Free at Last, Free at Last...

My thanks to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for this post's title. As of yesterday I am done with my junior year here at Mudd. All my classes are done, including exams/projects and I'm waiting until I move into my summer apartment on the 19th and start work. Of course...as a Mudder, having nothing to do is that pinnacle of the states of being that we all strive to achieve, but, being Mudders, having achieved it we're rather like my dog who once actually caught a rabbit that he was chasing and then had absolutely no idea what to do with it so it kicked him in the face and ran off again. We need things to do. Thus I have projects lined up to work on:

• Theremin: My summer roommate (a fellow roboticist and rocket scientist, possibly at the same time) has agreed to build a Theremin with me over the summer. Not because we can play music (although he's actually quite good with a guitar...mostly I can't play music), but because it oozes sciency sexiness. The theremin is a musical instrument played by waving your hands around it -- it consists of two antennae and some circuitry. One antenna controls the volume (closer your hand gets, the softer the volume) and the other controls the pitch (a variable-period oscillator is connected to the antenna and moving your hand changes the capacitance, altering the period of oscillation. This creates beats with a fixed-frequency oscillator and that signal is sent out to an amp). And I have friends who wonder how to make E&M sexy for high-schoolers.
• Blender 3D Robot Gait Plugin: Blender 3D is an open-source 3D modelling program. It has an extensive api and my friend Jacques over at Robots of Joy has realized the lack of good tools to let garage roboticists design walking gaits for multi-legged robots. Thus the idea was born to write a plugin for Blender 3D that lets the garage warrior build a model of his or her robot, animate it, and send out the commands for the motors when it's ready.
• Work: Oh yeah...I'll be working at Guidance Software in Pasadena. They do digital forensics. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing for them, but it should be neat. It will also be good experience working in the software industry.
  

And now for something completely different: I now have another reason to build a PC capable of playing modern video games (no, I won't leave you, 8-bit DOS games and buggy Sierra games, they're just prettier...it's really all superficial. You're still my favorites, I promise). It's called Mirror's Edge, and it's amazing:

I have Portal, Half-Life 2 (yes, I've never played it yet), and now Mirror's Edge on my list of compelling reasons to actually spend money on a decent computer. This game looks awesome. There are at least two things that are strikingly unusual about it. First, there's no HUD (on-screen display). Watch again. There's no ammo indicator, health bar, minimap, or any of the other elements you expect to get in between you and the world of the game. Second, your character's limbs are rendered, yet it's a first-person game. This is an attempt to make jumping decent in first-person games (perhaps the biggest complaint about Portal, actually). Finally someone has gone out on a limb and made what looks like a pretty good parkour game -- they did this by focusing on the parkour and not trying to add it as an extra like in Prince of Persia (decent games, but not great).

The game is set in something of a totalitarian dystopia where the government reads all electronic communications, so the only safe way to send illegal information is by using message runners. Your character is one of these message runners and, as seen in the trailer, the feds try to stop you. You can beat them up and even take their guns, but you only have whatever remains in the magazine when you take it and bigger guns will hamper your movements, so it's better to run away in most cases.

Mind you -- I still would rather do this stuff myself. I have a friend (who actually failed out of Mudd in a spectacularly epic way) who was learning some parkour and he showed me a little bit last time he came to visit. There's a decent spot to practice some of the basics on Mudd, but I'd like some other people to work with. Maybe I'll get a group together next year. For those of you who haven't seen it or don't know what parkour is, here's one of the more popular videos:

Actually, this would perhaps be better classified as free running (distinguished from parkour by its emphasis on acrobatics rather than efficiency), but either way it's really cool.

~KMarsh