A Strange New Universe

"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe."
-- János Bolyai

This past weekend was the MIT Mystery Hunt.

Mystery Hunt is a very large puzzle hunt. It's a little hard to describe puzzle hunts, but basically they're themed events in which teams compete by solving all kinds of puzzles. The answers to puzzles are always words or phrases (answers from this year's Hunt include DANNY OCEAN, GRAPHS, and AVENGERS), but how to arrive at that answer varies wildly. Most puzzles have two phases, a data-mining phase and an extraction phase. The data-mining phase could be answering the clues of a crossword or cryptic, identifying the missing letter on a bunch of road signs, looking at the rhyme scheme of a poem, doing some logic puzzles -- there are lots of possibilities. Extraction is getting from the data-mining to the answer. That could be indexing numbers into some words (taking the nth letter), looking at first letters of words, continuing a pattern, or looking at specially marked portions of a grid. A puzzle can be anything from a crossword with certain boxes marked so that those letters spell out the answer to a webpage full of pictures with no instructions at all.

Reflections on First Semester, Part 3

In which I really don't know what to think of Design Nature.

Reflections on First Semester, Part 2

This post is a look back at the past semester of Anthropology.

Reflections on First Semester, Part 1

In order to look back on the past semester in some kind of organized manner, I'm going to split this post (and all following ones) up by class/activity. This post is about ModSim and ModCon.

This is a Tale of Maggie Gibbon

Once upon a time, there was a gibbon named Maggie who lived happily in the southeast Asian jungles. Then, however, a developer arrived in the jungle and planned to cut it down. Maggie wanted to save her jungles, but she wasn't sure how. Then she noticed that the workers left the keys to their truck in the open while they took a break. Now, Maggie was unusual -- she had been born with magnetic feet! So her plan was to swing through the jungle, pick up the keys while the workers were away, and save her forest!

Between 11:59 pm on Tuesday and 12:01 am on Wednesday, Team Gibbon concluded that Maggie the Magnetic Gibbon was incapable of swinging, and she transformed into Maggie the Macho Gibbon, who was captured and wants to escape, so she's doing pull-ups while holding dumbbells with her feet in order to get strong enough to escape.

The transformation was a little like Cinderella, except not at all.

Last night was Transporter Night, I ate too much because upperclassmen are the nicest ever and bring wonderful food to the studios, and I did not get anywhere near enough sleep.

Look, a Gibbon!

Team Gibbon has a functional prototype! On monkey bars!

Well, for some definition of functional. Some parts of it are pretty fragile, and it's rather difficult to control, but all the components work, and it is capable of swinging! Its legs also move up and down so that it can pick up items with its feet (which have magnets). The leg movement is the best-working part of the gibbon.

Here is the frame of our second prototype (on bottom) beside the frame of the first prototype (on top):

ModSim: Green Edition

Unintentionally, both my second and third ModSim projects ended up relating to sustainability or green technology!

My second project was on passive freezers. That was a pretty stressful project. The physics was fun because I like thermodynamics, but my partner and I had lots of code problems. We ended up printing the poster two and a half hours before it was due. We had to record a six minute presentation, and we had to do three takes in under an hour.

Given how tight everything was at the end, the poster didn't turn out too badly!

Building a Passive Freezer: Taking an Active Stance on the Environment