The Tinkerer’s Handbook, Page 8 (of 8): “

(Start from Page 1.)

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The Finch, a cute portable robot for teaching comp sci: “

Meet The Finch, a $100 robot from Carnegie Mellon university designed to make computer science education more fun. From the press release:

A white plastic, two-wheeled robot with bird-like features, Finch can quickly be programmed by a novice to say ‘Hello, World,’ or do a little dance, or make its beak glow blue in response to cold temperature or some other stimulus. But the simple look of the tabletop robot is deceptive. Based on four years of educational research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Finch includes a number of features that could keep students busy for a semester or more thinking up new things to do with it.

‘Students are more interested and more motivated when they can work with something interactive and create programs that operate in the real world,’ said Tom Lauwers, who earned his Ph.D. in robotics at CMU in 2010 and is now an instructor in the Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab. ‘We packed Finch with sensors and mechanisms that engage the eyes, the ears — as many senses as possible.’

‘Our vision is to make Finch affordable enough that every student can have one to take home for assignments,’ said Lauwers, who developed the robot with Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and director of the CREATE Lab. Less than a foot long, Finch easily fits in a backpack and is rugged enough to survive being hauled around and occasionally dropped.

You can buy them from the official homepage. [Finchrobot.com]

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Two months on: “

The Economist has a report from the International Conference on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants of a plenary session discussing the Fukushima Daiichi accident: it’s well worth reading.

The main highlights seem to be:

* The accident wasn’t the result of a single disaster, but of two, and arguably three: earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent hydrogen explosions.

* The plan survived the earthquake (which exceeded its design requirements) quite well, and the reactors scrammed correctly. However, scrammed reactors continue to need power to run their cooling systems. The earthquake tore down the cables connecting the plant to the rest of the grid, forcing them onto backup power.

* The tsunami struck 15 minutes later, and was roughly five times higher than the plant had been designed for. A review of disaster preparedness in 2002 recommended raising “the average wave height they needed to be designed to cope with to about double the height of the biggest waves in the historical record” — 5.7 metres, for the FD plant. In the event, the tsunami that struck had 15 metre waves. It washed right over the plant and wrecked the seawater intakes, electrical switchgear, backup generators, and on-site diesel storage.

* The 2002 severe accident review that increased the tsunami wave height estimates recommended installing hardened hydrogen release vents, to prevent a build-up of hydrogen in event of a similar accident. These are standard on American and other reactors, but had not been retrofitted to the FD BWRs. Were such vents fitted, the explosions would not have occurred. (The explosions compounded the difficulty of bringing the plant under control.)

* Despite all this there appears to have been no public health impact due to radiation (stress and fear are another matter), and no plant workers were exposed to more than 250 millisieverts — the raised limit for emergency nuclear responders, equal to five years’ regular working exposure, but insufficient to cause a serious helath risk.

So: serious accident, yes — but it’s no Chernobyl. (Go read the article. It’s good.) The main take-away seems to be that, like a plane crash, it takes more than one thing going wrong to cause an accident — in this case, two major natural disasters, each of which exceeded the plant’s design spec, occurring within the space of an hour, compounded by failure to implement a safety system that is standard elsewhere. Despite which, they managed to dodge the bullet (for the most part: it’s still going to take billions of dollars and several years to clean up the plant).

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Kinect and 3D printer turns people into action-figure souvenirs: “

Barcelona’s Blablablab set up a ‘Be Your Own Souvenir installation that used a Kinect and a 3D printer to allow passersby to pose for on-demand action-figures of themselves and their night out on the town: ‘The project uses custom software developed using openKinect and openFrameworks. To create an army figurine style souvenir, visitors use 3 kinect sensors to create a 360-degree scan which creates input pointclouds. Meshlab then uses these combined pointclouds to create a Poisson reconstruction, which is cleaned up via Blender and Skeinforge before being fed into a cnc machine (Rapman 3.1), which prints out the souvenir. Voila! Now, seriously, check out the pics and video of it in action on the next page!’

Be Your Own Souvenir by blablabLAB – 04.08.11

(via Geisha Asobi)

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Time-lapse macro video: ferrous particles in liquid suspension, drawn to magnet: “

[Video Link]

Kim Pimmel shares the video above, and explains:

Ferrous printer toner particles floating on the surface of water are attracted by a magnet and align to the invisible magnetic field around them. The patterns and motions that result are strangely ordered and organized. Time-lapse sequences were created from individual photos shot with a Nikon D90, DIY macro lens and DIY intervalometer.

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Spider attacks an ant (with surprise ending): “

[Video Link] Watch until the end. The verite soundtrack is nice.

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Amazing sculpted toys by Gabriels: “

New Toys for Melancholics is a solo show by ‘Pop Surrealist sculptor and philosopher’ Gabriels. The toys are made from ‘polished hand-crafted bronze, life-like glass eyes, and scores of tiny internal intricate elements and organs.’ It’s opening May 6 at the Toy Art Gallery in Los Angeles.

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Let it be clear: these are not sculptures, but toys and more precisely prototypes of Toys for Melancholics. They aspire to the industrial production on a large scale and to the indefinite propagation, in proportion to the planetary diffusion of the anguishastic-desperative Weltanschauung and of the consequent — very legitimate, although not absolutely incontrovertible — propensity to suicideness. In this sense, our Toys for Melancholics scrupulously respect all the standards of global melancholy quality in a petrified primeval landscape, addressing courageously to a public of adults, kiddies and lithopaedia.’

—-Gabriels

See more images after the jump.

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