HR Geeks

Norfolk Technical Center is competing in this year’s US FIRST Robotics Challenge. A few HRGeeks members have been mentoring the students – assisting with software design / development, networking, and robot construction and electrical connections.
After 5 long weeks, the robot is moving under it’s own power, being remotely driven via joystick.

NTC FIRST Team’s Robot takes it’s ‘first’ steps! from HR Geeks on Vimeo.

Click through for a higher resolution view of the video.

So, I was on a plane flight from Newport News to Boston this morning when a really cool thing happened to me. Shall I mention, 7AM is early early for me, and a 7AM flight requires even more time to drive to the airport and do the flight shindig, like stripping off the shoes and passing a stool sample. I figured, as I didn’t sleep well the prior night, that I could also catch some z’s during the flight, or at least ’till they deliver some coffee. Anyways, as we approached Boston, the flight attendant announced the temperature.

As long as I can remember, I have always tried to “predict” values before they are announced. In this case, the value being that of Boston’s temperature. So, when the attendant was jussssst about to fill in the “blank” in a phrase somewhat structured as: “The current temperature in Boston is ______” I decided to guess that value. My guess: 68. And to my surprise, I was right! Now, I decided to investigate this a bit more, being extremely tired, and just chillin’ with my eyes closed, this seemed like a fun exercise. So my conclusion follows.

First, lets assume coincidences do not exist. I started thinking about Schrödinger and his cat. If the value, that being the number on the display representing Boston’s temperature, was in some quantum superposition, the flight attendant’s observation might have knocked it out of superposition and made the value so. OR! Or possibly, my guess was observation enough to set the value. And then the attendant was announcing the number I mentally created. Well, of course this sounds a tad pseudo-scientific. I do not tout quantum physics, and this field has of course only confused many, as there are many aspects that seem to outsmart our inherent intelligence. In fact, maybe the mere fact that I had Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out in my lap was enough to make me the thermostat of Boston. If only I focused on creating snow. In fact, maybe the result was not a Schrödinger cat act, but rather quantum entangling, and just flipping the neurons in my brain that were subconsciously trying to tune-in to the value. We could go in this hypothetical way for some time. Pretty cool. But lets try something else. How about a more statistical approach.

Since the radio informed me, upon travel to the airport, as being in the 70s or 80s in Virginia, I assume that the more northern locale of Boston should be cooler. Well, being August, I can guestimate a reasonable range of about 65 to 75. So that’s a rough range of 10 values or so. Being that I would also assume the number as natural, our fractions are eliminated. In this thought experiment, I now have a 1/10 probability of being the envy of all meteorologist. That seems a fair chance that I would make a reasonable guess.

So, either way, I was quite impressed with my conclusion of 68. Despite how I arrived at that value, I believe my subconscious had all to do in this case. I envision my subconscious as doing the churning here, and merely telling my conscious that “Hey conscious here’s a value for ya!”. At the time of guess, it seemed as if the number came out of nowhere. But upon deeper analysis, it seems logical that, however it happened, my subconscious had something to do. Therefore, upon delivery of this value to my conscious, and at the time not knowing where 68 came from, I felt mega-psychic. It was quite a humbling surprise. The mind is amazing. But, I confess, last night, I had the news on and Pick-Three came on. Well, to my surprise, I was off. I wonder if barometric pressure affects the results, pick-o-the beast. .

I am sure many of you have heard of the thought experiment relating monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare, to the concept of entropy. Monkeys Typewriters Shakespeare you say!? How much cooler can things get? Well, this creative thought experiment goes as follows:

“The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare” [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem].

I am not going to go into the history of that study, or much more. The wiki link above should do you justice. So what do monkeys and typewriters have to do with the 757ers? Well I’ll let you take a look for yourself, as I should not impose any bias:

That’s right, nerds, computers, and text generation. So I had the idea, well if there is a potential for monkeys to produce such a marvelous work as Shakespeare, surely my fellow Homo Sapiens should be able to generate something of equivalent brilliance. Thus, the birth of Project GorillaSpeare. The idea was to gather a log in #proto on the 757 IRC server, and eventually compare the log to Hamlet. Thanks to Project Guttenberg, I obtained a pure text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from which I parsed out the lines that represented who was to say what in the play, yep Hamlet is written as a play, and I also removed newlines, and some of the play-actions following a similar form to: [Ham. exits]. Once parsed, I wrote some code that compared each character of Hamlet to the first instance in the IRC log file of that character. Also captured was the user who constructed that character (spaces included). The processing job ended when the IRC log ran out. Now I must say, my parsing job was not perfect, nor can I credit the findings as being anything of scientific worth. But enough with the wordy-foreplay and on to the results:

• Parsed Hamlet Text: 164642 characters
• Parsed IRC Log: 32365 characters from January 11, 2008 till April 5, 2008. (log gathering only when I was logged in).
• We banged out about 19.657% of Hamlet
• About every 5.087 characters we plopped out 1 character of Hamlet.

The rest of the results can be obtained here.

So what does this “study” tell us about our entropy? Well, for one, I would think that a 1/5 ratio of Hamlet to Nerds is pretty efficient, but that’s my opinion. The results do not tell us too much, I just figured it would be interesting to see how efficient the IRC room is at generating a novel, without the premise of doing such. Granted, we are not communicating a novel per’se, rather what our blabberings have generated is still somewhat ordered, in comparison to a text that is not our goal of generating. In the thought experiment, the monkeys are typing pseudo-randomly. The next phase (GorillaSpeare 2.0) is to compare our writings to monkeys and measure, what I assume the original intent of the monkeys was, and that is a fairly good quality of pseudo randomness. My conclusion is that monkeys, our brethren, are awesome, and we as homo sapiens are no higher. If we were asked to bang on some keyboards without a premise, I’m sure we could do just a good of job.

-Matt (enferex)

I recently was linked to Flash Earth. This site allows you to switch between satellite map views with a click of the mouse. Compare Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft VE (Virtual Earth), Ask.com, OpenLayers, and NASA Terra.

Images are presented via an all Flash interface and the speed you can switch between services and at which the overlays are changed is quite amazing.

I thought Google had really good images of Norfolk till I switched over to Microsoft VE. Here is an example of the Norfolk Southern coal yard and train depot. (Left: Microsoft VE,Right: Google)

Thanks Erin.

Something curious I noticed today. Login to Newegg using Firefox and you are forced to use a CAPTCHA, use IE and its not there. I’m going with IE here because I couldnt figure out if it was showing me a “Z” or and “N” and neither would work!

Now while I am generally a fan of CAPTCHA, I am an even bigger fan of using the computer for good; enter reCAPTCHA. Essentially, a Carnegie Mellon team led by Luis von Ahn noticed that during the process of digitizing books there are words during scanning process which cannot be converted by OCR software to text. “Each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.”

Here’s how it works:

“Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.”

By reCAPTCHA’s estimates about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans every day, equating to more than 150,000 hours of work each day worldwide. Thats a lot of potentially useful computing power for the general good by taking the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.