THERE ARE KIDS IN AN ORPHANAGE AND NOT ON THE STREETS BECAUSE OF YOUR SUPPORT! This is huge!!
There are tons of things I had never considered about how difficult it is to fool your brain into thinking it's touching something it's not. I think the most important technical issue to overcome is timing. Much like how your brain can understand hearing someone's voice AFTER seeing their lips move, but not the opposite... the lag time of the sense of touch is an important thing for your brain. Another thing I hand't considered is the "rise time" that has to do with internal stresses in your fingers. If you conceptualize your fingers as water balloons around bones, you can understand how the internal pressure of your fingers rise the harder you press something. This type of information coupled with the "Sensory Homunculus" make for some incredibly fulfilling thought experiments. The temperature question is something I'm particularly interested in. Using a colder fluid to model a room temperature fluid because of the heat transfer equation is a fascinating area of scientific problem solving. If you think it through, everything about this boils down to differential equations. How much heat is leaking out of the hand, and at what rate, through what contact area?
If you've ever seen flowing water look frozen like glass... that's Laminar flow.
Technical details about what we're doing: We're working on a time-series problem called a Sequence Classification. Recurrent Neural Networks called Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are good for that. It’s what they use for natural language processing because it can remember context from the sentence you’ve just spoken. In this case its used to analyze not just the current timestamp of data, but what has been happening for the last 20 - 250 ms, which helps to reject false alarms.
It's a strange feeling to share this aspect of my life. I'm taking a break to go back to school, but here's a peek into the part of my life I've kept hidden from the internet for many years. I was asked if I wanted to film my last mission and use it as an opportunity to explain "Multi-Domain Operations" to the public. After much consideration, I decided that this topic (especially the cyber-domain issue) was important and chose to help inform the public. My mission was to participate in a missile and torpedo engagement exercise at Pacific Missile Range Facility as part of RIMPAC 2018. RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific Exercise) is the largest naval exercise in the world. It's used to test interoperability and the ability to work as an international force.
My first video of a 3 part series on "coordinated inauthentic behavior".
2nd video in a 3 part series on Social Media Manipulation.
We used a pressurized vacuum cannon to get the golf ball up to speeds of over 500 miles per hour.
What I really like about this project is that it taught me to think about the world differently with respect to physical objects. I now sometimes think about the outline of physical objects as if it's a line. The specific area of math that you use for things like this is called "Parametric Equations". I had a lot of great conversations about this stuff with Hansi and Jerobeam. I was very impressed by their intelligence, and also very thankful that they took their time to share these special things with me. I know they'd really appreciate it if you'd reach out to their website and purchase OsciStudio as well as some of Jerobeam's music. Even if you don't have an oscilloscope, purchasing the software will obviously help them continue to do what they love doing. Hansi showed me a very interesting thing he's working on involving ray tracing. It was fascinating.
Life is Amazing. Seeing this touched me and I wanted to share it with you
Sometimes you just want to goof around in the garage with friends.... and you happen to end up learning something interesting!
I greatly appreciate Dr. John Mather's time and patience with me. He did a fantastic job of breaking down the design of the telescope.
More calibration shots to come!
We spent 3 Years Making a Game
The coolest part about this is that Brad and Chad didn't ask me to say anything in particular.... they partner with wholesale dealers so you should be able to find them at your local disc golf store.
An interesting thing happened while I was trying to replace a cylinder on my tractor. It reminded me of some things about the backwards bicycle and I wanted to revisit it now that several years have passed.