The Mudd-y Swamp

Pop!

2009-04-22T17:52:00.000-07:00

There is so much to talk about and no time with which to talk about it right now. Here, in fact, is a list. I'll talk briefly about some things in this post, and may expound on some in later posts; leave a comment if you want to hear more about anything in particular.

Friday was the Barnstormers' trip out to Edwards Air Force Base.
Saturday Proctor Elaine set up a trip for a bunch of us to go to some hot springs.
Sunday I went to USC for the Intercollegiate Swing Dance Challenge my sister organized.
Clinic:

Code Freeze was on Tuesday
Final report rough draft is due Friday
Next Presentation is on next Tuesday

Graduation is in less than a month.

First, the Edwards trip. I have a difficult time expressing how cool last Friday was. We got to fly the F-16 simulator, then at the end of the day we got to walk around the F-16 flightline and see the real F-16s up close and personal. Our guide, Nate Cook (HMC class of '95), told us what each new thing on the F-16 was and then took us into the hangar and showed us some dummy bombs that they have for testing. He talked to us about the difference between dumb bombs, which are purely ballistic, and smart bombs, which guide themselves in to their target. We got to see the Global Hawks in their hangar. One of them was fueled and it's impressive how much droop the weight of the fuel causes in the wings.

The trip to the hot springs was quite lovely; the springs themselves are at the end of a mile-and-a-half hike. I was getting nervous hiking all that way through weather somewhere in the 90s, but the springs are right on the bank of a creek that was flowing with frigid water, and we actually had to cross the creek to get to the hot water. That was a nice, refreshing end to the hike before we went to relax in the springs. I now have a lovely peeling sunburn across my upper back. It has a hand-print on the back of my left shoulder, where I could reach.

My sister called me to find out if anyone from Claremont was coming to her Swing Challenge at USC (she's the president of their swing club and has been working on making this happen for several months). I asked some of the dancers here and then told her that no, the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company (CCBDC) had not heard. She asked if they were the right people. After all, this was a swing competition. At Claremont, I assured her, "Ballroom" means "Dancing with Partners" instead of "Waltz, etc." (those five are more properly the "Standard Dances").

It ended up that most of the company members had practice that night, but one girl and I were able to make it, so the two of us represented Claremont in the Jack and Jill challenge. A Jack and Jill is a swing competition in which each person dances with another, chosen mostly at random (leads and follows dance with a partner of the opposite type). I didn't get through the first round (11 leads, and all of them way outclassed me) but I had a great time anyway. Our other Claremont rep took 5th place, though!

For now, that's it. I'll talk more about clinic when I don't have to be doing it quite as much.

~KMarsh

Tools: Now with 100% more Photographs!

2009-04-10T17:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's just two, but hey, that's infinitely better than none. I've even got some mathematicians here to prove it. I have leftover pieces of stock for my screwdriver, so I can give you a before and after picture of that, although I don't have any intermediate pictures:
The cylinder on the far left is the acrylic stock for the handle. To prepare it, you need to face the ends (scrape off the rough edges made by sawing it off from the rest of the stock) and drill the central hole for the blade to go into. Both those steps are done using the lathe (drilling on the lathe will always feel odd to me, since it's the part that is spinning, not the drill bit). Next you use the lathe to carve out the cone. The milling machine then bores out the six flutes along the length of the handle, and it's back to the lathe to file the dome on the end into shape.

Finally the entire thing is polished -- first you sand it with coarse-grit sandpaper, then with two or three finer grades of sandpaper until you finish off by rubbing it down with toothpaste using a sock. If you do it right and put some elbow grease into it you'll get nearly a mirror finish to the plastic which is quite remarkable to see: scratches from machining the handle make the surface of the acrylic very cloudy and it looks like it will never again be as clear as the stock you were given.

The blade is placed into a holder that keeps it at the proper angle for machining the tip, the mill is used to take off the material from one side of the blade and then you flip the whole thing over in the jig to machine the other side. The other end is then faced to length on the mill and a tiny hole is drilled right in the very center of the blade near one end. A matching hole is drilled in the handle and the blade slides in and is held in place with a small pin. Before assembling the screwdriver, the blade is heat treated to increase its hardness and toughness and then polished in a sandblaster.

The hammer, shown disassembled with each piece next to a piece of stock where available, is a much more demanding tool, owing mostly to its increased complexity.
This is a machinist's hammer, not a claw hammer, and it has two faces: a soft face made out of nylon for easily-damaged pieces and a hard-face for driving nails and other more traditional hammer tasks. The first piece I made was the hard face. The hard face is made of AISI 4340 carbon steel and machined entirely on the lathe. After machining it is heat treated just like the screwdriver blade. The 4340 steel is quite hard to begin with and is much more difficult to machine than any of the other materials we use in this class.

After working with the hard face, machining the nylon for the soft face felt like butter. There wasn't much to do for this beyond facing it and reducing the diameter. The only noteworthy part was tapping the hole drilled in the back side so that we can easily thread a set screw into it to hold it on to the hammer head.

The hammer head required quite a bit of machining, both on the lathe and the mill. It's made of AISI 1015 steel, though, and is much easier to work with than the hard face. First it must be faced and the smaller diameters must be reduced on the lathe. Then a hole must be drilled and tapped and a "spotface" (very small washer-like indentation against the face of the piece) produced for the nylon soft face to attach to. The other side is drilled out, then reamed to a very tight specification so that the hard face can press-fit into it and hold without slipping out. That hole has a countersink bored into it to make room for the chamfer on the hard face between the two diameters. The head is transferred to the mill where the flats are cut on the sides and the slot for the handle is bored.

Finally, the handle is worked from a piece of wood and the entire thing is assembled. To hold the handle in the head a slot is cut in the top of the handle and a wedge driven between the two pieces of the slot. The spec-sheet says that the wedge is made out of "Red Devil #4" which has defied my preliminary attempts to define.

Moral of the story: take a machine shop class. It's fun, and amazingly useful even if you never step inside a shop again.

~Kyle Marsh

April crunchtimes brings May graduations?

2009-04-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

One of my professors just called April the worst month of the year. I had never thought of it that way, but in a way it is, and has been since I was maybe 10 or so. The second half of spring semester always comes upon us suddenly: it's staggering (and more than slightly terrifying, truth be told) to think that I only have 6 weeks of school left: 4 weeks of classes, projects week (finals week, too, for seniors), and an empty week (finals week for the rest of the school).

The downside of this, of course, is the 4 weeks I have to get EVERYTHING done. That includes my Computer Vision independent study, Clinic, Clinic presentation, Clinic poster, Clinic report, Photography, Philosophy of Mind, and tools.

Tools is my current favorite. I'm making my hammer now, and I just finished all the work that I need to do on the metal lathe. A quick search of my archives tells me that I haven't actually talked about tools yet, which is strange since I really enjoy it and I'm taking it for pure enjoyment. Tools, or E-8, is one of the first engineering classes that prospective engineering students take at Mudd. It's the introductory shop course, called "Tools" because that's what you build. You use the sheet-metal shop to craft a tool tray, bending, cutting and welding sheet metal into shape. You use the metal shop to build a flat head screwdriver, and most of a machinist's hammer (something like this, with one face made of nylon and the other of hardened steel). You use the wood shop to build the hammer handle.

I have not yet made my tool tray, but I've finished my screwdriver and much of my hammer. The screwdriver handle is made from acrylic using the lathe and the mill, and the blade is made on the mill. The hammer is the most complex piece. The hammer head (a short piece of 1in steel bar stock) is machined on the lathe and mill to fit the handle and both faces. The handle is made with the band-saw and wood lathe followed by a LOT of sanding. The hard face is machined from carbon steel on the lathe, followed by some filing, and then heat treated to bring it up to full hardness. It's polished by sand-blasting and fits into the head by press-fitting. The soft face is made from nylon (the nicest material I've worked with on the lathe) and attaches to the head with a screw. I'll post pictures of my pieces when I get off my butt and take some pictures (possibly tomorrow).

The shop proctors tried to chastise me when I told them (on, say, Wednesday night) that I hadn't started my hammer yet (due Friday of the following week). I corrected them. I am not a sophomore engineering student with no time. I'm a senior computer science student taking this class for fun. I can be in the shop every morning for 3 hours if I feel like it, and if I don't feel like it, I can drop the class (HMC's drop date is insanely late in the semester) or turn in half a hammer. It's a good way to approach the class.

In other news, I photoshopped up my senior page for the yearbook yesterday. Each senior gets a full page in the yearbook to decorate as desired, so I sifted through my (meagre) photo collection and placed the pictures on a canvas in Photoshop.
The pictures include me eating a Chinese-Donut-Burger, my barnstormers co-president, my girlfriend, my roommate (first three years; we have singles now), a prank some friends and I pulled, a prank some friends pulled on me, a few Halloween costumes (I'm the Rorschach near the top), me getting my head shaved for a friend who had cancer sophomore year (he's doing fine and back at school), the boxers a friend decided to hang on her wall after finding them in her laundry, the Mudd Amateur Rocketry Club at ROCStock a few years ago, Iris Critchell with her Cessna 172, and Rotsnake. And lots of gratuitous Photoshop effects.

I discovered Photoshop brush packs. Thus I have a coffee stain, ink stain, and crinkled-paper effects. The torn edges, actually, are incredibly simple to do in newer versions of Photoshop: turn on layer-effects and add a drop shadow, inner glow and outer glow to the layer. That gives the very slight drop-shadow to create some depth in the image and a thin white border to each picture. Take the eraser tool and grab a ragged brush, then erase the corners/edges of the photo. The white border now looks like torn paper where you've erased the image. I used this to create pinholes, torn corners where pushpins may have been ripped out, and half-ripped photographs. Putting the whole thing on a wooden surface gave it a bit more context, and I couldn't resist the coffee stain. The tape strikes me as a bit cheesy, but not too much and I had just learned how to make the tape.

As for post-graduation plans, I'm not sure yet where I'll be working; I have an offer from DreamHost, and I'm waiting on a few more. I'll probably take the summer off, though, and start in the fall. Over the summer I think I might take some classes at The Crucible in Oakland and visit old friends.

~KMarsh

Job Hunt: Successful!

2009-03-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

The last few days have been full of excitement for me, all on the job hunt front. First, I talked with the recruiter from AeroVironment. She said that they really liked my background, but they were essentially waiting to hire someone to be my boss before they made a decision on me. That was heartening, since it's been three weeks since I interviewed with them and I hadn't heard anything.

Next, Google flew me out the Googleplex on Thursday and put me up at a very nice hotel for a series of interviews on Friday. I had a lot of fun there, got a short tour of the campus and really enjoyed the people who interviewed me. Those interviews went better than any I've done before because...

The Googleplex!View Larger Map

I got a job offer on Thursday afternoon from DreamHost! They'll pay well, give good benefits, and they're really laid back. Since their downtown office is a block and a half away from a metro stop, which in turn is 3 metro stops away from Union Station where the trains come in, I can take public transit (real public transit, not buses which are a wholly unacceptable mode of transportation) in to work from almost anywhere in LA, I think. That makes this offer, in addition to a very good offer in its own right, an ideal safety net: if my girlfriend gets a job in one of those "anywhere's" that I can get to work from I have a job that I can take as well even if I don't get any other offers.

Of course, Edwards Air Force Base (remember the whole "Middle of Nowhere" thing?) is one of those not-almost-anywhere's from which I probably won't be able to get to DreamHost in any acceptable length of time. But AeroVironment in Simi Valley is even closer to Edwards than Pasadena (the nearest place I thought I might be able to get a job) and now I have a bargaining chip. I would be completely amazed if I got an offer from Google (they're in the middle of layoffs, so they can't be hiring many "Nooglers"). But hey, all I need to do now is graduate, and what can I say? I'm Feeling Lucky.

~KMarsh

Clubs, Projects, and Jobs

2009-03-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

Barnstormers
First up, the Barnstormers have a new website. They actually don't know it yet because Claire and I have been building it at a temporary location on a domain that I own while I sort out getting a domain of our own. It uses the WordPress blogging software and I hope will be immensely more maintainable (and thus more useful) than the website Claire and I inherited from days gone by. The blogging I intend to use as news posts and updates. I'm not sure if I want the news to be the front page (as it is at the time of this post) or if I want the front page to be an introduction to the club and who we are.

Additionally, we are going to Edwards Air Force Base to get a tour of the Flight Test Center there. Edwards is where everything eventually winds up for testing before the Air Force will accept it and we have an alumnus who works there testing F-16 armament systems. Sign ups for HMC students to go on the Edwards trip are going on right now and we'll be heading out there on the 17th of April.

Theremin, Thoremin, Th[eo]remin-Bot
I believe I've mentioned that there is a student-run electronics lab club at HMC now. Not only does said club exist, but it now has funding. And to raise interest, our intrepid leaders, Nate and Raffi, have decided that the club will buy kits for students to fun projects and then hold a projects day at the dining hall to show them off!

I took one look at Nate's e-mail and decided that this was my excuse to build a theremin, since I didn't get around to it last summer. After poking around the Internet for a while I had found a few theremin kits that appeared to come mostly preassembled (no fun for an e-lab project) and this. Art's Theremin Page gives instructions, schematics and component lists for building several theremins including one using vacuum tubes to get a 5 octave range.

I told Nate that I wanted to build one and that if someone else built a tesla coil we could pair them into a Thoremin. I steal the name shamelessly from one of the suggested names for the following:

The other suggested name was Zeusaphone. This tesla coil is actually producing the music; sound is just vibration of our ear drums at some frequency in the audible range. By firing the tesla coil, say 440 times per second, we can create a musical note. By feeding its controller the waveform of a piece of music, the tesla coil can be made to act as an enormous speaker that happens to shoot lightening bolts. Similarly, below you can see the result of someone using a (much smaller) tesla coil as an amp for his guitar:

One of the other students in the electronics lab, upon hearing that I intend to build a theremin, decided that he wanted to build a theremin-playing robot for a class next year.

Job Hunt
I have been applying for jobs this semester. So far I have interviewed at DreamHost and AeroVironment and I'm waiting to hear back from them. Google is flying me to Mountain View this Thursday for an interview on Friday, which I am really unbelievably stoked about. I've also dropped my resume to a few other places, but these three are the three I'm most far along with. (For those who remember, I'm also looking at Edwards AFB. I'll be talking more with Nate when we visit in April. Incidentally, AeroVironment is located in Simi Valley, shown in the lower-left corner of that map.)

I now need to admit my geekiness (you can prevent laughing at this sentence if you ignore everything above this point in the post, and all my past posts, by the way). I finally found a resume class for LaTeX that was close enough to what I wanted that I took the effort to modify it and port my resume away from Microsoft Word. The Word file I had was fairly finnickey and would not hold all its formatting if I tried to use ANY other programs to open it; Open Office (which I generally dislike), Abiword, and Google Docs all ran it on to a second page and so I always needed to be using a Windows computer (or a mac with MS Office) when I edited/printed my resume.

Now, I have a subversion repository online that holds the most up-to-date copies of my resume and cover letter. Feel free, of course, to take the .tex files and the resume.cls file to TeX up your own resume. If you're interested, you can find a rather nice IDE for using LaTeX on Windows here. Linux tends to come with LaTeX installed, and I think Mac OS X does as well. Of particular note in this subversion repository (you did find it under the "online" link above, right?) is the makefile. With help from professor Geoff Kuenning of the CS department I built a makefile that will typeset and display my resume and cover letter as well as add new files to the repository automatically and publish my resume to the web using a really neat tar-ssh-tar piping trick.

That makefile is exciting to me, but I accept that many of my readers will find it less than enthralling, so if you want me to talk about it more just let me know and I'll be happy to talk more.

Good luck to all of you who have applied -- admissions letters are in the mail now! If you didn't get in to Mudd, take heart; that you even applied is a good indicator that you'll get into another top school. If you did get in, congratulations! Let me know if there is anything you want to hear about. I also host "prefrosh" or prospective students, so if you want to come by for another visit let me know and I'll make the arrangements to host you when you show up. Finally, if you're not yet a senior then thanks for reading and good luck next year; you should also let me know what you're interested in hearing about. (And if you're not a prospective student but a prospective parent, one of my parents or one of my friends, then just enjoy reading).

Fail
One last thing before I sign out -- in addition to fouling up the account creation with DreamHost for the Barnstormers, I also clobbered my external hard drive last night. It takes power from my monitor, because that's the only reachable powered USB port I have. I usually turn my monitor off when I leave my room, but this poses a problem when I have a large backup running to my external drive. The drive is formatted with the fat32 filesystem (eew, I know) and so that crash caused some fairly massive corruption.

Interestingly, my data was all fine (except for the stuff copying over at the time) but my OS suddenly decided that the filesystem was read-only if I tried to delete the corrupt files. I ended up fixing it by telling gparted to check and repair the filesystem twice.

~KMarsh

Be Prepared

2009-03-20T23:47:00.000-07:00

So camping went...not as planned. After driving up to Santa Cruz, we stayed at Marty's uncle's house for the night. We got in at 01:00 and got up when the (very loud) espresso machine dictated. Once awake we discovered that some of the trails we planned to hike were closed and we couldn't get some of the permits that we needed on the weekend (it was Saturday). Poor planning on the part of the person who planned the trip. Oh well.

We had a backup plan. Sort of. We made one up on the spot, so that's kind of the same thing. We decided to make a day-hike of what would have been the last day of our trip and then go the rest of the way home to the north bay -- all three of us live within an hour's drive north of San Francisco -- and then go to the Boy Scout camp in San Rafael to camp for a couple of days.

We started our day-hike and had to ford a stream. Our oxen didn't die, fortunately, but Marty didn't have AMAZING HARDCORE WATERPROOF HUNTING BOOTS like Liz and I and so he hiked the rest of the 10 miles in wet socks. He had 5 blisters afterwards and decided to bail on additional camping. We took him home, spent the next day working out details of getting permission to camp on the Boy Scouts' land (a mini-adventure of its own) and then went out to spend one night camping.

Along the way we came across something that I had forgotten was up there: an old B-17 engine. One of the last B-17's manufactured crashed there on its way to Hamilton Air Force Base and one enormous radial engine is all that remains. I decided that my portfolio theme for my photography class would be HMC students doing non-academic things that they really enjoy, so I took some pictures of Liz with the engine and our packs, tying in to both her love of aerospace and of backpacking. When I finish shooting this roll we'll see how they turned out.

The moral of this story is something that I didn't realize until I'd been at college for a while: things don't always have to go as planned and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. I often get an idea of how something is going to work out in my head and then get stressed, consciously or unconsciously, when real life gets a hold on my plan, even if my "plan" is just my unofficial, unconscious view of what I expected to happen. It's amazingly freeing to step back and realize that it doesn't matter...we can have a fun time by completely ignoring the plan and doing something totally different.

Be Prepared is the title of this post, and the motto of the Boy Scouts, but being prepared can take on many forms...often it means having a well thought-out plan, but it could just as well mean be prepared to throw out your plans and do something different. If you're prepared, it'll work out fine. I was just told by someone that you need a well-formulated plan so that you have something to deviate from when you get into the field.

Although that was a good stopping point right there, I thought I'd bring this back to Mudd. I mentioned above that my photography theme is pictures of Mudders doing things that get them really fired up. I decided on this because I'm graduating in May and wanted to explore what it was that made me love this place for the last four years. I remembered back to freshman year when I was amazed to find the breadth of personality here at this tiny, technical (officially liberal arts) school. We have all kinds of people who enjoy all kinds of activities:

Jacques and Tavi, my freshman year, taught a class on Maori fire-spinning, called "Poi" which I really enjoyed. Jason was so good at unicycling that he can ride his unicycle up and down stairs and "idle" in one place talking with you. Brett drives to the mountains and tries to convince people to go mountain biking with him. He also sculpts. Scott flew RC planes and turned down at least two good job offers to go get a PhD in some form of aeronautical engineering. Marty plays Go. Alex was offered the role of Simba in the Disneyland Parade, although he turned it down because he would have had to take a year off of Mudd. Matthew auditioned for the Dapper Dans: Disneyland's barbershop quartet. A surprising number of Mudders are on the ballroom dance team. Liz bakes cookies for the dorm and sews magnificent costumes because she feels like it. Camillo dropped out because he decided his passion was in the martial arts and last I heard he was teaching German Longsword lessons and learning parkour.

We have all sorts here, and it really makes it an amazing place.

~KMarsh

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2009-03-13T02:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, so that title is misleading. I'm actually leaving an a Mercedes-Benz older than I am with a diesel engine and a currently temperamental starter motor...so surprisingly close to a jet plane, in reality. My girlfriend, a clinic teammate and I are all going backpacking in the Santa Cruz mountains starting tomorrow. Spring Break starts tomorrow, so it's pretty good timing. Not like we had it rigged to turn out that way or anything....

Packing was kind of a rush job tonight and I'm going to have to have some discussions with myself and my trailmates tomorrow morning about the distribution of group gear and what really needs to be brought. I'm bringing my SLR camera and tripod, which, admittedly, are luxury items and quite heavy, but I also am saddled with more communal gear than I realized initially, since much of the contents of my pack is fairly static and mostly communal. Let me explain that:

I was a boy scout. I am an Eagle Scout (for those not in the know, you can only be a boy scout until you're 18 in most cases, but if you make it to Eagle then you're always considered an eagle scout in the present tense). This means that I take a lot of stuff with me when I go camping that I never use and never want to use. This includes first-aid kit stuff -- bandages, alcohol pads, and tape -- and more general things like extra rope, straps, plastic bags etc. I leave a great deal of this in my back and often forget about it. I'll have to check with the rest of my group to see if anyone else has first-aid gear or any of this other stuff so I can see what can be left behind as overly redundant.

I say overly redundant because gear does break, and you can't be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no way to fix it and no replacement. We're bring two stoves, for example. The only meal we actually need to cook is dinner on the first night, but most other meals would be unpleasant to eat cold. We're also bringing 2 water purification pumps which is a bit redundant in my eyes, since I have a bottle of Polar-Pure. Polar-Pure is an iodine water purification that uses a small bottle with iodine crystals to saturate a small amount of water that can then be poured into much larger water containers to purify the water inside them. It tastes better than most iodine systems, but still not as nice as a pump, so my teammates will probably opt for both pumps. I still won't leave the iodine at home, though.

As an interesting aside, the sale of Polar-Pure was heavily restricted in California for a time (and may still be) because it is the only water purification that I know of that uses pure iodine crystals, and people were using the crystals to synthesize meth. Talk about a disruptive few spoiling it for the rest of us. Anyway, I really need to be asleep an hour ago so I can get up to finish last-minute work before spring break.

Look for an update when I get back from my trip, though!

~KMarsh

Dreamin' Again

2009-02-24T23:25:00.000-08:00

Wow...I'm really slacking on this. Anyway, a few weeks ago, as mentioned by Trevin (whose blog you should read, if you don't already), was the Career Fair. I feel like it was smaller than usual, although the spring career fair is always small, so it could just be perception (I haven't gotten around to going to the office of career services yet and asking). However, there was a company there called DreamHost. They are a web hosting company founded in '97 by four Mudders. They've managed to keep quite a bit of the informal, friendly feeling of Mudd in their company, which is completely amazing...check out their "don't be a jackass" policy (at Mudd we are told during orientation that you'll generally be okay if you try not to be a jackass...it makes everything a lot more chill than it might otherwise be).

In addition to being pretty chill, they're remarkably helpful. They have a status blog to inform you when things go down and a twitter account that will tweet status changes. Beyond that, they have the best administrative backend I've ever seen. They really make it a snap to do most things. The two coolest things that I've come across so far are the one-click installs and SSH access. The second, SSH access, is nice because it lets you have control over your own files in a way that is comfortable to most of the CS majors here at Mudd -- we use the Unix shell for much of our work, so we get quite comfortable using it. Most places only give you FTP access.

The one-click installs are truely cool, though. DreamHost has gotten together a number of popular packages (WordPress, Drupal, ZenPhoto, etc.) and created an incredibly simple installer. You just click on the package you want, it walks you through everything you need to create, and then deploys the package where you asked it to. It also has a button labeled "update" that will update your packages to the most recent release just as easily. Truly, it is crazy.

Anyway, I need to think up a really awesome domain name, and then I'll probably start blogging over there once I graduate.

I'll try to have more updates for you this semester....

~Kyle Marsh

Prezi: The Coolest Thing Since...Dinosaurs, I Guess. Or Rocket Ships. Those are cool too.

2009-02-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

One of my clinic teammates is really excited about making good presentations. This is great, because he's imparted that excitement onto our team. Probably everyone reading this has heard advice like "don't read off your slides" and "Don't write paragraphs for each bullet point", but I'm willing to bet that relatively few of you have ever tried to make a presentation that completely gets away from the PowerPoint paradigm. PowerPoint, an ancient relic of a past age that's too cumbersome to know that it's dead, encourages slides that look like this:

+--------+
| Title |
|*bullet |
|*bullet |
+--------+
or perhaps this:
+----------+
| Title |
|*bul |pic||
|*bul |___||
+----------+

*edit: HTML's reluctance to insert multiple spaces into a web page made this asciiart somewhat unpleasant to draw...Non-breaking spaces fixed it.

This makes for a very dull presentation, even with an enthusiastic speaker. This is, certainly, a valid style of presentation, but relatively few topics actually benefit from it, and very few presenters know how to make it work to their advantage. It became mainstream because it was just about the limit of what PowerPoint (and computers, really) could do back in the old days. PowerPoint, being a part of the most prolific productivity software suite ever, reached the masses, and an entire generation of students was brought up learning how to use it and carrying that knowledge into the business world.

Unfortunately, they mostly learned how to use the very basic features. PowerPoint has grown beyond its original limitations, but people have stayed behind and still mostly use the basic templates depicted above.

Enter Keynote. I am a PC user -- I run Windows XP on my Tablet PC and Ubuntu Linux on my (distressingly old) desktop. That said, Apple's Keynote software left me speechless the first time I used it. Nearly as intuitive as the iPod, I sat down and knew how to do nearly anything the instant I first tried. It made building a presentation fun, like the classier breed of really horrible Flash games you find online and can't stop playing.

The two presentations that my clinic team has done were built using Keynote, and both were probably among the best presentations that have been given for clinic projects (in my completely informed and unbiased opinion). Instead of bullet points, we had little circles representing our users that scooted around the screen, and lines that appeared between them, and several other gimmicky animations that really made the presentation far more interesting that a static screen full of bullet points.

3 days ago Marty came into my room and said "I just IM'd you a link...check this out." The link was http://prezi.com, and the "this" to check out was one of the samples at the bottom of the home page. Go there. View the three samples. You'll be amazed.

This is cooler than dinosaurs, cooler than space ships, cooler than those awful flash games, and even cooler than sliced bread (although there is some debate about the dinosaurs). This program, called Prezi by taking the Hungarian dimunitive form of the English word "presentation", tries to escape slides altogether. It is a seriously cool piece of software that really has the potential to change the way people give presentations.

Three of my clinic teammates have signed up to be Beta testers, so with any luck our final presentation will be given using Prezi. For those of you interested in it, you can check out the Prezi blog at http://blog.prezi.com and you can follow several of the founders on Twitter.

~KMarsh

And so I emerge victorious from the black depths!

2009-01-29T01:58:00.001-08:00

Welcome back. Sorry it's taken me this long to update, but I am indeed back at Mudd and the semester has gotten underway. Today's title refers to my first time in a darkroom since senior year of high school. I'm taking intermediate B&W photography this semester and the darkroom here is somewhat different than what we had in high school. It's also in the sub-basement of the physics building. Next to rooms with really big lasers.

In other news, I decided not to continue with Russian this semester, so in addition to photography I'm taking Philosophy of Mind on CMC, Clinic, Tools, and independent study with Professor Dodds. It's a light semester with only 12 units (I can't get on the Dean's List for this semester because of this, for instance), but I think I'll be very happy with my decisions.

In addition to all the academic classes I'm taking I also am taking 2 ballroom dance classes on Pomona. Pomona has a dance department whose students study modern dance, ballet, and other expressive dance forms. Mudders can take those classes for Humanities credits (that department is where I did my humanities concentration in Movement Studies, actually), but the ballroom dance classes are perhaps more accurately called "lessons" and are taken for PE credit (0 credits at Mudd, but you're required to take at least 3 pe classes before you graduate. I think I'm up to 10 now, 2 of which I helped teach...). The head of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, Paul Roach, is a recent Pomona College alumnus and teaches the ballroom classes. He's a very funny guy and has a unique style of teaching dance to large groups that I find to be very similar to the style employed by my martial arts instructor before I left for college. This semester I'm taking Silver (intermediate level) International Standard Dance and Silver Social Dance.

Standard is Paul's personal favorite dancing, and it is much more commonly danced in competition than socially (except, perhaps, for weddings you rarely see it in social situations) so that class is very exacting. That class drives us very hard for technique. The 5 Standard dances are Waltz, Tango, Foxtrot, Quickstep and Viennese Waltz. This semester we are starting with Waltz and then moving on to Tango. Last year Liz and I took the Bronze (beginning) International Standard Dance class in which we spent most of our time on Quickstep, but also learned some Waltz and ended with Viennese Waltz. I've never danced Standard Tango and I'm really looking forward to that.

The social dance class is one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. Bronze Social was alright, but the goal there was mostly to teach an enormous group of people the basic steps to a number of common dances (Cha-cha, Salsa, Triple-Step Swing, Polka and Lindy) and to try to get people out of their shells and make them more comfortable in social situations (while Mudd is the most technical school of the 5-C's, the others are no slouches and the difference between college students and high school students is, in some cases, only spelling, so social interaction can be a foreign concept to many people.

Silver Social, on the other hand, is an amazing class. Paul deliberately told us not to form lines like most of the dance classes and the result is a very organic and fairly chaotic group of fairly good dancers who are learning how to be themselves while dancing and look good while having fun on the dance floor. It is more fun than I can do justice to and I suspect will be a very, very good source of stress relief later on in the semester.

Dancing is fun, and I'm really glad I started taking these classes while I was at college.

~KMarsh

Would M'lady Care to Dance?

2008-12-21T23:52:00.000-08:00

The Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland, California plays host to the quarterly Gaskell Ball. Gaskell's is a social ball set in the Victorian era. The signature dance is the Viennese waltz (danced in the old social style, rather than modern ballroom style) but other dances make more than token appearances, such as polka (deadly, high-velocity, skipping), heel-toe galop (aim and charge at other couples in utter chaos), polka mazurka-waltz (slow Viennese waltz with a kick every half turn to warn off hapless dancers and small children), schottiche (German interpretation of what the French thought the Scotts were doing...or something), and some insane set dances with names like "The Jolly Dog Polka" and "Sir Roger de Coverly" (the latter is often followed on the setlist by the "de Coverly Recovery Waltz"). They have a live band, Brassworks, who, incidentally, played at SteampunkCon earlier this year.

The regulars are generally the same people who work at renaissance faires and things like The Great Dickens Christmas Fair. This means two things: first, the people are a little bit strange. Second, the costumes are AMAZING. Many of the people make

their own costumes and they are phenomenal. My girlfriend made my vest and tailcoat as well as her dress. She's actually the only active member of the sewing club at Mudd aside from Professor Sparks, who makes positively stunning quilts. They hope to get more members soon, so if you've an interest in sewing (or learning to sew) you should be pleased to hear that you'll have an outlet at Mudd for your creative urges. And time. Sort of. This dress took Liz 2 years from start to finish, but most of the work was done last semester in preparation for Gaskell's (the ruffles, unseen in this picture took 8 hours of labor each...there are 5 of them. I can't possibly imagine spending an entire work week doing nothing but ruffles).

Oh, and I mentioned the bizarre dance that is the Schottiche earlier. It's danced to 4 counts as follows: step-step-step-HOP, step-step-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP, step-HOP-step-HOP! You can do any number of variants, like the Goose-step Schottiche for a military aspect, the Vecchi Schottiche for a sketchy old man aspect, or the ever-popular Penguin Schottiche for a hilarious and somewhat cute aspect. This dance is usually danced in the shuttle position (partners side-by-side, hands held across the front of their bodies) rather than a traditional ballroom position: your partner's knee comes sharply up with each HOP.... Penguin Schottiche, however, is usually danced in something akin to a conga line. Oh, and Schottiche is pronounced "shoddish" (like the pokemon).

In addition to dancing, I also took pictures. I'm taking Intermediate Black and White Photography next semester (in addition to 2 dance classes, clinic, a philosophy class, and independent study...) and my grandparents gave me their old Canon A1 to use. It's about 30 years old and hasn't been used in nearly that long so I took it with me to the ball to see how it worked. That film is in the shop tonight getting developed (the first three pictures here were taken on my digital camera), so stand by for an update when I get it back and digitized. Until then, happy holidays!

~KMarsh

Apprentice Products Pitches Guitar Trainer to VC's

2008-12-11T02:34:00.000-08:00

Apprentice Products. The name 4 HMC students gave the mock company they created for Professor Evans' "Enterprise and the Entreprenuer" class. Their flagship product: Guitar Trainer. A week and a half ago four of us sat across a table from three venture capitalists, all of whom have been successful enough in the startup world to fund startups themselves. Chris Seib, Marco Thompson, and Eric Johnson took the time out of their busy schedules to drive/fly to Mudd (yes, Eric flew himself and Marco in in from San Diego in his Piper Saratoga II, tail no. N392HP. No, I didn't fly back with them) and listen to a bunch of students organized into made-up companies ask them for $2-5 Million in funding.

The whole class was fascinating -- Professor Evans has helped many student-born companies get off the ground (some succeed, others...he calls them "smoking black holes") and he told us the stories of several of them, including why they failed or some of they things they did correctly that contributed to their successes. He lectured on the different facets involved in building a startup company and the importance of paying attention to them all. The pitch to the VC's was the final project and really the thing the class had been building to the entire time. The VC's listened to our pitches and gave really great feedback -- they do this sort of thing for a living, so they're rather adept at it. After class we went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant with Chris (an HMC alumnus, actually) and had a wonderful meal while chatting with him. All in all, a really cool experience unlike anything I think I would have gotten anywhere else.

~KMarsh

Python is Your Friend

2008-12-05T23:33:00.000-08:00

I said I'd mention when I wrote twitter scripts and true to my word here's the first script I've written to interact with twitter. I was quite surprised to not find a command-line twitter client in the Ubuntu repositories, but perhaps it's because python makes it so easy:

#!/usr/bin/python
import twitter
from sys import argv
api = twitter.Api(username='askForCharon', password='redacted')
status = api.PostUpdate(argv[1])
api.ClearCredentials()

There's the entirety of my script. It knows my credentials (although I'm loathe to write anything that stores a password in plaintext) and takes the message to tweet on the command line. A slightly more sophisticated version would include a check to make sure the message was <= 140 characters. I wrote this for clinic, actually. I was getting ready to start a long-running job and I wanted to be alerted when it finished (particularly if it failed), so I wrote this script and ran the following:

>my_long_job ; tweet "The job finished with status $? at `date`."

This is instructive to budding linux users:

The semicolon means run the second command (tweet) after the first (my_long_job) finishes.
The '$?' is a shell variable that holds the exit status of the last command run.
`date` runs the `date' program and puts the output into the string.
I put the argument to `tweet' in double quotes because the shell will provide variable expansion in a double-quoted string, but will use a single-quoted string verbatim (I wanted it to actually expand $? and `date` into their values, not pass those characters to my program).

If I end up writing a more complete command-line tweet-er I'll post it here. Also, if someone could let me know of a better way to post code snippets on blogger I'd be grateful, because this is terrible.

~KMarsh

Reactions

2008-12-04T11:43:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note for everyone...I've enabled "reactions" for this blog, so below every post you should see buttons for "Tell me more!" and "Not interested". If you liked the post and want me to blog about similar things, click "Tell me more!" and if you think I should be posting about different things (more relevant to Mudd, less technical, more lolcats, etc.) click "Not interested".

Look forward to a post next week (probably not this weekend) about the final days of the semester.

~KMarsh

Playing With Real Boy's Toys

2008-11-28T11:30:00.000-08:00

My family went to my cousins' house in Redding, Ca. for Thanksgiving this year. My uncle designed and built his house, an energy-efficient straw-bale home. He owns a concrete fabrication business called Universal Precast Concrete, Inc. We went out to visit the shop and got to play with some real man's toys. Below are some examples:

Gary brought out his shotgun and let us shoot some clay birds.

It turns out I'm terrible with a shotgun.

Below is a really large CNC (computer numeric control) machine that Gary uses to cut molds out of styrofoam. Once the molds are cut, they're sprayed with polyurethane.

The cement is mixed with a variety of chemicals, shown below, in the 1.5 cu. yd. mixer shown further below, to create the concrete that is then pored into the styrofoam molds yet further below.

Now we get to the most exciting part for me: MIG welding. Gary has a MIG welding rig that he let me play with. He showed me how to lay a bead and let me play around with some scrap steel.

Here we see Gary showing me how leaving space between the plates when making a butt weld allows greater penetration of the weld metal.

The two weldments below are the sheets I practiced on when initially getting the feel for how welding worked (right) and the butt weld that Gary demonstrated the beginning of and had me finish.

Gary eventually got fed up with his workers breaking the hammer handles so he replaced this one with some #7 rebar.

To see more, with more complete descriptions, see the facebook album I posted with these pictures. And Happy Turked Day.

~KMarsh

Tweet Tweet

2008-11-26T02:57:00.000-08:00

Fitting, that just before turkey day I should break down and try twitter. My clinic team, for unknown reasons, decided to hop onto twitter. I think it was iPhone1 and iPhone2 (I try to call them that to their faces whenever possible. Half my team and our advisor have iPhones) wanting to check out the twitter apps. Whatever the reason, my twitter screen name is askForCharon. I've got a feed to it on the sidebar and who knows what else I might do.

Perhaps I'll write a script so I can tweet from the command line. Perhaps I'll write a script that posts messages both to twitter and to my facebook status. Perhaps I'll write a script that parses a file with timestamps and messages and automatically sets up my first script to post the messages when the proper time comes! You never know!

If I do write these scripts, I'll post about them here and, of course, on twitter. I wonder if I'll find μ-blogging addicting enough to keep at it. Have a nice thanksgiving.

~KMarsh

Oh, and give my regards to the ferryman.

Enormous Kites

2008-11-24T11:31:00.000-08:00

Gliders are kind of like enormous kites. You attach a big string and then run really fast to get it into the air. Normally, to help you run fast enough, you get in a powered airplane and use that instead. The Barnstormers finally got to go gliding this month and we're very excited about it. Following are some pictures of the event. These are the three gliders we were flying in and one of the tow planes.
My feet are shown on the pedals of the glider I flew in. Notice the overall lack of instrumentation and controls. There's the big red tow cable release knob in the middle, the pedals at my feet, the stick between my knees, and the trim and spoilers controls at my left hand. And the AC vent, but that was somewhat broken. As for instrumentation, we have an altimeter, a variometer (rate of climb indicator) and airspeed indicator. And a piece of string taped on the outside of the bubble as a slip-slide indicator.
Below is Larry's high performance glider. It's worth >$100,000 and has significantly more bells and whistles than the others. And a reclined seat. With parachutes if you want to do aerobatics, and oxygen if you want to make high-altitude flights.

Larry is the man who runs Sailplane Enterprises out of the Hemet airport and he was one of our tow pilots. He gave us an excellent deal that let us use club funding to get as many students as wanted to out flying.
My co-leader getting ready to glide. She and I were lucky enough to get to fly on both the trips we took. On my second flight the instructor let me try flying while we were still on tow, which is quite the experience. I also got to stall the glider and practice some steep-bank turns. It's a bit of a difference from the Cessna 172 I've flown with Iris, but probably not quite as different as some other aircraft could be.
One of the students in the first group to fly with us is working on his private pilot's license. Larry let him help taxi the tow plane out to the runway after refueling. We also had a private pilot in the second group who got the glider instructor she flew with to sign her log book towards a glider rating.
There are more pictures and stories, but I'll let it go for now with the following group photo of the first group who went out with us. Iris Critchell is the lady at the head of the glider, and my co-leader and I are on the far left of the picture.
If you want to hear more, let me know. Until then, have a great time.
~KMarsh

No Two People Are Not On Fire

2008-11-16T19:35:00.000-08:00

Fortunately, contrary to what Strong Bad would have you believe, we at Mudd are not, in fact, on fire. There are plenty of fires to go around right now (fairly common in Southern California around this time, actually), but they don't usually come very close to Mudd. Just close enough to make us smell smoke for a few days and occasionally drop ash on us when the wind blows the right direction. Look for a more substantial update when I have more time. (Yeah, like that ever happens). No, really, I still have to give you pictures of my freeze ray, for instance, and talk about the glider trips I led the Barnstormers on. (You just keep telling yourself that). I'm not talking to you anymore. (Isn't that was I was just saying?). ...huh.

~KMarsh

Now the Nightmare's Real

2008-11-06T00:35:00.000-08:00

Now Dr. Horrible is here! My Halloween costume was, indeed, Dr. Horrible. The gloves are the very same kind that were used in the video, Tillman 750's. The boots I got from McMaster-Carr
rather than spend the $70 on the authentic Morton Safety boots used in the video. The goggles are old Willson brand welding goggles from the days before arc welding that I got on e-bay last summer. The freeze ray was built from some cardboard boxes, various kinds of tape, bits of pipe from Home Depot, spray paint, and a camera flash (more on that in the next post). The most important part, the coat, was made by my girlfriend, who is an exceptional seamstress as well as being a Mudd engineering student. She modified the McCall 2233 pattern (the original pattern is for a chef's coat) and watched the film countless times to get it right. My Captain Hammer also agonized over his costume, finding
cheap alternatives to the gloves and boots that he needed. Another group had Dr. Horrible people, including the entire Evil League of Evil. More pictures are below. The semester is pretty busy right now, so I'll have to owe you the rest of what should be in this post (more halloween pictures and stories, and an explanation of my awesome freeze ray).

Above: Tie Die and Professor Normal of the ELoE. As a side note; welding goggles make amazing sunglasses.

Catch you later,
~KMarsh

Moving Right Along

2008-10-25T00:32:00.000-07:00

Now that my Quest for Graduation series of post titles is over, I have to express my disappointment in you, my faithful readers. You've had five weeks to tell me where that series came from and on one posted so much as a guess. For those who didn't know, the titles of the last five posts have been variations off the titles of the five games in Sierra's Quest for Glory series. These point-and-click, RPG-ish adventure games were some of the best I've ever played, despite their numerous bugs. Sierra, in its heyday, produced some of the most fun games I've ever played (circa 1990's). They are also some of the buggiest games I've ever played. The bugs were rarely showstopping*, but they certainly were noticeable.

In other news, I have acquired all the components for my Halloween costume and just need to put the finishing touches on a few parts before I'm ready. One of those parts is a capacitor about 2/3's the size of a AA battery. It scares the crap out of me, so I'm not doing anything with that component of the costume until I can get down to the electronics lab on Tuesday. Hopefully I can get all the soldering I need to do done then and just finish with the assembly and spray painting at my leisure. Now that I have tantalized you thoroughly, I take great pleasure in saying that you have to wait until Halloween to see it, like everyone else. Nyah nyah. Don't worry. I'm taking pictures as I go and I'll have plenty from the parties.

Speaking of the electronics lab, there's something cool going on this semester (and hopefully continuing on afterwards). A pair of students who are excited about learning more electrical engineering and getting an intuitive feel for electronic systems set up an informal lab period for interested students to come and play with the electronics lab. We do a little bit of instruction and mostly tinkering on projects of our own. I'm hoping they can help me with the bits of my costume that I don't have the knowledge to do safely.

Speaking of student-driven interest groups, I've got updates on the Barnstormers! Claire and I (co-presidents of the Barnstormers Aeronautics Club here at Mudd, if you'll recall) have been working with Iris Critchell to get the soaring trip going. We flew to Hemet and Crystalaire, where there are glider schools in operation, to see what was available and decide where we wanted to go. Larry Howell, the man in charge of "Sail Plane Enterprises" at Hemet really impressed us and offered us a great deal on pricing. He can only take 12 students a day, and only on the weekends, which is lower than the "Great Western Soaring School" at Crystalaire, but we liked the feel of his operation much more than the Crystalaire one, so we called him up and scheduled two trips. At least two of Claire, Iris, and I will be on each trip, so I'll make sure we'll get plenty of pictures and we'll have some wonderful stories.

See you after Halloween,

~KMarsh

*A glaring exception was Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness. This game had a glitch that made it impossible to progress beyond a certain point no matter what. Instead of releasing a patch or an update, Sierra provided a save file with the character located past this point so that players could see the end of the game, albeit with a different character than the one they had built up along the way.

Quest for Graduation: Dragon Fire

2008-10-22T20:45:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update this time; I have tutoring in an hour and plenty of Russian homework to do before then. I just finished my most recent Computer Vision assignment and thought I'd share: image mosaicking. Using matrix multiplication it is possible to warp the image of a plane to any desired perspective. By assuming the subject of a group of pictures is a plane (a good approximation when taking pictures of, say, the landscape) you can then warp images together so that they overlap properly, creating a panoramic composite image. By choosing corresponding points in the images below, I told my program how to line up the two pictures and it created the third image.

In fact, we can do better. By taking this result and feeding it to the program as one of the inputs, we can extend this panorama indefinitely.* I put a third image into it here:

Next week: Automosaicking.

~Kyle Marsh

*Pro tip: if you actually try to mosaic images all the way around a circle, you'll hit problems as you approach 180 degrees -- the program tries to map straight lines to straight lines, so it'll try to bring the vanishing point (infinity to each side) into the image. Your result will be an infinitely wide image. To actually make a full panorama you have to map the images onto a cylinder, and to do that you need to know the focal length of the camera.

Quest for Graduation: Shadows of the Real World

2008-10-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

They say there is no life after Graduation. If so, I've seen some pretty lively corpses in the last couple of years. But now it's my turn and I have to find a place to work when I am no longer with you. Normally this wouldn't be very hard -- everyone needs computer scientists, right? -- but I have to find something near whatever my girlfriend finds so we don't have to commute too far. Again, we're both in technical fields so this shouldn't be too hard. My girlfriend, however, is looking very closely at the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB. For those of you who don't know, Edwards AFB is in the Middle of Nowhere:
This is great when you want to test supersonic aircraft or munitions, either of which may leave enormous craters in the ground (depending on whether they work or not, respectively). It is somewhat sub-optimal when it comes to having anything else within a reasonable commute of the place.

Hopefully they will have a place for a poor computer scientist among all the engineers. Besides...how cool would it be to learn to fly from a fighter pilot?

In other news, I am really enjoying my Computer Vision class. Professor Dodds is a fun guy and he really makes learning these things fun. Two weeks ago we implemented an algorithm called "seam carving". This algorithm will remove connected seams of pixels from images to resize them to different aspect ratios without cropping or distortion. The idea is that you first find the edges of a picture (or some other measure of "energy"), then find the string across the picture with the least "edgyness" or "energy" and remove it. This maintains any interesting areas of the picture, where "interesting" is defined by your energy function; in this example, edges are "interesting".
This picture is of a Pentium Pro I opened up (fairly destructively) to get a look at what was inside. The die on the left is the L-2 cache and the die on the right is the processor itself (Pentium Pro was based off the Pentium II's microarchitecture, which is what the Core2 chips are based on, as well). The image in the upper right is the energy function; white pixels are strong edges, black pixels have no edge strength. The lower left picture is the result of adding up energy across the image to find the lowest energy "seam" and the picture in the lower right shows the carve result (same scale as the original image in the upper left). This method doesn't always work well, but when it does it can produce some spectacular results. There is an extension (that we did not implement) to use seam carving to resize videos as well.

This week we're working on auto-mosaicking to create panoramic images from a set of pictures.

Also: I'm looking forward to Halloween like crazy; it's by far my favorite holiday and there are always such great costumes here at Mudd.

~KMars

Quest for Graduation: Wages of War

2008-09-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry for abandoning you last week; Clinic suddenly crunched on me. For those of you who haven't run across it yet, Clinic is a really neat program available to most Mudd students. In 1963, Professor Jack Alford of the Engineering Department founded the Engineering Clinic program, grown from the idea that engineers should have the same sort of "clinical" experience that medical students get.

The basic idea is that real-world companies with real-world problems submit a problem that they would like a team of students to work on. If their problem is accepted, a team of 3-5 students in the relevant major gets put together and spends a year working on the project. Clinic is worth 3 units (one normal class) per semester and most students in the majors that offer clinic take 2 semesters -- engineers, masochistic people that they are, take 3.

My Clinic sponsor is Fair Isaac Corporation, of FICO Credit Score fame. They realized that they often have people working in different offices on very similar projects who don't know about one another. This leads to duplication of work, lost efficiency, etc., etc.

The solution? I'm glad you asked. They want us to build them a system that reads their employee's e-mail, determines who is interested in what, and then tells you who else would be interested in receiving any new e-mail you write. It sounds really big-brotherish and scary, but it's contained on the company network and everyhting done on company computers is the property of the company (it's part of the hiring paperwork) so the moral issues are avoided.

It's actually quite a neat project and I have a great team. We were the first team to present our proposed design to the other clinic teams, and while it's great to have that out of the way, it meant we had to prepare the presentation last weekend. That meant we didn't have that time to prepare our Statement of Work, the rough draft of which is due to our faculty advisor on Friday. I was up until 04:40 last night.

Now that I've given you all my excuse I have a request to make of you. Humor my vanity. I know you're out there; the mudderblogs all have Google Analytics tracking our traffic, but I've gotten only one or two comments from prospective students since I started.

I read an interesting article last year; someone did a research project at a university to study the effect of surveilance on people. Students could opt-in to the program and they would then wear tracking devices that would constantly relay their position to a system on the school's computer network. the information was available to everyone at the school. The people who opted into the program could check up on who was checking up on their locations (I'm watching you watch me! You'd better watch yourself!), and astonishingly they started showing signs of depression if noone was looking at the information.

You might think this is shocking at first, but after thinking about it, it sort of makes sense. After all -- that scenario is an actor's worst nightmare; it's the reason most people get stagefright. It's horribly crushing to put yourself on a stage and have nobody interested.

Don't take this to mean I'm upset or depressed by writing this blog -- I'm actually having a great deal of fun doing so -- it's just that I'm writing to help prospective students decide if they want to come to Mudd and I don't feel like I'm having any effect if noone mentions anything. Even if you don't have any questions, drop me a line; say hello. You don't need to sign in to leave a comment, so go ahead and let us know you're there. We're all excited to hear from you and I just wanted to reiterate that you are, in fact, allowed (and encouraged) to be commenting; asking questions, arguing, and generally being social.

As a parting word, the 10 points I offered for citing the inspiration for the recent post titles is still up for grabs. You, yes you, should post a comment suggesting where they are coming from. These 10 points are quite valuable and useful to cash in for instant cred in any geek-trivia competition.

I'll try to get you another update this weekend.

~KMarsh

Quest For Graduation: Trial by Fire

2008-09-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

Once again, I find myself in the digital electronics lab at 2am (or, as I prefer, 0200) -- edit: by the time I finished writing this it was 0340. I'll swear I told myself I'd never do this again, but here I am making the same mistakes I made this time last year. My girlfriend (an engineer) is taking E85: Digital Design and Computer Architecture (required for engineers, not CS, but I took it last year for fun) and I offered to help her when she needed things explained. One of my primary functions should be helping her avoid all the little pitfalls in the terrible-does-not-deserve-to-exist-and-should-die-in-a-fire software that class uses called Xilinx ISE. How this software came to be industry standard I do not know, but it is and it is buggier than any game Sierra ever made back in the 90's. And that's hard to do (mind you, I do love my vintage Sierra games).

Despite my supposed wisdom from having experienced all this before I ran us into a 2 hour detour when I forgot that xilinx (look! I'm not even dignifying you with the capital letter deserved by proper nouns, you awful program!) is sensitive to which file you have selected when you tell it to run the simulator. Thus I ended up having her simulate the schematic file rather than the testbench file. The result: the simulator happily simulated the circuit with no input. It didn't have any test program to run through the circuit to check it, so it just said "Okay, your inputs are floating, so I can't really say what the outputs should be, but I've got it sitting here simulated." This led us on a merry 2 hour chase reorganizing how we did the input wiring in the schematic before I noticed that the wrong file was selected in the other window because xilinx is made of FAIL.

On top of the whole xilinx sucking thing, realize that there's a much better way to do this: HDLs. HDL is an acronym for Hardware Description Language. There are two popular (read: industry standard) HDLs: VHDL and Verilog. VHDL is an acronym for VHSIC HDL and VHSIC is an acronym for Very High Speed Intigrated Circuits program. It was developed by the Department of Defense. Hence the 2-level deep acronym. VHDL is more common in academia, and Verilog is more common in industry. Professor Harris, one time digital engineer for Intel, decided we should use Verilog. I digress. The point is, the cute little gui that gives everyone so many headaches in xilinx is really just a wrapper around verilog. When you click the buttons to make it simulate it writes (rather nasty) Verilog behind the scenes. If you wrote the Verilog yourself to begin with, as we do in later labs, you'd avoid all the headaches of xilinx and it'd be much faster to boot.

\end{rant}

By now I've probably scared you all off and bored the rest to tears. I had a nice paragraph here about what I think is cool about Verilog (it looks like a programming language, but each "function" is actually a hardware module so you can't treat it exactly like programming) but then blogger went and ate it, so I'll leave it with that bit inside the parenthesis. If anyone's particularly interested feel free to leave a comment for me and I'll describe it in more detail. To finish off I'll leave you with an interesting proposal: Professor Dodds teaches a class called "Programming Practicum" in which students must solve problems similar to those found on the ACM programming challenges. He gives bonus points for being the first to solve a problem in a particular obscure language. This has led people to solve some of his problems in languages like x86 assembly, Prolog, PostScript, and Tex, of all things. I think someone should solve one in Verilog, that is, someone should implement the solution in hardware and run a simulation to get the answer.

As a parting word, I'll give 10 points to the first person to correctly identify the inspiration to the recent post's titles.

~KMarsh

Quest for Graduation: So You Want To Be A Mudder

2008-09-17T00:57:00.000-07:00

Здравствуйте!

We're back and school has begun. Actually, it began 3 weeks ago. The semester started off rushed for me, but it's settled down for now and I finally have time to blog again. As you may have noticed, I'm learning Russian. It's far too much work to be worth it (6 hours of class/week + 2 hours of homework/night = totally not worth it), but it's my favorite class so far. Be that as it is, however, I'm enjoying all my classes considerably more than usual -- there are often one or two that I just need to take, but this year all my classes are of my own choosing (except clinic, sort of) and I'm enjoying them all.

I'm enjoying living in Case, too. The rooms are huge, although mine is still filled with boxes that I haven't unpacked yet or are waiting to return to storage, and this time around I actually know the people I'm living with and they all range from "I don't know you very well yet" to "damn cool". We've got my Wii in the corner of the L and Litz got a PS3 over the summer so we're going to buy Rock Band 2 when they come out with the new peripherals for it. I also managed to acquire an armchair and 3-seat couch from my grandparents when they bought new furnature. It is some of the most excruciatingly comfortable furnature I've ever experienced, so I'm happy.

Computer Vision is such a cool class. I'm not really sure how much Professor Dodds actually knows about robotics and computer vision because he's always telling us stories about things he tried that didn't work, but I get the feeling that he knows his stuff. It doesn't actually matter, though, because he is extremely good at teaching it and at inspiring excitement and enthusiasm in his students, and that's really the whole point. Our first project was to write a program in C++ or Matlab that locates a can of spam in an image. We took a bunch of pictures of each other holding spam in class on the first day and used those to test our programs. We met with mixed success, but had a fun time seeing what we could do with the code libraries available.

In non-academic news I am now co-president of the Barnstormers (as mentioned before, apparently...). The Barnstormers are HMC's club for all things aeronautical, and Claire and I were given leadership of the club when Matt McKnett graduated. We've already done some cool stuff, like skipping class to hang out with Stan Love -- an HMC alumnus who happens to be an astronaut, but we have even more cool stuff coming up.

First is the annual aero alumni fly-in. At the end of September each year many of the school's alumni who have airplanes will fly in to Brackett Field, take current students up on joyrides with them in everything from carbon-fiber homebuilts to a Citation 2 jet. After the flying we all retire to the Aviation Room at Hoch-Shannahan dining hall (paid for by the aero alumni, hence the "Aviation Room") to have dinner and catch up.

Second is an event we've been planning since last year (also mentioned before). When Claire and I took over the Barnstormers, Matt and Iris proposed that we try to take any interested students on a gliding trip. We started looking at possible glider schools and sent an e-mail to the student body asking for interested parties. Within hours I'd received over 50 responses. Now, after sending an e-mail to the new freshman class, I have over 80 people who have expressed interest. The club got $2400 in funding from the school for the trip, and if even half of those people are still interested when the time comes we'll probably have to make them pay more than I wanted. Also, Claire, Iris and I flew out to visit one of the potential glider schools and the guy there mentioned that he could probably fit about 12 students in one day, so we'll have to split this up into multiple days. More on this as it unfolds.

That's about all I can think of right now, but keep an eye out for more regular posting -- I'll probably start updating on Friday or Saturday and I'll see about getting an RSS feed going. As a parting word, kudos to all those who caught the reference in this post's title.

~KMarsh

Mad Science

2008-07-26T17:08:00.000-07:00

IT LIVES!!! Well...I'm sure it would if I were a biologically-minded mad scientist, anyway. If you look back a few posts, you'll find that I planned on building a theremin and writing a plugin for calculating multilegged robot gaits in Blender 3D. Neither of these has happened. However, mad science finds a way, and I have two projects that are (mostly) done now:

IR Goggles: Engineers learn that there is no such thing as perfection. Specifically, for my application, there is no such thing as a perfect band-pass filter. The human eye can be thought of as a system that produces a significant response to electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 4 and 7 hundred nanometers, peaking at about 550nm (green light). This band of the EM-spectrum is usually called "visible light" because, well, we can see it. The response is a curve, though. It's impossible to get a sharp cutoff in any system, and that includes our eyes. Thus, with a powerful enough source and some way to block all the "visible" light it becomes possible to see light classified as infrared (around 720nm). Your eye produces a very weak response to near-IR light, but it's still there and by blocking out all the visible light, we can actually see IR light. I don't have quite the right lighting gels, however. A friend had extra gels that she gave me and she had the correct "Primary Red" but not "Congo Blue". I tried it with the "Royal Lavender" that she had, but that doesn't actually block much more red than the "Primary Red". Thus I have very dark red sunglasses until I get my hands on some actual "Congo Blue" gels or equivalent.
Tesla Turbine: Nicola Tesla was a mad genius. Probably my favorite historical figure, Tesla was a brilliant man who really had some great ideas. Many know him as the invertor of the Tesla Coil and pioneer of AC electricity, but he also built other things. The Tesla Turbine is a design for a bladeless turbine that uses a nifty property of flowing fluids known as the Boundary Layer Effect. In short, when a fluid is flowing across a surface, the molecules against the surface don't actually move. The next layer of molecules moves slowely and each further molecule moves faster until you reach the full speed of the fluid. Tesla, although fluid dynamics was not a field that we knew much about at the time, observed this and used it to make a pump to move mercury. He thought it was friction at first, but soon realized it was something else. He later ran it in reverse, pushing fluid through it in order to make it spin. The idea here, is that you take a bunch of disks and stack them up with very little space in between. You then put the stack in a cylinder and squirt a fluid on a tangent to the edges of the disks. The fluid "sticks" to the disks because of the boundary layer effect, transferring some of its energy to the disks. As it loses energy, it travels more slowly, so the radius of the circle it takes around the disks shrinks. It eventually spirals all the way to the middle where it reaches an exhaust drain. I made mine from CD's glued together with neodymium magnets and a small CD spindle. These turbines produce high rotational velocities, but rather low torque. I suspect that is the reason you never see them in modern applications even though they are more efficient than conventional turbines -- you normally want high torque.

Pretty good for the last two weeks of living here. I'm going home next Friday, but we're almost entirely packed right now. For those of you wondering why on earth someone would choose to live out of a bag in South-Central LA for a week (where you can't really go out to do anything without fear of getting shanked) I shall...well, at least rationalize my insanity. The apartment building tosses everyone out for 10 days at the end of summer. Why this is, I do not know, but Chris, Megan and I got some storage pods delivered and piled almost everything in the apartment into them. We are left with the one or two bags that we're taking home when we leave and the food in the fridge. Incidentally, this is why I don't have pictures of the tesla turbine being built -- they're on my desktop computer. It's out of commission until I get back to Mudd in August. I'm so bored this weekend....

Adventures in Cooking! (in Space!!!!)

2008-06-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

There are some things money can't buy. These things can be enormously enhanced by imagining them in space.

On a slightly more serious note: tonight I cooked for the first time, a real meal for myself. Sure I've made scrambled egg sandwiches for lunch and baked cookies for dessert, but tonight for the first time I cooked a real dinner with vegetababbles and everything! I decided to chronicle it, then thought of the MasterCard commercials, then thought of Star Wars, then went a little overboard with the star shaped brush in Photoshop...although I must admit I forgot to do all the cool glowy filters on the lasers. Ah well.

Anyway, let this be a lesson to you all: cooking is not hard, is not scary, and means you don't have to live off hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches for an entire summer like I did last year.

Now a week later I have not died and in fact just cooked some chili. When I say some, I mean I'll be eating chili for a week. I have postulated that anyone who is good at cooking and not freaking out at the same time is prime material for chemlab -- little chemistry is as fast paced as cooking is when you don't know what might burn or when you should have had cans already opened.
~KMarsh

Adverse Yaw

2008-05-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend, Liz, got back from a semester in Ireland a few days ago and for her belated birthday present I took her flying. I e-mailed Iris Critchell (who I still have to write a "People I'm Glad to Know" post about...) asking if she would be willing to take us for a short flight on Saturday because Liz couldn't participate in the flight lab in her Flight Mechanics class. She agreed and asked what Liz wanted to do. After a while of that we decided to meet at 13:30 on Saturday and go for a spin in "42-Golf"; one of the Cessna 172's she flew for the Bates Program. The Cessna 172 is one of the most stable aircraft you'll find and Iris delighted in explaining the how and why of the aircraft's responses to us because we both understood a lot of what she was talking about.

One of the new things that I learned was adverse yaw. In the aero world, the three rotational movements are called "pitch" (tipping up or down), "roll" (rolling side-to-side), and "yaw" (pivoting left and right). When you use the rudder to induce yaw, one wing is travelling faster through the air than the other which provides it with more lift. That additional lift induces a roll. However, when you use the alierons to create roll, the change in lift and drag across the wingspan will induce yaw counter to the turn. This phenomenon is called "adverse yaw" and is prevented by applying rudder into the turn as you roll.

Iris, being a flight instructor, was able to put us (one at a time) into the left seat and let us actually fly the plane once she'd gotten us into the air. Among the things that she showed us were steep-bank turns, low-power (and thus slow) flight control, and stalls. We also got to see how the plane reacted to flight conditions it didn't like -- we gave it a sharp tug to increase or decrease pitch and then took our hands off the controls and let the plane sort itself out over the course of the two oscillations for which it had been rated to do so. After we flew around for a while and learned more about flying in an hour than we had ever known before she took us back down and we headed back to Mudd.

Iris mentioned that when a new flight instructor is being tested for certification, it's an immediate fail if the trainee instructor ever stops talking. Perhaps that's why she'll talk your ear off.

~KMarsh

At World's End

2008-05-25T21:27:00.000-07:00

This first semester of blogging has finally drawn to a close. Another year is lost to the mists of time, the summer coalesces into reality, and my friends and I become Seniors. My apologies for not making these posts separate and sooner, but I've been remarkably busy the last week. It just means I have more to talk about now.

First up is the end of school. Spring semester 2008 is now over at Harvey Mudd College and that means us students are out to do whatever it is students do over the summer. In my case that means working in Pasadena. Before we get there, though, we have graduation! The seniors are leaving us for ever and ever until they come back to tell us how easy the rest of the world is, and we get to listen to Bill Nye the Science Guy give the commencement speech. Bill's a great speaker and now my class has to come up with someone better...I have no clue how we're going to magic that up. Side note: I swear, if you're gonna get a doctoral degree pick the school with the best robes. We've got some very colorful members among our faculty.

Graduation from Mudd occurs on a Sunday (often Mother's day) and students are required to vacate the dorms by 8:00 Monday morning. Thus Sunday night finds my roommate and I packing feverishly and wondering where all this crap came from and more importantly, where it all can possibly hide during the year -- you really settle into a place and don't realize how much stuff you have until it's time to pack it all away. Things also tend to be distressingly non-rectangular. Being the first time that I'm spending the entire summer not living at Mudd (frosh year I took Summer Math, so I stayed for the first 6 weeks and soph year I worked on Staff for the CS Department almost the entire time) this is the first time that I've actually had to pack everything. I'm moving (moved...) into my sister's apartment in LA for the next 11 (10) weeks, so everything must be packed up and everything must be moved or put in storage. Good thing Mudd provides a lot of storage options for us. You see there my room in a state of partial destrucion. Things certainly got worse before they got better. I hadn't thought to take any pictures of my new room/apartment until now and it's currently plunged into darkness, so that'll wait until the morning.

Finally, I started work last week! So far I'm enjoying it. Guidance Software does computer forensics; in the paraphrased words of my (Mudd alum!) boss: first the door-kickers go and kick in the door (doorknobs are out of style in today's world), they shoot a bunch of people and shout "Clear!" Then the detectives come in and shut down the computers in a forensically-sound manner, check the computers into evidence, check them back out, and take the hard drives out. The hard drives have write-blockers attached and the detectives use our software to make an image of the drives. The computers get checked back into evidence and finally the detective uses our software to search the drive images for whatever he or she is looking for (incriminating e-mails, pictures, documents) even in the unallocated disk space (deleted files and such). It's apparently incredible to see someone tear into a drive with this and my boss is hoping to get me into one of the training courses they offer because it's "Wicked cool."

In order to unlock all the features of the software so I can be a developer, they gave me a USB dongle. It's worth about $60,000.

~KMarsh

edit: Here are pictures of my apartment. The first is the living room/kitchen/dining room and the second is my room.

Gimmie just a minute...

2008-05-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

There will be an update early next week, I swear -- I've been so busy packing and moving and starting work that I haven't had time to get around to it. Actually, by then there will be two updates I'll want to make.

By the way...I know I'm getting some visitors...you should comment; it'd make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

~KMarsh

Free at Last, Free at Last...

2008-05-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

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

Army of (Friendly) Robots

2008-05-03T18:50:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago the CS department used the colloquium period to tell us students what the professors would be working on over the summer. Professor Dodds' presentation included a slide proclaiming that he would be building an Army of (Friendly) Robots. He claimed this is because an Army of Robots should be on everyone's ToDo list, but helikes the thought of friendly robots more than the thought of unfriendly robots.

Last Thursday was the demonstration day for our robotics class. As you may remember, my team was intending to enter the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge, but unfortunately two of our 4 members were also taking VLSI which maybe sorta ate all our time and possibly our souls. We scaled it back so that we were only looking for textbooks, under the assumption that textbooks have very well-defined images, and did not implement the bounding-box stuff. Even so we were in the lab Wednesday night from 17:00 until class the next morning. We seemed to work best in shifts of two or three; you've heard that too many cooks will spoil the soup, and in this case there weren't enough different parts for all of us to work simultaneously on the project.

We each had "expertise" in a different area of the project, too; I knew how to make the wheels take the robot where I wanted it to go and had a good general feel for making Python talk to the different microcontrollers we were using (the ER1 Evolution base, the AcronameBrainStem controlling the servos, and the Arduino board controlling the sonar). Heather was the vision person and she did most of the work making our robot identify the books. Greg was the man who braved the dark waters of computer networking to get our MacBook Pro and Dell PC talking to one another via a short length of ethernet cable and even magicked up the campus network on the MacBook's wireless and shared it with the Dell. I don't understand such black arts, but he managed it. Ellen was the servo wizard. I bloody hated those things. They were built from magic and the desolation of lost souls and were even more finickey than the network to get right and always did something wrong if you looked at them cross-eyed, but she managed to bend them to her will somehow.

Next up we actually had to integrate all these pieces. We had a subversion repository full of code fragments that were each a proof of concept for controlling one element of our setup, but with three microcontrollers, two computers, and code written in both C and Python it was no mean task to get them all working together. In fact, it took all night. I was took the task of writing the main Python driver while Ellen was at a play rehersal and Greg and Heather worked on the vision code. I spend a good deal of time making it modular and following good coding procedures and I think that will really help anyone who decides to follow in our footsteps or really anyone who needs to figure out how to make any of these controllers work.

Once I had that put together, we hooked everything up, turned it on, and watched with bated breath as our robot ran headlong into a cardboard box. Turns out that the sonar sometimes returned a bad value and that would crash my program, so I caught the exception and ignored it -- potentially a dangerous thing to do, but it was a 30second fix and I was in a rush. After some confusion stemming from dead batteries powering the servos (did I mention how much I hate those things yet?) we actually got it running and completed the final tests around 07:00 Thursday morning. By this time Greg was passed out and Ellen had gone to bed leaving Heather and I to run the final tests and add in some amusing code of our own. Here is a video of our demo. Professor Dodds isn't the greatest of steadycam men, but it's probably the most exciting video of our robot so far. And for those of you who are wondering, Yes. The "Where are you hiding" is a tribute to the turrets in Valve's Portal.

~KMarsh

It's About Time!

2008-04-23T21:16:00.000-07:00

Finally someone comes out and tells the truth about cell phones and aircraft instrumentation...and it only took the airlines opening up Wi-Fi on flights to make someone actually do their research and explain it to the rest of the world. Cell signals do not interfere with aircraft communications or other instrumentation. The radio waves used by cell phones are limited to specific frequency bands shown here, and they do not overlap with those used by aircraft communications as seen in the U.S. Frequency Allocation Chart. They've traditionally been prohibited on board airplanes because they play havoc with the cell phone networks.

A cellular network works because the towers have overlapping areas of coverage -- think of a Venn-Diagram -- and when the phone is in the intersection of two towers' coverage areas, it chooses to use the one that gives it a better signal. The problem is that the radio waves used by cell phones get blocked by buildings, mountains, trees, and other unfortunate side-effects of civilization and geography so the towers are fairly close and powerful to provide good coverage. A plane flies over all the detritus on the ground and your cell phone can receive a decent signal from towers miles away. This means that the phone is constantly switching towers to find the best signal and that puts unwanted strain on the network. A cell phone will crash a plane the same way it will crash a car -- by distracting the driver, not by interfering with instrumentation. And airline pilots get slightly more training than automobile drivers.

Wired magazine ran an article in the current issue that mentions this, although it doesn't do much to explain it. The primary focus was to let people know that several major airlines are providing Wi-Fi service to passengers via-cellular networks. The way these work is by having a "cell tower" in the plane connect to the base stations and all the network devices on the plane connect to its tower instead of the cell sites, thus avoiding the network problems described above.

I may have some details wrong in the above description as I don't know a great deal about radio communications, but the gist is correct and this has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, so I'm glad the myth is finally getting resolved. It's as bad as the 10% of your brain myth.

~KMarsh

Never Gonna Give It Up

2008-04-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

They just RickRolled karaoke night at the dining hall....

Old Engineers are Amazing

2008-04-23T01:27:00.000-07:00

I just spent the last 40 minutes up to my elbows with a fellow student in the nether regions of a pinball machine. It's an old Adams Family pinball table that the student hangout and pizza joint recently acquired and it wasn't working; the ball would vanish down a little chute and should have been knocked to the side and then shot out. When the solenoid triggered to knock it to the side, though, the ball didn't move. We pulled the ball out to look at the chute and I found a light bulb from elsewhere in the machine had been knocked off and gotten stuck in the chute, preventing the ball from going through the hole in the side. We pulled it out and the machine worked.

Mostly. The screen didn't, which is kind of a pain. It appeared that everything else worked, so after some rooting around we discovered a key hanging inside the case of the machine that, once we tested it, opened the panel that the screen is on. We took it out and looked around to find a very smoky looking fuse -- we suspect it was blown when Ross zapped himself under the table, but we couldn't quite tell and didn't have a spare on us. We'll go back soon and check to see if that was it.

But the cleverness that you see in old mechanical things! It's really amazing what those old-timey engineers could come up with. Take the bumpers, for instance. They are a plastic or metal tube that the ball collides into. Around the base is a pressure switch that the ball presses when it hits the bumper. That switch triggers a solenoid (almost everything in the machine is a solenoid) that drops a metal ring from the top of the bumper. The ring is concentric with tube part of the bumper but slightly larger around so that it hits the ball somewhere on the bumper-side of the ball's center, forcing the ball away from the bumper. There was also a solenoid pointed at the side of the case. The best guess that Ross and I could come up with was that it was for making big thumps as sound effects.

~KMarsh

I Love Mudders. And Planes.

2008-04-22T01:30:00.000-07:00

I should preface this post with the following confession: I am a compulsive e-mail checker. When I'm at my computer I'll usually have a window open to GMail and I have this nasty habit of replying to e-mail as soon as I see it rather than waiting until I have, say, finished my homework.

With that in mind, consider the following. I sent an e-mail to the student mailing list (students dash L, we call it) asking for students interested in a glider trip with the aeronautics club next year at 22:30 on a Monday night. I had the good luck to send it right as the mailing list moderator was cleaning out his in-box so it got sent right away. Within 3 minutes I had 7 responses. 3 and a half hours later, in the middle of the night, I had 34 responses. One day later and I had nearly 50 responses. I did not expect this, but it is exciting all the same. The 3 minute one is really the important one.

As for the trip, well I'm taking over joint leadership of the Barnstormers (HMC's aeronautics club) next year and one of the suggested events was to schedule a trip for the club to go on a glider trip. We need to submit our budget proposal by Friday, so I needed to gauge interest: a 30 minute flight is about $100, we might get a 10% discount, people'd probably be willing to spend about $20 out of pocket and the club pays the rest if we can get our hands on the dough. Thus, it's just a matter of how many people are interested. With 50 expressing interest right now I figure we'll probably find ourselves with about half that actually ending up wanting/able to go depending on when it's scheduled.

Another thing to note is that Harvey Mudd College used to have an aeronautics program in which students would learn about aviation and eventually get their private pilot's license. Iris Critchell was the driving force behind the program, and she's still here at Mudd. Look for more about the Bates Program and Iris in upcoming posts.

~KMarsh

Registration and Current Coursework

2008-04-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've settled on a language now: I'm going to take Russian next semester. I wanted to learn a new alphabet/writing system but I'd been told that Chinese and Japanese are huge time sinks and I don't want to deal with that on top of clinic et cetera. I sent an e-mail to Professor Little who teaches the engineering Project Management course to ask him how much it will overlap with the Software Development course I took last semester and depending on the answer I'll take either that or Computer Networks.

Last night the entire school decided to party. I'm not entirely sure why, but among other reasons it seems that everyone realized that we're near the end and the mountain of coursework is, in fact, doable. For some value of doable, at least. I've finished one of the movement analyses I have to do and have started researching my big paper, so that's good, but VLSI needs to be documented, so we have a huge task writing that up now as well. My robotics project has been scaled back to the problem of finding textbooks instead of generic objects because two of our team members are in VLSI and couldn't work on the robot much recently. I'd better get back to researching.

~KMarsh

Registration is in the Air

2008-04-14T20:31:00.001-07:00

The end of the semester is upon us and as the flowers struggle up through the melting frost (yeah right) the time for pre-registration is come. We just got our pre-reg packets which include our yellow card, tons of fliers, other random spammy papers, and the all important course catalog for the 5C's. Here's the idea: Similar to room draw, everyone at Mudd, by class, gets a time slot to register for classes next semester (officially registration isn't until next semester starts, but we pick our classes and everything now during pre-registration). We fill out the provided card with the classes we wish to take (as well as some alternates in case classes fill before we get to register) and have it signed by both our humanities adviser and our technical adviser. When the time comes we stand in a huge and delayed line, skipping classes and playing general havoc with the school to try to get into the classes we need to graduate.

Tentatively, my schedule for next semester looks like this:

CS Clinic (cool industry research/work project class)
CS Colloquium (get talked at for an hour a week by people doing CS-y things)
Computer Vision (taught by Zach Dodds, who is Awesome, about once a decade)
Occult and Magical Philosophy (taking it on Pitzer with friends -- fills Humanities reqs.)
Some Language Class

German -- 4 days a week and I've wanted to take it for a while.
Japanese -- possibly quite useful, but 5 days a week and people tell me it's hard/huge time requirement.
Chinese -- 5 days a week, but taught on Mudd by a new prof. Fills an on-campus hum req. but new prof is a gamble. I'm not remarkably interested in it.
Russian -- 5 days a week. Slavic language may be useful for travel in Eastern Europe.

Some Other Class

Project Management -- Engineering class, may have overlap with Software Design.
Networks -- I don't know much about computer networks and I really should learn.
Enterprise and Entrepreneurs -- Econ class on Mudd, fills on-campus hum req. Easy prof.
Materials Science & Energy Conversion/Storage -- something cross listed under Chem, Engineering, and Physics. Sounds interesting, but held at 8:00-9:15pm

Pretty cool choices, this semester, all in all. Oh, and for those of you who wondered, VLSI has improved immensely -- we got the microcode done and are just puttering around with optimization now. I still have to start that research paper, but I'm really enjoying myself at the moment.

~KMarsh

Its the Small Things that Really Count

2008-04-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

Since I've come to Mudd I have noticed several small things that aren't mentioned during admissions at any college (that I found) that make the Mudd experience so much better. These are official campus programs, so they're more than just the (generally wonderful) congenial atmosphere between students, staff, and faculty, but they don't get any recognition from the admissions office.

First is DOS, the Dean Of Students office. Dean Chris (also known as Dean Fun at times) hires his "DOS Muchachos" to aid in planning study breaks and events for the student body. Things they get up to include $2 tickets to the midnight release showing of movie X ($5 if you go IMax, I think), water fights in the quad on Friday afternoon, "s'mores on wheels" rolling through the dorms in the evenings during winter, and the "Indiana Jones Interactive Experience" projected on the enormous blow-up screen (think bounce castle, but with a screen) in the quad complete with giant rubber ball covered in brown paper chasing a student in an Indiana Jones hat through the audience.

Next up we have CAP, the Committee for Activities Planning. This committee subsidizes off-campus activities such as movies, concerts, and trips to Disneyland. If you want to do something fun but think it costs just a bit too much, go to CAP and they'll probably offer to subsidize it if you can scrounge up about 10 interested students.

For faculty-student interaction, the Leonard Fund is hard to beat. This fund will pay for up to $8 a person for up to 8 students eating out with a faculty member. The most notable use of this was spring semester 2007 when a group of my friends would go to Jack in the Box every Wednesday night at around 3am with Professor Bob Schaffer. He could almost be a CS prof with those hours.

Finally, one of the nicest amenities and perhaps the least touted is the summer storage. Each dorm has a storage room or two that residents can use to store their stuff over the summer when they're off campus. Mudd also orders in a bunch of "storage pods" which are plywood boxes that are left on campus in the weeks leading up to graduation that are then carted off to some secure storage facility. Most other colleges and universities that I've heard about do not do anything like this, leaving their students to either rent public storage or cart everything back home/to their summer housing (whatever that may be).

~KMarsh

I'm Okay...Really.

2008-04-03T11:06:00.000-07:00

Those of you who read Trevin's blog will have heard already about VLSI. For those of you who don't, VLSI is an acronym for Very Large Scale Integration and is the name for the processor designing, laying out, and fabricating integrated circuits -- computer chips. HMC's VLSI class is taught by a man who is a legend in the industry and as such is incredibly hard. I'm a computer science major, not an engineering major, so I decided to take the class because I enjoyed the simple digital design class and wanted to learn down to the electron level how computers work. That thirst has been slaked.

When the class started, it was incredibly interesting to me and even though it was a lot of work (we had a 16 hour problem set once...) I was really enjoying it. Now in the second phase of the class we are working as a 14-student team on a single, big project: we're building a 6502 microprocessor -- the chip that was the heart of machines like the Apple II and the Nintendo Entertainment System. This sounds cool, and it is, but my partner and I were brought onto the microarchitecture team and for the first few weeks were slogging through this code that we didn't write and had no idea of how it was structured. The last few weeks have been spent finally understanding the code and trying to fix it. All the while the other teams are moving forward and if they're not waiting on us now, they certainly will be if we don't get finished soon.

I think you'll understand, then, when I say that I'm just done with that class. I can't drop it (not because I'm not allowed to, but because I've got this far and really would like to finish it, and also because other people are depending on me to do my work and if I leave then suddenly someone else has to step in and take over for me), but I'm sure my grade is suffering terribly because of the slow progress we're making and, worse yet, this class is eating into the time I should be devoting to my other classes -- I have little time to be working on robotics, which is still fun, and I have a research paper for a humanities class that I have yet to start. Hopefully we'll get this microcode finished this week so we can start paying attention to other things.

~KMarsh

New Camera!

2008-03-31T17:01:00.000-07:00

As an incentive to take pictures to show you all, the admissions department at Mudd offered to give us bloggers cameras to take pictures of the things we blog about. I just got mine today, so in honor of this fine event I present pictures of my new camera as taken by my old (bulkier) camera.

I would also like to mention that this is the way packages should be. Notice how everything is packed nicely inside with no glaring empty, unused space? Also there's none of that infernal "clamshell" packaging that is impossible to open in a manner that is either safe or neat (I have a scar on my right hand from when I was about 7 years old trying to open one of those).

Finally, I finally broke down and installed the camera software for this camera to check it out. In the past I've always regarded that as junk that is a cheap imitation of decent photo software, but it's actually quite nice to be able to plug the camera into the computer and automatically transfer the images to a destination of my choosing and delete them from the memory card. I was also gratified to learn that by simply plugging the camera into my Ubuntu Linux machine I was presented with nearly the same options without installing any software myself.

~KMarsh

Fire and Brimstone

2008-03-29T16:42:00.000-07:00

Let's face it, fire is just fun. The show last night was amazing. A Different Spin put on a great act using all their toys (well...they didn't do any contact juggling, but that's really a bit much to ask). The show was set to some pretty high-energy music, including a techno remix of the Tetris song (search for Basshunter Tetris on YouTube). After the show they packed up and then I took them around Mudd looking for a place to hang out. They're a really cool bunch and since they're based in Oakland (near where I live when I'm not at Mudd) I'll probably hang out with them a bit over the summer. If you want to check out their website you can find it at www.adifferentspin.net.

~KMarsh

Great Craic

2008-03-29T13:00:00.000-07:00

If you've read Trevin's blog you'll know that at Mudd we refer to something that's fun or addictive as "crack". I find it amusing, then, that in Ireland when something is fun they call it "good craic" (pronounced crack). I spent my spring break in Ireland visiting my girlfriend who is studying at the University of Limerick for the semester. The flight over was long as was the immigrations line at Dublin -- I actually had to start asking people to let me ahead of them in the line when I looked to be in danger of missing my connecting flight. I made it, but just barely.

Once I got to Ireland Liz and I started traveling...we went to several places around Limerick and then flew to London for a day. While in London we took a train to Stonehenge and then came back and saw Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery. Of particular note was the tomb of Sir Issac Newton, which we visited so we could shake our fists at the man who has caused generations of luckless science students untold misery.

Back Ireland we took a train to Dublin for a day trip and visited several sites of historic importance -- particularly the Guinness Storehouse which was leased by Arthur Guinness back in the day for 45pounds a year good for 9000 years. The company apparently finds various ways to give back to the Irish people what it saves on rent. We also went to visit a ruined castle that was destroyed by Oliver Cromwell. Most of two walls still stand and students from the university often walk down to it and throw parties there. On the last day of my trip we had a small party with a Tex-Mex dinner and watched Braveheart with an Irish bartender who has been kicked out of American bars for complaining that they don't pour their Guinness correctly.

You can see my photos here: http://tinyurl.com/2rhmut

~KMarsh

A Different Spin

2008-03-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

Today a group called A Different Spin came to visit Mudd. They're a fire performing troupe based in Oakland, California. They came last year and we enjoyed it so much that we booked them again this year. They're scheduled for a performance at night (actually half an hour from the time of writing) but even better than that was the workshop that they held in the quad this afternoon. Starting at 13:00 they broke out their toys and started teaching people how to juggle balls and clubs, spin poi and twirl staffs. I learned poi spinning from a junior and senior who taught it as a student-taught PE class my freshman year and really enjoy it. These guys taught me the basics of juggling in about 10 minutes last year even though I had never been able to learn before. This year one of them taught me how to crack a bull whip.

A whip is a really incredible object; I'm going to go into science mode for a few minutes to explain it. If you've ever held a rope, chances are you've laid it on the ground and shaken it up and down to produce a wave that travels along and falls off the end. A whip is exactly that with one extra bit: if you were to tie a light, thin rope to the end of a thicker rope and send a wave along the thicker rope when it hit the thin rope it would continue along, but it would go faster. The equation is v=(F/m)^(0.5) where v is the speed of the wave, F is the tension on the rope, and m is the mass per unit length of the rope. Thus as the rope gets lighter, the wave moves faster. A whip is tapered, so it's constantly getting lighter which means the wave gets faster and faster until it falls off the end. At that point it's traveling along individual fibers teased out of a piece of string tied onto the end called the "cracker". When the wave is on these fibers it's traveling extremely fast and when it falls off the end the cracker breaks the sound barrier and a sonic boom is created.

When you whip a towel you'll find that you need to pull back after you fling it out in order to get it to snap at all. That's because the wave along the towel does not speed up, so you need to pull back to get any speed at the end. A whip does not, and you crack a whip by flicking it straight out in the direction opposite the one it's pointing in -- that creates a kink or loop that propagates down to the end, and if it's tight enough, the whip cracks. Of course, the trick is to get it to crack away from you. I'm slightly embarrassed to say that this was the most fun I've had in a long time with that picture of my arm as evidence. I'm off to the show now, but I'll let you know how it went and how my trip to Ireland last week went in the next few days.

~KMarsh

Mish-mash of Updates

2008-03-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post. Two Sundays ago I went to the circus training school in Redlands with a group of people arranged by math professor Rachel Levy and spent an enjoyable afternoon learning static trapeze, tumbling, and other fun physical activities from the people there. I was planning on doing a major post about it once I got access to some of the pictures, but I haven't gotten any so I'm going to forge ahead for now -- this post will be mostly me updating on what's happened recently, so if you want to hear about anything more in-depth, just ask.

My eye is better, so that's good. Those eyedrops itched something terrible.

In big news right now, as many of you probably are aware, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was released in the United States on Sunday, March 9th. Smash Bros. is one of the more popular group video games here at Mudd, so we were all eagerly awaiting its arrival. I went with my roommate to a friend's house in the next town over (Badier graduated last year but we still hang out with him on occasion) on Saturday night and picked up the game at its midnight release then played for 8 hours. It was one of the worse decisions I've made this semester, but I knew it was going to be and decided to deal with it.

I am going to be orientation photographer during freshman orientation next year! Orientation happens the first week or so before classes begin in the fall and it's a time for the freshmen to get adjusted to the school and to life away from home without worrying about classes or upperclassmen. The freshmen get grouped together in "sponsor groups" of about 5 frosh each and get taken under the wing of an upperclassman "sponsor" who takes them through orientation and answers any questions they may have. I'm not exactly a sponsor, as I won't have an assigned group, but I will be the photographer for orientation so I'll be there working with the freshmen. Maybe I'll see some of you there.

Last weekend was a conference here at Mudd to discuss the possibility of an aero center at the college and I was invited as a student panelist. This warrants an entire post of its own, so I'll leave it at this for now.

Finally, I'm heading off to Ireland for spring break this year. My girlfriend is studying abroad at the University of Limerick this semester and I'm going to visit her for the entirety of break. I'm getting very excited, since my flight leaves on Friday at the end of this week. I have far too much stuff to get done before then....

Okay, this is sad. I got up for class today and then when I got here I realized that I managed to knock my clock ahead an hour when setting the alarm last night, so I was an hour early. That's always a terrible thing (remind me to tell you that story from freshman year sometime), but I went off to breakfast and then came back and started this post to kill the time before class. Class time rolls around and still there's no one here. I don't remember anything about there not being class today, but it seems that not only did I wake up an hour early, I didn't actually have to wake up for this class at all today.

~KMarsh

Surprise Trip to the ER

2008-03-01T01:13:00.000-08:00

Today could have gone better. I had a couple of meetings in the morning, ending at 11:30. I ran into one of my friends on the way back to my dorm and stopped to chat with him; we had a positively wonderful conversation swapping stories of the mad chemists we know (one of mine involved 300lbs of mercury in an unregistered home lab and one of his was about a prank involving a weak contact explosive on the underside of a toilet seat with the added benefit that one of its components was iodine, so it stained the unlucky prankee a deep purple).

While swapping said amusing anecdotes, I got something in my eye and tried to rub it out. It didn't come out and when I looked at my eye in the mirror it was kind of yellowish and goopy looking. Not goop on top of the eye...the white part seemed to be gellifying. I was understandably disturbed by this and called my grandfather who is a retired doctor to ask his opinion. He said that I'd scratched it and had some conjunctivitis, basically an infection in my eye; the yellowish stuff was similar to pus, and I needed to go to an optometrist or the ER and have them take out whatever was in there and give me antibiotic eye drops. My roommate, on the other hand (doomed to grow into one of those mad chemists, I'm sure) told me that if they tried to take my eye out I wasn't to let them.

After running the gamut to settle the insurance issues I got in the car to go to the emergency room and spent a lovely part of my day sitting in the waiting room. After I was seen they sent me back with the eye drops Poppy told me they would give me and a suggestion to take some Claritin to keep me from itching it.

All told, I'm back now and my roommate is happy to see that I still have both my eyes. The eye drops they gave me had a sheet in the box describing what's in them including detailed chemical structures. Because we're Mudders, I'm going to show that to my roommate to see what he can say about it.

~KMarsh

Go

2008-02-27T12:59:00.001-08:00

My friend Marty recently convinced me to start playing Go with him. Go is a board game that comes originally from China, but we get it from Japan (Go is the Japanese name). It is played by two people who take turns placing stones on the intersections of the lines in a grid. The objective is to "capture" territory which is done by surrounding said territory with your stones. The fundamental rule is that a group of stones is considered to be captured when it has no "liberties" where a liberty is a place where another stone can be played such that it will connect to the chain:
Here, the black stones form a chain which has 3 liberties...two up and one on the right. The white stones block what would otherwise be the 3 liberties on the bottom and left.

This is an immensely complex game and I am just beginning to play it, but in it's simplicity it allows the player to focus on the strategy and reflect upon other aspects of life in which similar principles may apply. Last night I finished my algorithms homework at around midnight and started a game with Marty on a 13x13 board. Considering that I've recently tried to reform my sleep schedule to wake up at 9am every morning, this was probably a poor idea -- the game lasted until half-past three. Not only that, but the power went out briefly around 7 in the morning, so my alarm clock didn't fire. I woke up and saw the clock blinking and my first thought was that I'd slept through the beginning of my 11am class. Miraculously I somehow actually woke up just after 9, so I went to breakfast and started some VLSI homework before class.

~KMarsh

0-Round Pull into Case!

2008-02-26T11:31:00.001-08:00

The title of this post needs explaining. A lot of explaining. It is thick with jargon and contextual knowledge. I'll explain it backwards, starting with the meaning and then describing how I got there. The statement means that one of my friends will be proctor of Case next year and that I will be living with him or her. Case is one of our dorms, so that's easy. What does "pull" mean?

At Harvey Mudd College, rooms for everyone except the freshmen are decided through a process called "room draw". In the simplest form, everyone is assigned a number and then goes in order picking which room he or she wants to live in next year. Numbers are assigned randomly (I think) among the members of each class; thus, rising seniors get first pick, juniors next, and sophomores last. When you pick a room, the verb we use is "pull". You can also "pull" a roommate or suitemate (which, I believe, is where the term came from -- you get a room and pull a buddy with you). If you choose a double or triple, you must fill the room, so you write down your name and the names of your roommate(s). When you pull a single, the system is kind so it lets you bring a friend to live in the room next to you.

Seniors are slightly different in that there are 3 rounds of Senior room draw. In an effort to make sure that seniors get to live where they want to, Senior draw is divided into first-round, second-round, and third-round. During first-round, all the rising seniors who currently live in a dorm get to pull into that dorm before rising seniors with better numbers who don't live in the dorm. This is called "in-dorm status" and is the center of much maneuvering during junior draw. The second round is for out of dorm seniors, and the third round is for seniors pulling underclassmen. Confused yet? The worst is over.

The title claims that I got pulled into Case, but it claims I got a "0-Round" pull. I said there were only first- second- and third- round pulls, though! Some rooms are preplaced. A number of rooms each year in each dorm are reserved for incoming freshmen or transfer students and some people petition to live in rooms with certain characteristics because of medical needs (a med-pull, commonly used to get a room with a kitchen for people with food restrictions). One or two rooms in each dorm are the proctors' rooms. Each dorm has at least one proctor (Case and Atwood have two each) and he or she is allowed to pull a friend just like everyone else. That friend is placed in what's called the 0-Round since it happens before the seniors' first-round.

We've explained the title now, but what's a proctor? The proctor is Mudd's equivalent to the RA. They keep an eye on the students and make sure that no huge problems surface. They are the people you can talk to when you have problems, be they fights with friends, noisy neighbors, stress from homework or more touchy issues relating to drugs/alcohol/sex or whatever else you might come across in your first years away from home. The difference between the proctors and most RA's is that the proctors are not here to report your actions to the authorities; they are not responsible for getting you in trouble. They're here for when you need them, whether as someone to talk to, someone to support you when confronting said noisy neighbors, or someone to help you notice, if not avoid, the pitfalls in the rocky road of life. Proctors do report directly to the deans, but they're not interested in getting people in trouble. Their job is to keep the school healthy, physically and emotionally, by collectively watching every student on campus to make sure everything is okay and helping us when nothing is okay. That's a tall enough order as it is, and if you add "tattle-tale" to the job description you've created a paradox in which people should feel comfortable going to the proctors for help, but are afraid of getting in trouble if they do. As an example of the sort of thing the proctors do, after last year's shooting at Virginia Tech our deans and proctors holed up together and spent hours compiling a list of all the people on Mudd who showed warning signs of being depressed, unstable, friendless, or otherwise in the slightest danger of becoming dangerous. (For what it's worth, the list was empty).

Two of my closest friends here at Mudd -- actually the two closest outside of my girlfriend -- have been proctors; one of the juniors I lived with when I first arrived at Mudd who really embodied the spirit of the place for me went on to become a proctor the following year and just last week my roommate, with whom I have shared a room since we came to Mudd nearly three years ago, has been made proctor of Case. I'm a bit disappointed that he didn't get Atwood, but Case is workable and he's been walking on clouds ever since, so when I see you next year, come visit me in Case.

~KMarsh

in Which Robots Rule the Post

2008-02-20T02:41:00.000-08:00

In this post I was planning to talk about the career fair last Friday at which some fellow students and I pulled a great prank (with permission, of course), but then we decided to do the same thing on a bigger scale later so we're going to keep it hushed until then (read: check back in later for an awesome story). Robbed of its primary focus the post became very contrived and a rather dull discourse on how great the career fair is, ra-ra-ra, go Mudd.

That's boring.

Instead, let's talk about something cool: robots. With lasers. Got your attention yet? It only gets better. I'm taking CS 154, robotics, this semester and I have to say, building robots is just as cool as you hope it'll be. First off, the class is taught by Professor Zach Dodds who is just about the nicest person you could hope to meet. Not a particularly hard teacher and he doesn't give the same intimidating impression of towering knowledge and experience as some of the other professors here, but a really nice guy who really knows his stuff -- many of his stories are about robots he built in his college days that didn't end up working, but don't let that fool you: Dodds is a smart man with boundless energy. Dodds' research interest is in computer vision, which couples tightly with robotics. He's got a working NES in the lab with a Duck Hunt cartridge. The Duck Hunt light gun is strapped to a pair of servo motors that can point it at any spot on the screen and they are connected through software to a camera that watches the screen and controls the gun to play the game. It was built by some of his students several years ago and this year there are two teams using the Wii Remote as part of their projects.

He's also interested in cheap robots. While his robotic idols are Stanley and Boss, the autonomous cars that won the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challange, he likes working with students on projects that cost very little, and still work well. A classic example is using a webcam and laser pointer as a low cost rangefinder -- true laser rangefinders cost thousands of dollars, but by using an off-the-shelf webcam and a cheap laser pointer it is possible to get very accurate range data. Couple that with some servos and you have quite a good ranging system. I told you I'd work lasers into it.

Just last summer three girls, all rising sophomores, did research with Professor Dodds and entered a competition. Their goal was to build a robot that would autonomously seek out and "capture" 6 colored markers. The capture was done by driving up to a marker and reading off the sequence of colors that made up the marker. They threw together an iRobot Create (the Roomba platform) with a Macbook on top of it and some legos holding up little sonars and a camera. I think the whole thing (except the macbook, which one of the students already owned), cost under $200. Almost all of their competition was teams of graduate students and the next cheapest robot was somewhere in the realm of $6,000. Our team of sophomore girls won the competition. And let the bruised egos of the mighty come crashing down.

I mentioned that I was taking the class, but I have yet to mention my project. My team's project is ambitious...possibly too ambitious. We're entering the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge. The goal is to build a robot that can receive a text file containing a list of objects and search for images online of those objects. Once it has a bunch of images it has to autonomously rove around a testing environment which contains many of the objects from the list, taking video or pictures of its surroundings. After touring the environment it has half an hour to sort through its video and select one frame that has each object in it, declare what the object is, and place a bounding box around it. So far we have a laptop on wheels. On the agenda this week is integrating the motors and vision together. For that we need to get the computer talking to the camera and some servo motors, then write software that will make the camera center on a region of a particular color using both the servos mounting the camera and the wheels turning the robot. Since we haven't gotten our short-range IR sensors or sonars working yet we can't really make it autonomous, but we're going to work on making it capture images and process them against a small database.

I'll keep you posted as this gets further along.

~KMarsh

in Which Our Hero Awakens

2008-02-08T02:11:00.000-08:00

Welcome, all! I'm Kyle Marsh, now a junior at Harvey Mudd College. This blog is linked to the HMC Admissions office and was conceived as a means to let prospective students, their parents, and a variety of other people not directly involved with the college gain a perspective into the life of her students. That said, this blog is completely my own work which means I get to choose the topics, the wording, the style, and all other aspects of the blog without censorship from the college administration.

I will discuss my life as it relates to my college experience, various people I know through the college, different activities I've done and anything else I feel is relevant. To start off, here's a little bit about me:

I'm a martial artist and love physical activities such as climbing, parkour, and dance. In fact, I decided to concentrate my humanities work in "movement studies". You'll also find that I have terrible punctuation when it comes to quotation marks; this is an artifact of being a computer science major, as I believe quotation marks should enclose exact phrases without containing any residual syntax.

I enjoy a wide range of activities and take the opportunities I get at Mudd to try new things when they present themselves; since I've been here I've built and launched a rocket, sailed a yacht race, flown a small plane, gone "hashing" (it's a running game, since you ask), worn a santa-hat for nearly two months straight, strung hammocks from the rafters of the dining hall, re-shingled a roof and then put solar panels on it, and enjoyed some of the most rockin' guitar hero jams with my roommate of two and a half years.

I have a girlfriend whom I met on the Pre-Orientation backpacking trip when I first came to Mudd and who is studying abroad in Ireland this semester. I currently live in Atwood dorm, the largest dorm on campus and far, far superior to Trang's Sontag dorm. I work two campus jobs currently: tutoring for the Programming Languages class and Staff (system administration) for the computer science department. I have a group of friends who go tree climbing at midnight on Fridays or Saturdays and a nasty habit of climbing the side of my dorm instead of taking the stairs.

Once again, welcome aboard and I hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions or comments, leave them on the comment panels here or send me an e-mail or instant message. My e-mail is firstname_lastname@hmc.edu and my AIM screenname is Shienath.

~KMarsh