No, actually, I have not forgotten about Project 22. It’s just been busy the last few weeks and I’ve only just gotten together quite a few make-up photos for days that went past without appropriate photographic records. It’s shameful, I know. In any case, here they all are, starting with… Continue reading ‘Project 22 - 17 January - 8 February 2008′
Tag Archive for 'cornell university'
This bunch of photos takes me up through the day before I drove to NC (i.e. yesterday). Continue reading ‘Project 22 - 12 - 18 December’
Having missed an opportunity to see Skynet, Cornell’s DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle, up close and personal today due to my optics lab, I decided upon returning at the end of the afternoon, that I was entitled to some quality photography time. So I grabbed my camera and headed off across campus. I got a lot of lovely photos, so many, in fact, that I had a hard time settling on this photo of McGraw Tower at sunset as today’s photo. But, in the end, it’s hard to pass up a photo of Cornell’s most prominent symbol silhouetted against a violet sky.
Currently teams from both my department here at Cornell and my alma mater, Case Western, are competing in the National Qualifying Exam for the DARPA Urban Challenge for which teams have built vehicles that will compete in completing a race in an urban traffic-like environment without a human driver. This means the robot has to not only get from Point A to Point B entirely without human direction, but must do so while following all the rules of the road and dealing with traffic - including human drivers as well as other autonomous ones.
It’s a pretty tall order.
I’ve been following TeamCASE closely through their blog, but TGDaily also has video (the second one) of their robot, Dexter, in part of the NQE where the robot has to perform left turns with traffic. Dexter does fabulously–exactly what I would expect such a great team of engineers and computer scientists behind him! Go TeamCASE and Cornell!
Ironically, this was not a photo that I’d originally had in mind as a Project 22 subject; I was just taking a picture of my professor’s notes on the blackboard because I hadn’t bothered to write them down. But somehow, the photo managed to capture the mood of today extremely well. It’s been a day where I’ve felt harried, confused, and generally unwell about my world and my place in it.
Tonight I spent a little time poking around the law school for photographic inspiration. The law school’s buildings and grounds are so beautiful that’s it’s truly a shock to turn around and see just how ugly the engineering buildings directly across the street are. Alas, that engineering buildings are confined to utilitarianism!
Aside from being a building I traverse daily, Duffield Hall happens to be one of the few attractive engineering buildings I’ve ever seen on a college campus. I took this photo in the early evening, so the atrium is relatively empty, but, during the school year, I have never seen Duffield without undergraduates studying/working/eating/talking all along its length.
Today’s Project 22 entry isn’t the greatest composition and the colors are, well, terrible (auto ISO killed me here), but it definitely commemorates the highlight of my day: attending the Olin Lecture given by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. His two-hour talk ranged over an array of topics, including a strong emphasis on why the United States is and will continue to fall behind other countries in terms of scientific and technological achievement. To some extent, it was preaching to the choir to give such a talk at Cornell, but it’s important to hear nonetheless. As a speaker, he was extremely engaging and entertaining–sometimes it felt more like stand-up comedy than an intellectual discourse, but nobody seemed to mind. I ought to have spent time jotting down some of his excellent remarks, but, alas, I did not. Here is one of the most poignant in paraphrase: “You know, as a culture, that you’ve stopped innovating when your first achievement still looks impressive.”
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