The Squirrel, the Fez and the Robot Overlord

Of course I run the Machines Behaving Badly course just for fun, and to see kids get a start in the world of technology.  I don't accept payment.  But when you are offered a coffee mug that bears your quasi-official title as Robot Overlord one must of course graciously accept.

It might be used for its primary purpose in the future but for now it is up on the shelf alongside Bill the Squirrel and my fez collection.  

FIRST Blizzard

You know the FIRST robotics season is getting close when my snowblower shares garage space with last year's competition robot.  Our team's work space is currently occupied by the Spirit of Christmas, a most excellent organization that helps improve the holiday for those in need.  In that context it is only a minor inconvenience that our robot has to live elsewhere for a month.

Of course when the first (or FIRST?) blizzard of the year slams 8 inches of heavy wet snow down on Wisconsin it's time to shuffle things around and deploy the snowblower. 

A couple of images from what I assume to be only the beginning of a long series of Boreal insults.

Only yesterday I made some wire mesh cages to go around small tasty plants that were already being nibbled by rabbits.  When I dropped these on there was still green grass visible.  Now the poor things look like they are trying to climb out of a missile silo.

But they are doing a damn site better than our front yard Arbor Vitae tree.  This is a grizzled veteran, survivor of many a hard campaign.  Now it kneels in abject surrender before Cruel Elements that will offer it no quarter.

A Quiet House for the Holiday

This is a puzzling picture to look at, and it was none too easy to photograph either.  It is the sticky hand print of a one year old on a mirror.  

It's the sort of small thing you notice when you are going to be on your own for a holiday.   Which is by the way, a good thing.   If I might explain.

Wife and I will be without small people on Thanksgiving this year for, we think, the first time since 1986.  33 years if you are keeping score.

The reasons?  All good.  Gainful employment in The Big City in one case.  But more generally it's because we are now sharing the kids and grand kids with other people, other families that also love them.  I can think of few things more worthy of giving thanks.

On the actual Day of Turkey eating we'll improvise.  Maybe curry.  Maybe a brunch at one of the local taverns that is open for food.  

And over the weekend we'll have them all together again for at least an abbreviated family gathering.   I bet there will be mashed potatoes and gravy at a minimum.

Time and Space Capsule - Astronaut Cards

Another set of peculiar artifacts from our fall attic cleaning.  This is a series of trading cards from 1963 that celebrate the astronauts of the Mercury Program.  It took me a while to figure out why I found them so fascinating.  I decided that they were from such a different time for us culturally.  We once had Heroes who became celebrities based on their accomplishments.  In these lesser times we mostly just have Celebrities trying to pose as heroes without accomplishments.

There were seven astronauts in the initial group.  They were referred to as "The Mercury Seven".  Here are the three most famous ones.

Of course John Glenn became the household name.  Fighter pilot in WWII and Korea (where he shot down 3 Migs), he made the first US orbital flight.

Virgil (Gus) Grissom was another Korean War fighter pilot.  After flights in both Mercury and Gemini spacecraft he was scheduled to command Apollo I.  But died in the tragic launch pad fire of January 27, 1967.

Alan Shepard was a WWII veteran of the surface Navy, later a test pilot.  He took up the first manned Mercury flight, a suborbital one.  He then had to wait ten years as an inner ear problem grounded him.  It seems as if it was worth it, as the Commander of Apollo 14 he became the fifth, and oldest man to walk on the moon.

There is a separate card that indexes the 55 card set.

The series comes in two versions.  One has a sort of 3D picture on the back.  The other, less common one, was a give away with Popsicles.

This seems to be one of the more valuable ones.  I guess everyone loves monkeys.

It's hard to imagine in these later and lesser times that anyone could become famous and admired with a visibly receding hairline and irregular teeth.  Its another facet of Celebrity sans Accomplishments.  There's nothing wrong with looking good.  It's just that in a sturdier era your looks were really not a deciding factor.

Alan Shepard 1923-1998

Vampire Deer and the Dark Ages

Happy to report that I'll be excavating at the Roman site of Vindolanda again in May.  Should be an interesting year.  We've got most of the usual merry crew of Anaerobes back together again and the area under excavation will be those intriguing late Roman/Dark Age strata.  True detritus of empire.

I remember one of my first years digging there, before I knew that many people.  I'd go off for walks just to explore.  One one of them I was astonished to see a deer about the size of a decent jack rabbit go bounding off into the woods.  It was a muntjac deer, one of those little critters that British Imperialists encountered, thought was cute and brought home to their estates.  Of course they escaped and are now an invasive, albeit still cute, species in the wild.

They are not so bad, but at the Bell Museum recently I ran across these guys.  Variously called water deer or musk deer they have these alarming tusks.  (When looking them up I discovered that female muntjacs also have small but still concerning fangs). 

These have also gotten loose in England and small populations of what are also called "Vampire Deer" can be found.

With that thought in mind, best of luck to all my Wisconsin deer hunting friends.  Let's be careful out there.

Possums, Toads and Large Rodents

Sometimes grand children are an excuse to do fun things even when they are not actually in tow.  The other day we found ourselves in the Twin Cities and decided to visit the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota.  Just to check it out you know, to see if it would be fun to take the Small Ones some day.

We both remembered it from long ago when it was a quaint little museum full of dusty taxidermy dioramas.  Now it's big and modern.  And while a lot of the dioramas made the trip the place is spic and span.  I have never seen glass polished to the extent that sometimes I had to peer closely to see that it was there at all.  They must have the greatest janitorial staff in existence.

It encouraged me to snap a few pictures with the "Through Glass" function on my camera.  Some of them turned out pretty well.

Wrestling possums.  I figure this will be the grandkids in a few years when the age/size discrepancy is less.

Some of the things on display were live including this meditative toad.

Over in the prehistory section I posed warily next to a Rodent of Unusual Size.  

Technically it is a giant beaver of some sort.  Here's his modern day descendant apparently nursing a stomach ache.  Must have eaten some bad bark.

And because the primary function of the internet is cat pictures, here's a lynx licking its lips in anticipation of chomping onto a little bird.  Both the bird and the lynx are of course full of dry stuffing material so this amount of gustatory anticipation is actually a bit odd.

A fun place to visit.  We will haul the grandkids over some day.

Machines Behaving Badly 2019

The 19th annual Machines Behaving Badly event is done.  And it was a good one.  A dozen or so helpers turn up.  The arena rolls in and is assembled.  Robots get last minute finishing touches.  And the audience shows up.  

There's probably an upper limit of how many you can park on bleacher seats around a six by six arena.  And this is about it.  At the other end of the room the high school team had the Big Robot up and running.

Nice to see a lot of girls trying their hand at the controls.  Also the occasional five year old.

And there were the competition robots.  Many and varied, it made for fascinating matches.  Spinners versus pushers.  Lifter bots versus machines armed only with duct tape and unrealistic expectations.  Some did way better than I expected.  Some surprised us in other ways.

There was a new arena hazard this year, a pneumatic powered axe.  Perhaps just a bit less lethal than the Chains of Doom, but it provided some nice moments.

For the kid brothers and sisters in the crowd there was the opportunity to operate the arena hazards or to drive a VolunteerBot. We had several of these on hand, but the voyage of this Barbie Themed bot is worth chronicling.  Thrown together in about fifteen minutes.

Proudly driven by kids.

And at the end, minus some parts and with a new punk hairdo, Barbie in Robot Cemetery.

A fun but tiring day, made possible only the efforts of my fun and tireless minions.  You see them here and there in the photos wearing the black new version Machines Behaving Badly shirts.  Many people asked about buying one.  But of course I had to shake my head and tell them:

"Some things in Life cannot be bought.  They can only be earned."

Some of the students now bumbling about with these crude machines will go on to far greater things.  They will join the high school FIRST team, they might even be motivated towards a career in technology.  They will accomplish a lot.  But not by buying it, by earning it.