One year ago today: March 1, 2020, birdhouse template.
Five years ago today: March 1, 2016, beware of code violations.
Nine years ago today: March 1, 2012, Witch Attack, the graph.
Random years ago today: March 1, 2004, calendar redaction.
I long to get back to my work on Arduinos. I read the latest somewhat regularly and notice the initial innovation has plateaued. You get dozens of “new” projects that are just a basic switch connected to a device, like camera. Hardly innovation in my books. I still have ideas but not the time nor the clean room to make anything. My house has a semi-permanent layer of dust from the renovations that gets into the farthest corners. Tell you what, I’ll describe my latest idea.
What came to mind is the old artificial intelligence program I keyed into my Apple ][e back in the early 80s. This was the 2D program that defined “life” for a screen icon as moving in a straight line. Upon hitting the edge or an obstacle, the icon would randomly seek another straight path. The fun part was you could introduce a series of parameters and watch the dot begin to exhibit intelligence. For example, you could get it to “remember” what worked best the last time, or you could give it “fight or flee”, the option to rebound off an obstacle or clobber it and continue. Or give the obstacles the ability to move.
Most interesting was when the dot “learned” to kill was the best way to survive, and the obstacles were given the sense to see the dot coming their way. Can this concept be applied to a 3D cube? I don’t see why not. I would want a larger, more spread out cube so as to make the action best visible. Why not give the operator the chance to dodge by joystick and have the first real 3D action game? Because, I have to work on my house and yard, that’s why.
This would be a test item only. For a realistic game, you’d need probably a cube of LEDs 100 on a side. And you are talking to the only person you’ve met who has counted to a million and knows what it looks like. This could likely not be done by hand. But I know how it could be accomplished. A template, probably 3D printed. I’ve never seen any clear plastic from these devices, in which instance the template could become part of the grid.
Rock Valley College, IL
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Education. I’ve been asked again why not become some type of teacher? The conditions have changed around this COVID hoax and we get a reminder of how solidly the left has infested the education system. Telling your kids the USA is bad is only one problem. The real goal was always control, and now that they have home education, they continue to tell you what you can or can’t teach. I discovered to day one such regulation is “outside contact
Years ago I look at this in Miami. Several factors put me off, the top I recall were a requirement to take courses I had already passed and the requirement for documentation that went far beyond protecting kids. It was an AARP-style excuse to “fill in the blanks” of your life that they did not already have on file. I just don’t see whether I have a pilot’s license or where I see myself in five years have any bearing.
I don’t like the way such people think. Like who might be planning to kidnap his triplet teenage daughters and fly them to Tahiti, which has no extradition laws. Anyway the secondary topic that came up is this current bull-donkey about universal right to Internet access. This “rights” never work as intended and create a new class of sub-dependents. I’m against them for another reason – computers are no longer primarily a learning tool. You heard me.
Sit down in a room full of kids with computers and you are fooling yourself to think any of them are doing research or careful guided study. For that they need constant supervision and that makes computers no more effective than the library. And the library is a vastly underused resource. That’s where the kids should be. Only the top few who attain the skills to do research or similar should be allow a computer in the classroom.
Yeah, I’ll get flak for this because we all know everybody’s grandchildren are whiz kids blah, blah. That’s baloney. Kid’s are no smarter now than 100 or 1000 years ago, they just know more about what adults call “knowledge”. There are so many distractions and worse on the Internet that any talk of kids using a computer exclusively for school learning is talking nonsense. Let the kids who merit a computer have one, but universal access to the Internet, which a great concept, is a pipe dream in reality.
No way should the taxpayer be burdened with supplying children with yet another fancy toy. It is also a fancy forward guess that future workplaces will involve working directly with computers. I think when computers become as intelligent as an 8-year-old, the cube workstation as we know it is gone. And, so you’ll know, computers are already half way there, which should be real worrisome to most clerical workers I ever met.
