inportb

It’s today! According to SparkFun,

You can blame it on Chris Anderson’s book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that’s ‘free’. Sure, we have free bits (open-source hardware designs, available code, etc.), but we don’t have free physical widgets. Now combine that with our love of creating shear havoc (AVC, C&D letter, Portable Rotary Phone), and you get Free Day.Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There’s always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it’s open season.

• $100 max per household
• You pay shipping
• Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
• Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
• Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
• Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed

So… go grab some parts?

Thanks to my awesome uncle, I now own a Kindle 2. I have updated the firmware and loaded up a couple of PDF’s, and am browsing Amazon’s library of free and public domain content. And ultimatebuster has mastered the art of converting any website’s content to PDF.

full of e-ink win

Totally unrelated photo of the moment, just because. May the warmth of the flame carry us through the long winter nights of finals preparation?

It is morning and I have two final exams later today back to back… and I’m slightly ill. As a result, I have been taking a lot of time off to think about random things. Today will be a disaster, but I’ll survive. I know that whenever I think of my wonderful friends. Because of you, I feel that I am not alone in the world. Because of you, I feel that I am special. Because of you, I have an audience for my silly exploits. Because of you, I can pour my mind out onto the internets. If you’re reading this, I thank you very much for sharing in my thoughts.

Sometimes I feel that I have not spent as much time with you as I could have. While I am not studying, I am your regular hacker and script monkey, instead of being useful. I might even have offended you at times when I am not feeling my best. And during the past few days I have not been keeping up at all with what’s going on around me. It is my ultimate goal to be useful to society… but how could I, if I could not even help my closest friends? As I partake of this wild life’s journey, there are those that I would not, could not forget. I hope you can forgive my selfishness.

It may sound strange, but I’m going to say this anyway: I love you and I treasure your friendship. Knowing you has made my life meaningful in so many ways, and I have grown so much because of you. I am proud to know you all.

Bark with me if you’re my dawg?

Early this month I heard about the ECCERobot, or Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot. While standard humanoid robots mimic humans in appearance, ECCE copies the internal structures and mechanisms. The anthropomimetic design incorporates such elements as bones, joints, muscles, and tendons, allowing for the potential for human-like activity. ECCE’s drive system of elastic cables and drill motors may be complicated and inefficient, but it provides insight into our own design.

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Having unpacked much of my stuff at my new house, I found a neglected helium-neon laser. I’m surprised that I still have one of these things, since solid state lasers seem to be all the rage these days. Anyway, the design makes it quite suitable for experimentation. I dusted it off and decided to have some fun with one of my storm windows…

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Medicine is not an overnight choice for me, but a decision formed over a lifetime. I am often asked why I have chosen to pursue medicine instead of technology, especially by friends. While so far I have done quite a bit of work in engineering and computer science, my interests lie ultimately in the human body. This most intricate meat machine is amazing especially from an engineer’s perspective, since it is both incredibly complex and highly resilient. Medicine is a selfish science, however: it concerns itself with the malfunction and repair of this machine. I say “selfish” not with regret: it is a very human property that we must proudly embrace. While pure science somehow serves a higher purpose, our selfishness gives us a tangible direction. Thus, medicine blends science with art.

I ran into an interesting guy in the park today. He had come all the way here from Nevada for a case of traumatic brain injury. I hadn’t known about Mount Sinai’s outstanding neurology program, or that people would even cross the U.S. to be treated here. He was a highly-functioning individual at first glance, but further interaction revealed a significant level of impairment. He would be crossing a two-way street, but forget to look the other way while crossing the midline; or he would lose focus as other conversations drifted into hearing range. While he was otherwise neurotypical, he had trouble working with numbers and needed frequent rest; before the injury, he had a job playing cards in Las Vegas. The structure and function of the brain, as well as behavior and psychology, have always caught my interest; but pathology of brain and mind is a topic that I would explore further if I had the opportunity.

^* minor details modified to preserve anonymity

I’m imagining a computer program running on a basic server cluster (read: Google) that’s able to learn stuff by asking random users random questions. It would be primed with some basic knowledge by the programmer, but every day it would find something interesting (i.e. random dictionary word) and probe its properties. The types of questions would initially be naïve (is an apple a noun or is to apple an action?), but gain depth as knowledge becomes available (how is an apple different from an orange?).

A simple way of sending the program to school would be to expose it on many websites where it could ask questions and accept answers from users. So… would this work?