Curmudgeon Corner

So far, so good.

2007-07-10T08:33:00.000-04:00

Just thought I'd update the BLOG with respect to the Urban Challenge. Our team did very well at the site visit (that's where DARPA folks come out and see if your car really can drive itself), so we are expecting to go to the National Qualifying Event. We won't hear officially until mid-August, but since we passed every test they threw at us, I am pretty confident.

To see the 5-minute video we submitted to earn the right to a site visit, see the company website.

BAD Chinese food

2007-03-27T16:17:00.000-04:00

So I was in Lansing, MI today, keeping my Mom company while my Dad had "minor" heart surgery. Mom and I went out of Sparrow medical center to try and find some Chinese food while we waited. We found a place called Linsing Chinese Express, and thought we'd give it a try. My recommendation in hindsight: Don't.

The portions were large, but I'd classify it as "all-you-can-eat," since I really couldn't eat more than a few fork-fulls.

The flavors were muted, nearly bland. The tea was, well, pekoe (read: Lipton).

The atmosphere was sort of cafe-like, but the tables were dirty. ENough. Just thought I'd vent because now I am 25 bucks poorer and still hungry.

Urban Challenge

2006-11-08T13:42:00.000-05:00

I seem to be the software lead for a DARPA Urban Challenge team. Much work to do!

Wow!

2006-10-19T07:41:00.000-04:00

Well, I fell off the wagon about two weeks ago. I have been playing WoW every day since then for at least a couple of hours. Like smoking, the exact old patterns of behavior have re-asserted themselves.

I think about the game all the time when I'm not playing it. It's strange, because over the past several months, I didn't.

Why restart then? A bunch of little reasons, really. My dear friend Claire told me she was playing. South Park's WoW episode. A guy at work said they needed a fifth for questing. The impending release of the expansion. The *sweet* looking druid talent tree.

In fact. I think I'll go play right now.

Nothing to say?

2006-10-07T12:06:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I just can't think of anything to say. That sort of explains why I didn't write much during September. Here are some things I thought about writing, but didn't:

I went to Orlando where I met Aidan and Yvonne, two lovely people from Dublin. We went down to the Lucky Leprechaun pseudo-Irish pub (it's really a karaoke bar) every night for the duration of my stay. Aidan is a pretty decent singer and a very good drinker. Yvonne is a wonderful conversationalist and a very good drinker. This photo was taken the day after they had spent too much time in the Florida sunshine.

Things I learned about from them were Magner's Cider and Sudocrem. According to Yvonne, Sudocrem will cure everything that is red or itches. According to Aidan, Magner's will cure everything else.

White and Nerdy

2006-09-28T07:56:00.000-04:00

Weird Al Yankovic has just released "Straight Outta Lynnwood", featuring a parody of this song:

Here is Al's version

The sad thing is that I understand Al's lyrics, and I'm pretty sure that half of Chamillionaire's "lyrics" aren't even words.

Bonus Day

2006-09-01T22:06:00.000-04:00

And while I'm at it, I've had something to say all week but been too busy to write it down:

First, you need to understand the concept of truthiness. Now that you've read about that, imagine that it doesn't just apply to our favorite ne'r-do-smart, but to hard science as well. I know a guy who uses truthy science. That is, he asserts things as true because they should be true. Never mind the facts, if something is conceptually easy, then the implementation must, per force, be easy as well. The exorcism power of the entire Catholic church has banished the Devil from all of the details in this guy's mind.

Here is an opinion poll question: Can an automobile navigate in suburban traffic patterns using only a 30-meter range scanning LADAR and a curb sensor?

Your opinions are welcome!

Is society disintegrating?

2006-09-01T21:47:00.000-04:00

Welcome back, faithful reader. And yes, I acknowledge that there is only one of you. I've been thinking lately about evolution and meta-evolution; Evolution of societal meta-organisms versus the traditional evolution of people.

If one accepts that societies are organisms (at least they share some properties thereof), then do societies evolve (as in survival of the fittest) or do they learn (as in our 200-year old American democracy* is a spoiled rich kid who has nearly spent all of his trust fund). Societal organisms should be longer-lived than their constituent people, but then do they breed? Do they preproduce by sharing memes? Is Victorian society a dead organism, or did it learn to become industrial England?

And the reason I'm thinking about this is because I wonder if the kind of stupid stuff my boys do is the same level of stupid stuff that boys (who will, after all, be boys) did 100 years ago. Or 1000.

*There is a saying: "Democracy is the system of government where everybody gets what the majority deserve." It is one of my favorite quips, but I do not know to who to attribute it.

Another writing exercise

2006-08-25T08:50:00.000-04:00

So over at http://scrabblestories.com/ there is a contest to write a max 500-word story using a set of words that resulted from a Scrabble(tm) game. Sounds like a bit of a challenge.

Meanwhile, I need *something* to do, since the Naked Scientists are on their summer hiatus.

I have not heard back from the researchers in GA that I was hoping to get a peer review from for my paper. I may have to wait and just submit the dang thing next year.

Arcane Lore

2006-08-17T21:08:00.000-04:00

I just got back from Indianapolis, where I attended the JAUS Working Group meeting in Indianapolis. It is very pleasant to spend a week with smart people who share my interest in robotics. While I was there, I downloaded a constraint satisfaction library called choco because I suddenly got the urge to solve some NP-hard problems, and can't afford to shell out the bucks for Ilog's Solver and Scheduler optimization software.

What fun! I coded up the beginnings of a task scheduling package where tasks are constrained by time and resource requirements. I am about a tenth of the way toward implementing resources. I hope I am still running on full steam in a couple of weeks so I can finish this.

Dang Spammers

2006-08-14T14:11:00.000-04:00

Due to the only responses to my posts being from spam bots, I have turned on the need to read the funny little wavey picture. For those humans out there, I apologize.

Is sex really necessary?

2006-08-10T22:00:00.000-04:00

Provacative title for a fairly dry subject. The issue is this: in the Evolutionary Computing literature, there is a slow-burning religious war over the effectiveness of the mutation operator versus the crossover (recombination) operator. Each of these operators has been shown to be effective in certain domains, and new papers are being produced every month that provide results that overturn those of a previous paper.

Several people have taken a stab at characterizing the operators over a variety of problem spaces. The problem is that this is gathering tiny points of data in a vast sea of problem spaces. We need theories about when to apply the operators to which problems that are founded in objective (preferably mathematical) bases so that we can support or refute them with experimental data.

I got to thinking about how mutation (and only mutation) is successfully applied in nature by single-celled organisms. Asexual reproduction is the only form of reproduction for single-celled organisms (that I know of, please correct me if I am wrong!). And bacteria are among the most successful species on the planet, having adapted to every environment we have. Score 1 for mutation.

Yet every advanced organism (I can think of no multicellular organisms that do not) use sexual reproduction (i.e. crossover). Score 1 for crossover.

Theory 1: single-celled organisms don't move far, so they have one fairly fixed environment. Macro organisms can move across vastly different environments. Therefore, there may be some survival potential in taking genes from a creature that has successfully traversed terrain A and also from a creature that has successfully traversed terrain B, yielding (if you're lucky) a creature that can navigate either terrain.

Theory 2: crossover represents a disruptive force on the genomes of both partners, which is detrimental unless there is some balancing benefit (like the terrain diversity in theory 1). This balancing benefit is not felt by bacteria and other single-celled organisms, so all single-cellular animals that tried sexual reproduction died out trying to compete with their simpler brethren.

Theory 3: once upon a time, there were two types of single-celled organisms; those that reproduced asexually, and those that reproduced sexually. The poor bastards who had to find mates didn't do very well, until they mutated adaptations to allow them to swim faster, sense better, etc. Those adaptations could only go so far on a unicellular chassis, so pretty soon, unicellular became multicellular.

Theory 4: God just designed it that way.

Genetic Algorithm Paper Outline

2006-08-09T22:12:00.000-04:00

I can't upload the paper yet, cuz I need to see if I can get it in one of the symposia, but here is the powerpoint outline I used to write the paper.

The software is coming soon.

Nearly caught up

2006-07-28T08:12:00.000-04:00

OK, most of the things that were worrying me about not being done have been done. Oh, and camping was great fun. I haven't been camping in about 30 years. I honestly wasn't looking forward to it, but when I actually got out there and started hanging out with my son, it was a joy.

I missed my deadline for getting the satire done. But then again, I have made good progress with my paper on optimization techniques for my exemplar-based genetic algorithm fitness function.

I've also received my AmigoBots at work, so I've been doing research on how to do simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using nothing but the (notoriously noisy) sonar range finders on the little guys.

Camping

2006-07-20T14:54:00.000-04:00

I have written several of the papers that I need to, and now I am off to the wilds of Michigan to camp with my 8-year-old son, David for a few days.

What have I been up to?

2006-07-16T11:34:00.000-04:00

I noticed the usual pattern in blog writing here: a period of time with one or more posts per day, followed by a week gap with the next couple of posts. The trick is not to slip into the "once a month with interspersed apologies" phase of blogging.

Unfortunately, this is one of the apologies. I've been swamped at work, writing research proposals. Actually, I only wrote a few this round, unlike the past where I have written as many as 12. I am learning new things about my ability to manage time in the midst of distractions.

Aside from the research proposals, I have been persuing an independent research project that has to do with Genetic Algorithms. I had originally thought that my idea for evolving Finite State Machines using genetic algorithms was really clever. Then I did the google search and discovered that, although clever, my idea was not original.

However, I did come up with a (hopefully!) novel way to improve the convergence of the genetic population to a solution. It involves using a dynamic fitness function, but one that is not based (directly, anyway) on the age of the population but rather on which problems in the problem set remain unsolved. The best way I have thought about expressing it to non-GA geeks so far is that it is like offering a prize for solving the hard problems. The amount of the prize is increased over time until the problem is finally solved. The effect of this is to cause the population to climb out of local maxima more quickly than can be accomplished using the usual mutation operators. Results that I hope to publish for next year's GECCO conference indicate a better than order of magnitude improvement in performance. So I have been working on the paper in MS Word and not on the blog.

And finally, I have papers to write for this years Simulation Interoperability Workshop. I am doing topics on using FSMs for simulation scenario authoring, using gestures of robots to anticipate their intentions, and using standard model interfaces to promote interoperability among military simulations. However, since all three papers are more than a week late, I may not get any of them published.

And really finally, I need to finish my satire for the WBA.

So maybe I'll write here instead of in word, so at least my (0) faithful readers can keep up with what I'm doing.

The key to success?

2006-07-16T11:14:00.000-04:00

I saw a thing on T.V. (I was spending time with my wife, and t.v. is one of her "hobbies") the other day about a guy who traded a paperclip for a house by "trading up" 14 times. How does a person get away with something like that? So I asked him. Kyle, if you have anything to add, please respond here.

Another writing contest

2006-07-11T10:46:00.000-04:00

The fine folks over at the WBA have another flash fiction carnival going on. This time, it is humor on the theme of writing and publishing. Watch this space for my entry.

Two Kinds of People

2006-07-04T23:02:00.000-04:00

I spent a lot of time over the past few days re-installing operating systems and virus scanning my several household computers. This experience reminded me of two kinds of people:

There is a saying, "Mean people suck!" This is the type of person who writes computer viruses. I mean, I am a software developer and I like coding challenges, but I don't have the malicious streak that it takes to release a virus. So here's a giant raspberry for computer virus authors. pbtbtbtbtbt!

Then there are the folks who write free software. As I put the pieces of my system back together, I was gratified at how easy it was, largely because of the availability of free software that works. Software like Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and Cygwin. I don't share Richard Stallman's philosophy that all software MUST be free. But I am grateful for free software, much as a farmer is when his neighbors come over and help him raise a barn. So I tip my hat to the many authors of free software Tip! That's right neighborly of ya!

I will be giving back to the community by being a team coach for next year's RoboFest. More on that later.

Happy Independence Day

2006-07-04T23:00:00.000-04:00

While you enjoy your hotdogs and fireworks, please don't forget to face East and salute our troops. I pray that they can come home soon.

Non-ja

2006-07-01T21:29:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across some ninja crap on the internet today (ewwww, it smells). Here is the "official ninja home page". I was reminded of reading The Tick back in the late 80's. Here are some classic Tick quotes.

Another kind of flash...

2006-07-01T16:45:00.000-04:00

Today, instead of playing WoW, I did the tutorials with Macromedia Flash MX. It is a very powerful tool, but it is perhaps too complicated. I am a research scientist, but I find its interface too complex to understand. On the other hand, I know a lot of artists who don't have any trouble with it. That should be a lesson on the meaning of "intelligence."

Celebrating Reading

2006-06-30T11:58:00.000-04:00

I stumbled upon This Site while looking for a text-to-speech program. It is not about text to speech, but rather about all facets of reading.

Naked Science

2006-06-30T11:40:00.000-04:00

Here is a place where you can download MP3s of the Naked Science show.

Today, instead of playing WoW...

2006-06-29T21:13:00.000-04:00

What am I doing to fill my time now that I am no longer playing World of Warcraft? Well, so far I am setting a pretty good precedent:
I have written a story, learned double-entry book-keeping (which sounds like it should be illegal, but isn't), rebuilt a toy car for my kids, saw the movie "Cars", took my kids to the local ice cream parlour, and replaced my laptop keyboard.

As one of my co-workers said to me a couple of months ago, "Playing WoW did not improve any part of my life."

KnitDesigner

2006-06-28T23:12:00.000-04:00

My wife and I are working on a program to allow knitters to create patterns by selecting stitches on a palette and then clicking on a chart. The program can then write out the knitting instructions in words as well as print the chart according to a number of popular conventions (Barbara Walker is the default).

Is there any interest in making that program available here?

Flash Science Fiction

2006-06-28T00:43:00.000-04:00

Limit of Expansion is one of my entries into the WBA Flash Science Fiction Carnival. I will try to get a few more up before the deadline on June 30.

It was inspired by current thinking on the Big Bang at WikiPedia, and by one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke short stories, The Nine Billion Names of God.

Limit of Expansion

2006-06-27T23:24:00.000-04:00

The researcher waited expectantly, but not impatiently, for the timing signals from its colleagues in distant galaxies. Impatience was a crutch for those races that still had physical forms, not for those who were lattices of quantum probability. Yet for all their advancement, there was still the question: what would the ultimate fate of the universe be? Was the mass of the Universe sufficient to halt its own expansion? If not, the universe would continue to expand until everything was so far away from everything else that no interaction was possible and heat death would occur. Was there enough mass to reverse the expansion, ending in the collision of all matter? Or did the Universe rest on the knife’s edge of probability, where there was just enough matter to hold the whole thing together, expansion slowed to the point of imperceptibility but did not reverse? Then the universe would continue indefinitely, allowing the matter it contained to find its own fate.

Countless civilizations had spent thirty billion years experimenting, measuring, and speculating. Until now it was too close to call. The researcher considered it a point of academic curiosity only; all of the three possibilities still left fifty billion more years: enough time for life to be completely eradicated and to rise from nothing to its pinnacle thousands of times more. But finally the time had come to know. In the next few moments, the quantum communications tracking the distance between far-flung galaxies would verify whether the expansion had continued, halted, or reversed…

Having been filled to its utmost with Divine breath, the bubble burst, leaving a sticky, pink film on the face of an oblivious, child-God. She giggled, peeled the mess off of Her face, poked it back into her mouth, and resumed chewing.

Why Leadership is a commodity

2006-06-25T12:24:00.000-04:00

One of the themes that emerges when one reads "how to make a million dollars" material is that 1) You need to start your own business and 2) Most people are afraid to start their own business.

This transcends simple risk aversion. When I was playin WoW, I noticed that most people were very reluctant to lead even a 5-person group in adventures. Why is that? What was the "risk" ? These people were very eager to play in the 5-person group, they just didn't want to "lead."

This same phenomenon shows up at work. Being the team lead on a project doesn't require any more technical expertise than being a "rank and file" worker on the project. It just requires the ability to stand up and take charge. So why are managers paid so much more than engineers? I think that the answer is "supply and demand." As rare as good engineers are, they are not as rare as people who are willing to take charge.

I think that a good consulting company could be formed just on the basis of coming into a situation and taking charge just long enough to find somebody who is already there who should be put in charge. I might just try that. Again, I'll let you know if I become a millionaire.

One Week without WoW

2006-06-25T11:56:00.000-04:00

One difference between quitting WoW and quitting smoking is that I didn't have any actual withdrawal symptoms. I just stopped playing. I have not been tempted to log in. I don't have dreams about playing. My blood doesn't beg for me to get a fix. This was WAY easier for me.

So, during the first week without WoW, what has changed? Well, I haven't had a miraculous recovery of excellence at work. On the other hand, I did have time to do some "dad" things. I found a Power Wheels Suzuki Sport next to a dumpster and brought it home about six months ago. There it sat while I was playing WoW. Two days after I stopped WoW, I got out the tools and repaired it. It took me about an hour to go from a piece of junk to a toy that my two youngest kids were riding exultantly around the yard. And yes, I removed the dangerous parts that were the cause of the recall and replaced them with automotive-grade electrical components.

What else? Oh yeah, I started looking into how to improve my financial position. I went to Marshall Brain's site and read about how to make a million dollars. I highly recommend it. This turned me on to a few books that I have since purchased as MP3's, and I listen to them on my commute. It also re-engergized my will to spend a little time writing this blog. I will let you know if I become a millionaire.

My wife has noticed that I am "more energetic." That's not a bedroom reference. It means that I am not sitting at my desk like a sack of potatoes.

How World of Warcraft Changed My Life

2006-06-25T10:52:00.000-04:00

Addiction is a heavily used word. Being a linguistic conservative, I usually like to go by the dictionary definition. What I was taught in school many years ago is that addiction necessarily implies physical withdrawl, and any similar effect was "psychological dependence." Well, as I often note, the English language is evolving (i.e. disolving), so I will take the popular definition of addiction, which is "persistent compulsive use".

And what does this have to do with World of Warcraft? More than I thought, it turns out. I have been playing WoW for about a year and a half. I played it a lot, but that that is relative. For example, this article has plenty of annectdotes about people who played more than me. And although I may not have played baseball with my son as much as he may have liked, nothing like this ever happened.

For me, "a lot" meant spending almost all of my free time playing. Sure, if I am completely honest with myself, WoW also occasionally cut into non-free time; from time to time I would go to work a little late, or go to bed a little late, or put off the yard work for an extra hour or two. But the point of today's rant is to examine what happened when my "free" time was spent doing the same thing.

I don't watch television. This is another form of addiction that I have been fortunate enough to avoid. That simple fact means that I have about 12 hours a week more free time than most people. What I did with that free time before WoW was: read books, play with my kids, write computer programs, do work that I hadn't finished during the week, and play paper-and-pencil role-playing games with my friends. After I started playing WoW, I cut out reading, programming, and extra work. My RPG time was limited enough that it didn't interfere with WoW, so it didn't really suffer.

And what was the effect of that? Duh. I started fallin behind in my understanding of current affairs. I stopped excelling at work. I got rusty at computer programming. I stopped most of my positive interaction with my kids (they still got yelled at for making too much noise and distracting me from my WoW group responsibilities). Here's one pretty bad thing: I didn't notice any of these things, at least not for a long time. I am not alone in this phenomenon. This cry for help is an example, but even more interesting is the large number of responses at the bottom of that page.

Normally, my family would let me know if I was doing something bad that affected them. For example, the wife and kids ganged up on me to get me to stop smoking. But when it came to WoW, my wife said "you're not missing work, and you need your recreation." But finally, something inside me snapped. I woke up one morning and said "I am going to do an experiment and stop playing WoW for a few weeks and see what happens."

Over the next several posts, I will share my experiences and reflections.

Government of the people?

2006-06-25T09:59:00.000-04:00

We in the United States have government OF the people. And people constantly complain about how bad the government is. There seems to be a disconnect here.

My personal experience as a military contractor has taught me that elections are vaguely consensus, largely influenced by advertising dollars, but the actual government is done by special interest economics with personal representatives in Washington who pay personal visits to congressmen and their aides.