24 Hour Video Race

Posted on 1 June, 2006 by steevithak

Susan and I attended a few screenings for the preliminaries of this year’s 24 Hour Video Race. A friend of ours participated and her team, Common Man, was one of the winners in the preliminaries and moved on to the finals (congratulations!). It’s a cool little contest. At midnight on the starting day, the teams are assembled and given a general instructions that include a theme, a prop, a location, and a line of dialog. They have 24 hour to write, shoot, edit, and deliver a 5 minute video containing all the required elements. Everybody’s video is shown at the Angelika theater and judges select the good ones to go on to the finals. The whole event is produced by the Video Association of Dallas, the same folks who put on the annual Dallas Video Festival. I missed the finals but the Comman Man team came in second in their category (congratulations, again!).

Storms, Crustaceans, and PQFP Chips

Posted on 8 March, 2006 by steevithak

There’s a major thunderstorm passing overhead right now. The noise from the rain hitting the roof of our building sounds like loud applause. Ten minutes ago it was warm and dry outside but that’s Texas weather for you. I’m working late again tonight and I’ve been nervously watching the lightning strikes all around the area and hoping one of them doesn’t take out our power. I replaced the batteries in two of our UPS units this month, so we’re probably ready for it if it happens.

Susan is working late too. We took a little break earlier and tried another of the new restaurants that’s opened here in Deep Ellum. There seem to be new ones opening all the time. Tonight we tried Crustaceans, a creole/cajun place. It’s actually the reincarnation of a New Orleans restaurant that was destroyed by hurricane Katrina. The owner, chef, and some of the employees ended up in Dallas and a local organization helped them re-open their restaurant here in Deep Ellum. It’s the real thing. If you’re in the area and like that sort of thing, definitely check it out. In the past week we’ve also tried Tarantino’s (Italian food, a bit expensive but very good) and Kim’s Cafe (breakfast, burgers and sandwiches – so so).

The website design business is booming lately, leaving me not very much time for more fun things like robotics. The latest group robot project at the DPRG is proceeding nicely without me. I’ve been working on my own robot off and on. Just as I finally felt like I’d wrapped my head around PID algorithms and got some working code, I managed to toast the 68332 on my MRM board. I’m guessing it was a static discharge. It’s a surface mounted 132 pin PQFP chip; not exactly something you can replace with common household tools. I ordered a few new chips, though, and a friend with a hot air rework station is going to swap out the bad one for me.

What are the odds?

Posted on 6 November, 2005 by steevithak

Susan and I were talking about the Texas lottery the other day. The odds are so bad on most of the lottery games that I usually refer to them as a tax on stupidity. Well, I guess we’ve joined the ranks of the stupid because we finally decided to pay a dollar for a lottery ticket. I naturally got interested in how to calculate the odds of winning and how to pick a reasonably good number (or rather avoid picking a bad number).

Like most forms of gambling, they’ve made it as complex as possible to try to hide the terrible odds. The advertising is a bit deceptive too. I’m looking at a flyer from the Texas lottery commision that says my “overall” odds of winning are 1 in 57. However, it turns out the actual odds of winning the real jackpot are 1 in 47,784,352. That’s for the Lotto game. The Mega-millions game has odds so astronomically high they make Lotto look like a sure thing.

Trying to sort out how the odds are calculated was interesting. Six balls with numbers ranging from 1 to 44 on them are selected at each drawing. So my first thought was something like 44 * 43 * 42 * 41 * 40 * 39 but this turns out to be wrong for several reasons. The first five balls are drawn from a container that holds 44 sequentially number balls. The last ball, the “bonus ball”, is drawn from a second container that holds 44 sequentially numbered balls. The order of the first five balls isn’t important so a combination rather than a permutation should be used. As I understand it, this means the number of combinations of the first five balls can be calculated like so:

C(44,5) = 44!/(5!*(44-5)!) = 1,086,008

Multiply that by the 44 possible ball 6 values and you get a total of 47,784,352 combinations, one of which is the winning number.

I looked at a few websites that give alleged advice for winning the lottery but most ranged from wrong to absurd. They suggested things like avoiding the selection of numbers that form geometric patterns on the lottery forms and avoiding numbers based on birthdays. Some suggested avoiding sequential numbers or numbers that had been picked in previous drawings. None of these make any mathematical sense that I can see. I’m don’t know much about statistics but I decided I could probably come up with something better on my own.

Fortunately, the Texas lottery website offers CSV data of prior winning numbers going back to 2003. I grabbed the file and wrote a few lines of Perl to draw histograms of the differences between the winning ball values of each drawing (excluding the bonus ball). It turns out that small differences are as much as 20 times more likely than large differences. Clumps of two or three sequential numbers are very, very probable whereas evenly distributed numbers are highly unlikely. For example, 1 2 3 36 37 seems much more likely to occur than 1 11 21 31 41.

Aside from picking a good number, there seem to be two other ways of improving the odds. The first is simply to play the same number repeatedly. Play it 10 times and the odds improve to 1 in 4,778,435.2. Play it 100 times and the odds improve to 1 in 477,843.52. The second is to play multiple good numbers with the same effect.

One crazy idea that just occured to me is to check all possible three and four ball combinations against the database of winning numbers to see if there are any that occur more frequently than others. I wrote another little Perl program to do that. It’s running right now. It will probably take several hours to complete. I don’t hold out much hope of finding anything as I’m sure others must have tried this before as well.

Robonexus 2005 Debriefing

Posted on 16 October, 2005 by steevithak

I’m finally getting caught up on things since returning from Robonexus and one of the last things on my ToDo list is posting something here about the trip.

Before I get to that, I should mention that Susan and I went to the State Fair of Texas this year just prior to my Robonexus trip. Nothing new and amazing to report there but I used the Fair to test out a new camera, the Fuji Finepix A345. The A345 is an inexpensive 4.1 Megapixel pocket camera. I still shoot a lot of 35mm film but didn’t want to lug my Canon T90 and associated gear around Robonexus, so I picked up the Fuji to try out as an alternative. If you’re curious, take a look at a few of the 2005 Texas State Fair photos or the Robonexus photos I shot with it.

Okay, so on to the Robonexus trip itself. Like most trips, it started with the hassle of airport security and placing all my belongings into little plastic bins. I filled one bin with cell phone, camera, keys, change, belt and shoes. It took another for my laptop and a third bin for the laptop case. This was followed by some hopping around on one foot while trying to put on shoes and simulatneously hang to my other stuff so it wouldn’t get stolen.

I’ve been to a lot of places in California but this was my first trip to San Jose. Random San Jose info: It doesn’t look that different from the Dallas area. They’re still using incandescent traffic lights instead of LED lights. The cross walks emit all sorts of weird sounds that are presumably intended to assist the blind. We’ve got nothing like that here in Dallas. The Kinko’s in San Jose have service as bad as those in Dallas.

I ended up in Hotel Montgomery which is within easy walking distance of the convention center so I didn’t need a car. I got in on the first day and picked up two sets of credentials: a press pass as editor of robots.net and an exhibit staff pass for the Dallas Personal Robotics Group. Because the DPRG didn’t really have enough advance notice to prepare anything interesting, we ended up just placing some flyers on our table that described the group. I had the flyers printed down the street at a Kinko’s (see above comment on Kinko’s).

I only had time to sample a few of the talks including Matt Mason’s overview of robotics and AI research at CMU, Michael S. Chester on launching a robotics company, Max Chandler on robotic art, and Stewart Tansley on Microsoft’s plans in the field of robotics. I showed up to hear Phillip Torrone of MAKE but he was a no-show. Most of the talks were interesting but primarily technical in nature. One non-technical talk, Joanne Pransky on The Frankenstein Complex and Its Impact on Robotics, brought up more philosophical subjects such the human reaction to robots with intelligence, emotions, and sentience. The talk left a number of people, including myself, involved in debates with other audience members over the subject. Some people still seem to be made profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that machines made of metal and silicon may one day be as good as us meat-based machines at thinking and feeling. No mob of angry peasants with torches appeared however, so perhaps things have improved since Frankenstein’s time?

Along with several other Dallas attendees, I escaped the conference for a few hours on Friday and drove up to Stanford. Sanjay Dastoor, a DPRG member who is now a student at Stanford, arranged a tour of some of the robot labs for us. We checked out the Stanford quadruped and also got to see some of the Stanford Sprawl robots in action (they’re fast!). After the robot labs, we took a few drive-by photos of the Frank Lloyd Wright Hanna House which is on the Stanford Campus. I also got a chance to check out the San Jose Museum of Art since it was just across the street from the convention center, though I had to do that one by myself. It was worth the visit and I enjoyed the Sandow Birk exhibit in particular. Overall I’d say it rates higher than the Dallas art museums but not as high as the museums in Ft. Worth.

Back at Robonexus, I spent a lot of my time networking. It was good to meet so many people in person who I deal with online regularly including most of the fine folks at Servo Magazine. The conference includes an interesting mix of high-end commercial robotics companies such as iRobot, commercial hobby robotics suppliers such as HiTec, and non-profit organizations such as the Robotics Society of America. There were also demos of many robot contest formats including NATCAR, Botball, FIRST, Robo-Magellan, and the Trinity Fire-Fighting competition. One suprise this year was the arrival of Lindz Lawlor and his Electric Giraffe. The Electric Giraffe is a huge mechanical quadruped equipped with more lights and audio amps than your average dance club. It walked around belting out dance-velocity Kraftwerk tunes. The Electric Giraffe was created for Burning Man, which seems to be a venue increasingly used by robot builders to demonstrate their work. After talking to Lindz and others who’ve been there, I started thinking it sounded like a lot of fun.

I returned to Dallas from Robonexus with two general feelings. The first was that the DPRG needs to go to Robonexus 2006 with more people and plenty of hardware to show off. The second was that the DPRG needs to think about creating something worthy of Burning Man. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that when you mention attending Burning Man, people will either react by saying something like, “What?! Burning Man is jest a bunch of nekkid hippies runnin’ around!” or they’ll say, “I’ve always thought Burning Man looked like fun but I’ve never had a good reason to go”. The DPRG members seem equally divided but I wouldn’t be suprised if we manage to make it out there in the coming years.

Futuro Man and the Candybar Ranch

Posted on 29 September, 2005 by steevithak

Back in April of 2003, Barry Jordan, a friend from the DPRG, asked me to come out to his ranch and help him set up a foal cam. The Candybar Ranch is east of Dallas in Poetry, Texas. On the way there, while traveling down Highway 276, I came upon an intact Futuro house. The Futuro House is a round, fiberglass house on stilts that looks something like a flying saucer. It was designed by Finnish architech Matti Suuronen in 1968. Like R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit and Wichita House, the Futuro house was designed to be a light, prefab house that could be shipped anywhere in the world and quickly assembled to provide cheap housing. The Futuro house could accomadate up to 8 people, included a bathroom, a kitchen, a table, and beds. Less than 100 of the houses were made. About half of those ended up in the United States. Many still exist if you can find them. They are said to have come in a variety of colors but all of the examples I’ve seen in person have been orange. Perhaps the US manufacturer favored that color. I made note of the location and, a few days later, Susan and I returned to the scene and took a few photographs.

Why am I telling you this now instead of two years ago? It seems I did make a passing comment about it some forgotten blog post. I recently received an email from someone in Finland who is trying to locate and document all surviving Futuro houses. He ran across my blog and asked for more info. His website is a bit scary; loaded with animated GIF files that will slow your browser to crawl and make the site almost unnavigable. Still, it’s a worthwhile goal to build such a list. So I dug up our photos, scanned them, and added a Futuro House gallery to our site. I’ve sent the link off to be added to the list. If I get time in the near future, I may make another trip out to the house to verify that it’s still there and take some better photos. If anyone else knows the location of a Futuro house, drop an email to FuturoMan.

Road Trip with a Kitten

Posted on 14 November, 2004 by steevithak

Susan and I are still trying to find homes for our bounty of unexpected kittens. We found a home for one of them with Lacey earlier this month. I made an overnight trip down to Houston to deliver her little tortoise-shell-colored kitten in person. I’d been wanting to visit the huge IKEA store down there so this worked out well. Overall, I can’t recommend making a 4 hour car trip with a small kitten. The kitten was in a large pet carrier with a dish of water and a small cat litter tray. It spent the first hour of the trip meowing and then discovered that is was fun to roll around in water dish and then in the litter box. By the time I got to Houston, it had turned itself into a scary looking mud-covered cat. I stopped on the outskirts of Houston and cleaned it up using a bottle of water and a towel and, by the time we arrived at Lacey’s house, it was dry and looking like a proper kitten again.

The kitten took an immediate liking to Lacey. She has two other adult cats, so the kitten got its own room until it became accustomed to the new surroundings. Meanwhile, Lacey and I spent a couple of hours wandering around the vastly huge Houston IKEA building. I picked up several catalogs and bought a few things we needed for our new office space.

After that, Lacey took me to The Artery, an eccentric little Houston outpost for the arts. Stationed in a converted house, the Artery is place for local artists to hang out, learn from each other, and show off their stuff. The yard around the house has been turned into a sculpture garden. After dinner we sat around for a good part of the evening trying to think of a name for the kitten. After much debate and flipping through art books looking for interesting names, she decided on Moxie Picasso.

After a healthy breakfast of Pop-Tarts, we visited the Menil Museum, where John and Dominique de Menil’s private collection of art is exhibited. It’s an amazing assortment of things ranging from Paleolithic artifacts to 20th Century works. We spent a little time looking for an elusive historical salvage place that Lacey needed to visit but we never found it. However, along the way, she showed me one of the strangest things you’re ever likely to see in Houston.

We pulled into a parking lot in a typical, Houston warehouse district and, lined up along one side of the lot, we saw the giant busts of the US presidents. They were at least 20 feet high and there were 30 to 40 of them lined up. We were looking at the parking lot of the warehouse where artist and sculptor David Adickes does his thing. He is the creator of the huge, 67 foot statue of Sam Houston that can be seen from I-45 north of Houston. Most of the presidential sculptures looked a bit beat-up as if they were old (except for the one of Reagan which was in pristine condition and sat opposite all the other presidents). There was no obvious explanation of why they were there but I suspect they may be alternates for the ones at the Presidents Park in South Dakota. The heads are even famous enough that they’ve turned up in a Zippy strip.