, check this out: Robots!)

This was a very busy week and weekend. We met every night except Wednesday during the week to work on the robot and we got a lot done (photos here).

On Saturday morning, we loaded up the robot into my pickup truck and drove it to Simley High School in Inver Grove Heights where they had a mockup of the arena in their lunchroom and they invited other teams to come have a practice competition. I think they had almost a dozen teams show up - including the team from Brainerd!

It was a really nice setup - the only thing that was missing was carpeting on the floor. Other than that it was a wonderful opportunity to test our robot.

It passed with flying colors!

We already knew we could pick up the ball, but could we do the other things we needed to do? So we put the robot in the arena and proceeded to do the four things we need to do. We knocked the ball off the overpass. We captured the ball and carried it around the track, we lifted the ball up and hurdled it over the overpass and we placed it on the overpass.

Man there were a bunch of happy kids after we did that!

The practice competition was a great idea. It gave all the teams a chance to practice their driving, debug their robots, and get a feel for what the other teams were doing. They actually staged a few sessions with six robots on the field so that it was like a real competition. It gets pretty crowded with six robots out there.

See photos of the practice competition at Simley High Schools here.

Sunday we rested. Actually I worked on my Mom's house and did the grocery shopping. The kids met and worked on the robot from Noon until around 9:30.

On Monday morning we loaded the robot up again and went to another practice competition. This time it was at Egan High School. They also had a full arena setup but they had carpet on the floor, so it was more like the real arena.

We already knew we could do what we needed to, so we used this time to do more driver selection and practicing and also to debug the robot some more. We found a couple of weak areas and fixed them up.

Photos from the practice competition at Egan High School here.

After the practice session ended (they kicked us out at 7:00 - otherwise we would have stayed all night) we went to Mark's house and tweaked the robot some more. Finally I called it quits around 9:30 and made the kids crate the robot up for shipping so we could go home.

The robot is now out of our hands until the regional competition in Milwaukee on March 13th-15th. When we arrive there will be stuff for us to do to it, but I think we are in pretty good shape.

This is a great talk by Gever Tulley at TED about 5 things you should let your kids do.



I need to get busy on this list with my kids. I did all of these when I was a kid. (Except ripping a CD, we didn't have CDs when I was a kid...)

Hell, I learned how to drive in a '58 Willy's Jeep when I was 12. It was a blast.

And I have scars from pocket knives.

They are making a film about Harlan Ellison titled Dreams With Sharp Teeth! Amazing.

He is a cantankerous old bastard. And I love him.

Here is a wonderful clip from the movie



There is more good stuff on the movie web site.

La Lubu over at Feministie writes a very powerful post about the birth of her extremely premature baby and all the health care battles she had to fight.

Prior to that, I received my first bill from her original hospital. It came after six weeks of treatment—before my daughter was officially listed as being under the insurance plan (see, you have to produce a birth certificate first, and there’s a time lag between when you can obtain the official birth certificate from the state, and the processing of the paperwork with the insurance plan. First, I had to prove that the baby that came out of my body via the fully-paid for emergency c-section, was actually mine. Don’tcha just love bureaucracy? It didn’t include neonatology services, radiology services, pediatric cardiology, respiratory therapists, or even surgery. But it was about $750,000 just the same. Now remember, that was before the hefty insurance discount was applied.

And I laughed. Yes, I laughed. What the hell else could I do? Who the hell did they think was going to be pulling $750,000 out of her ass? Because it sure wasn’t me. At the Ronald McDonald House, I traded war stories with the other parents. Most of the parents there were long-termers—waiting for the call for new organs for their sick children. Everyone had lost their jobs because of their children’s medical crises. At least once. I met folks whose employers couldn’t be bothered to give them a week of time off. I met a family where both parents had hepatitis C (and that ain’t cheap, people); they were waiting for their toddler son to get a lung transplant. People from all over the nation. A nation of isolated medical crises.

Here's an interesting video about Global Warming. It's by a science teacher and instead of trying to convince people that Global Warming is true, he instead works the risk management angle.

As I was watching it, it seemed to sound a lot like a version of Pascal's Wager, and at the end, he puts up a slide that acknowledges that and apparently he has a series of videos that address more questions too. I'll have to watch them also.

In any case, this is well worth a watch, whether you think Global Warming is true or not.



(p.s. He's wearing a League of Awesomeness t-shirt!)

I'm a huge Science Fiction fan. But I don't know who Charles Stross is. (I think I'll have to find out though.)

In any case, Charles Stross has a blog, and on this blog he recently wrote an article about why he thinks that colonizing other planets is completely unfeasible.

Sad to say, he makes a very valid argument. But I'm still going to read Science Fiction about space colonization and I'm still going to enjoy it!

I just bought this bumper sticker. It's totally awesome.


Go buy one.

(h/t to Crooks and Liars)

After reading this article, I no longer "Believe" in Evolution.

You don't "believe" in scientific facts and theories. They either are true or they are not. There is no "belief" involved.

Am I arguing semantics? Well, yes, but that's my point - words and their meanings are powerful and can define the argument. When it comes to science in general and evolution in particular, belief has nothing to do with it - or at the very least it doesn't have anything to to with its veracity.

The other night my mother-in-law cooked a "Turducken" (you know, a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey). My wife asked which type of meat she had on her plate and a variety of quips followed - "Poultry", "Some kind of fowl", "Something that had feathers", etc. I answered with "Something that descended from dinosaurs". Facetiously (I hope), she quipped back "Only if you believe in evolution" to which I said "Actually, they descended from dinosaurs whether or not you believe in evolution". Belief (or lack of it) doesn't change facts.

However, scientific evidence has lead to the conclusion that evolution is at work.