Speedy the Robot

I just finished building another bristle bot named speedy.

Speedy is a fun and simple bristle bot that I built from parts that I had lying around the house. I make the chassis from scrap metal that I had, and I shaped it using my diamond cutter. This was perhaps the most dangerous part, as cutting through sheet metal in your room isn't usually a good idea, however if the proper safety measures are taken there's no risk.

I got the motor from my brother's Xbox controller, as he is yet to discover. Working with the motor was extremely frustrating because it has very short, thin wires that left no margin for error. It was also too powerful, as often times the enormous vibrations used to move the bristle bot would loosen the hot glue that held it down.

I soldered the motor and the power supply to a switch. I've seen and read enough MAKE tutorials to know how to solder properly, and fortunately I have a bit of experience with a soldering gun. The first contact point went smoothly, however the second point took me forever to get right, and the vibrations would keep loosening it until the point it would break off. I finally decided to solder it and then wrap the connection point in hot glue to prevent short-circuiting and disconnection.

I attached all of the parts using hot glue and double-sided foam tape, and added a flashing blue, yellow, and green light display at the front to give it a cooler look (especially when its on in the dark).

I actually spent more time troubleshooting then I did building, which is always frustrating.

This isn't my most applicable robot, but I suppose it could clean some floors before I take it apart or it drives its self off of a table one foot too high.

Awesome Mac tweaks

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to speak with some high school programmers. They had messed around with the school terminal program on all of the library's macs to the point where our tech people blocked Terminal from use.

Most mac users fail to see what a powerful application Terminal really is. You can use it for networking, writing Perl code, and just about everything else. DOS (Windows) has a similar command-line, but the commands are different than that of Unix (mac).
Today, I found one of my favorite commands:

"defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES"

I found it at Mac OS X tips, along with a couple others.

What this command allows you to do is take Dashboard widgets and put them on your desktop, which is pretty cool.

To get this command to work, you have to:

1) enter it in Terminal
2) enter "killall Dock"
3) press F12, click and hold on a widget, and press F12 again.
4) enjoy your favorite widgets on your desktop



When using Terminal, be sure to exercise caution, it is a very powerful application that you don't want to enter the wrong command in.

BW Science Labs now has an official logo!

I think we'll all agree that BW Science Labs has been in need of a logo for quite some time. Well, now thanks to Joseph Dudley (age 15), we have one.




Designing logos is just one of the many ways you can get involved in BW Science Labs. Feel free to send me your ideas at brennonw[at]gmail.com.

Follow BW Science Labs on Twitter

Often times I make a little something cool, like a small but powerful blue light, and I mean to post on it at BW Science Labs, but I'm just too darn busy, so BWSL is left without an update and I'm left with an unrecorded project or idea. Now, this problem has been solved with Twitter, which lets me post quick and easy updates on what I'm doing. You can see my recent "tweets" on the left sidebar, or better yet you can follow me directly on Twitter.

So, if you ever check BW Science Labs, and find it not updated, be sure to check my recent tweets!

Math and "Mathemagic"

Arthur Benjamin has been a long time hero of mine, ever since I first saw his TED Lecture on how he does mental math. Today, I managed to convince my science teacher to let me skip some class and see Benjamin speak on campus at the High School. Much of his talk was extremely similar to his lecture at TED, sometimes even word for word, but this time he had some very cool never-before-seen tricks.

For his first trick (if you can really call it that), Benjamin had a student come on stage where he produced an imaginary deck of cards. He asked the student to pick an "invisible" card from anywhere in the deck. This seemed strange, as there were really no cards at all, however the student pretended to take a card, and then to flip it up-side down and place it back in the imaginary deck. Benjamin proceeded to pretend to place the cards in his pocket, then withdrew a real deck of cards. Benjamin fanned them out and pointed out that one of the cards was facing backwards, as if the student had placed it there. He then asked the boy what card he imagined he was holding when he took the pretend card. "A seven of hearts" was the student's response.

We were all skeptical as to what was going to happen next, but it really was remarkable what he was able to do. He pulled out the card and showed it to the crowd, a seven of hearts.

I was blown away to say the least. Arthur Benjamin seemed to know ahead of time what card would be in the student's mind, as the real cards he took out of his pocket were arranged neatly inside a box. One theory is that Benjamin used simple probability to accurately guess what card the student was going to imagine. Seven is often times what one thinks of when asked to choose a number between one and ten. Perhaps with cards, people had the tendency to usually pick a seven of hearts. However, this would leave a large margin of error as the volunteer could be thinking of a different card just as easily, making it only probable that Benjamin would be correct.
However, he is a mathematician, so there may be some way to calculate what card the person would be thinking of when pulling a card out of a certain part of the imaginary deck. For instance, if the student had pretended to pull out a lower card, then he may subconsciously be thinking that the card he is choosing is a King or Queen. However, this too leaves a large margin of error, as the volunteer could be thinking of an ace of clubs while imagining to pull a card from the top half of the deck.

To be honest, this one really stumped me. There are a number of theories, most of them are possible, but not necessarily probable.

I was amazed by Arthur Benjamin's math abilities, so much so that hours later I bought his book, Secrets of Mental Math. I don't think his card trick will be in there, but I will hopefully have a more interesting concept of math when I finish reading it. And hey, maybe I'll finally be able to square three digit numbers in my head...

Astrobiology Interview

Yesterday I interviewed Dr. Darlene Lim, a NASA Ames scientist who heads a project called PLRP, or the Pavilion Lake Research Project. PLRP studies organisms called microbialites that are believed to be the only living things on early Earth, about 2.5 billion years ago.

PLRP's data also will have a huge effect on future Mars and Lunar missions, and also will provide the perfect way to train astronauts.

All this, and more, in the upcoming Edition of Science Quarterly.