London: Surveying and skating in Jolly Old! Summer 2014: Day 10 5/19/14 (BreakFAST!, so am I still waiting?, workin’ out!, bloggin’, salmonin’, thermochrons)

So after I crawled out of bed at like 8:15 and showered I let Shoop in and I had Cheerios. After that we made it over to the office. We basically chilled in the room for the first hour. We worked a bit on the meeting stuff with Peng for a bit, but otherwise had nothing to do. At 10 AM we pulled Peng into the room and talked to him about our project. We asked him when the soonest we could start surveying people was and he said probably Friday (although he hopes it will be sooner). We also asked him about the best incentives and how to go about doing our project. We really can’t do much of anything except prep for the meeting tomorrow at the ARA and so we did that in about half an hour. Really wish we had more to do.

We broke for lunch pretty early as we had nothing to do. I went back and grabbed some bread and the rest of the chicken from last night and piled some more sliced chicken and cheese in there and bam! Lunch. When I got back to the office I chilled with the team and we just derped around on the internet for a while. I read some IFLS articles online such as a device that helps to acoustically make objects invisible (with applications in sonar) and how fire ants can act as a liquid and a solid depending on how they are holding on to one another. In swarm mode they can squashed and will retain their shape! It’s pretty cool. They could be poured out of a funnel as a very viscous liquid. In a different vein I read on Hackaday that this dude wrote an AI that defeats the elite 4 without losing a Pokémon in Pokémon Blue. It is a python script that runs using an emulator on his computer and reads the memory dumps from the emulator which tell the position of the trainers (so the script knows where to travel to). The script also uses some libraries to fake accomplish the button presses. The AI revolves around the use of a decision tree to break the enemy Pokémon down in terms of max damage and type etc. The program then selects which of the program’s squad has the attack with the highest damage (taking into consideration the critical hits and type advantages). It was pretty cool and actually worked too! The AI is also capable of healing its Pokémon instead of attacking. Another article I read was about the first cyborg (a scientist who had an RFID tag placed in his forearm). He is a college professor over someplace in Europe and he works in AI and autonomy. It was a Popular Science article talking about the use of AI. Both the scientist and his wife both actually had RFID tags put in their arms and at one point even linked up tags and brains such that the guy could feel the woman’s thoughts such as moving an arm or something. He said it was more intimate the sex. O.o

After approximately 1 PM we started working on things again. We didn’t get very far and we wanted to talk to Katy, so we called her and Peng back in and discussed the project. This included us saying we really wanted to work on surveying people and sadly it won’t be until Friday afternoon at the earliest before that happens. -.-// We are still waiting on the City Council to give our project the okay to continue. We then worked a bit on what to do for our project and Skyped Shockey and Ruiz about our lack of progress. They seemed really relaxed about the whole project actually and just told us to keep doing what we can. Not too much after that we broke for the day and I went to the gym with Stefan and Nick. We will be doing more for work tonight on our paper. After the gym I rode to Sainsbury’s and met Shoop. I got about $26 worth of stuff at the store (much more chicken!!!) and then came back to chill.

I was really hungry so I decided to cook up the salmon that I had bought and it was SO GOOD. I used some teriyaki sauce and pan fried it (and it ended up looking like chicken instead of the pink salmon), but it was really tasty. Shoop cooked up some gnocchi and these meatless sausages (he had mistaken the package and bought the wrong ones). He shared some gnocchi with me and they were pretty good. He somehow suffered through two of the meatless sausages before he decided he couldn’t eat any more of them. I tried just an end of one of them and it tasted like a slightly charred roll of Play-doh with the same consistency and thickness. I had the salmon which was really good. After dinner Shoop and I headed to the Pierson place to get some work done, meaning that he and I were going to research thermochrons.

So basically a thermochron is an embedded thermometer inside of a rugged housing that takes temp measurements at pre-programmed intervals. The technology is really simple and uses a real time clock to timestamp measurements. The device is capable of taking up to 2048 measurements ranging from about a minute to 255 minutes between readings. These readings can then be read using a one-wire system of communication (aka using a single wire for half-duplex serial communication (i.e., sending or receiving data exclusively)). These are decently cheap and have been around for about 10 years or so and cost about $10 per piece at 1000 pieces. We researched so much on them in an hour and a half and have a good page of sources (soon to be written up)! So progress. After that it was finally time to chill. Tomorrow we have the ARA meeting and a chat with BROhan at 10 AM. Until later, have a good night!