Posts

This silly little ‘guide’ is meant for beginners in PHP. It’s a super quick template you can begin a website with (I claim no copyright to the code I wrote below, do what you want with it). Managing a site is much easier if the common elements are made dynamically, and for this [...]

Simple Machines Forum is a really great free and open source script for running a forum.  There were some vulnerabilities in earlier versions, however, and a forum I run seems to have become victim to one such attack.  A user under the name ‘krisbarteo’ was able to register, then create an avatar picture which somehow [...]

I discovered Tom Lehrer, a humorist piano player from the mid ’40s through the 60s, just now when reading The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins (HIGHLY recommended book).  Tom was mentioned in one of the captions for his song which is marked to play in the style [...]

Introduction
Some months ago I began a project involving Flash for making visual representations of data.  The learning curve was steep at the beginning, mostly because of so much confusion between all of the Adobe (and formerly, Macromedia) products.  There’s Flash, ActionScript, Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Director, and so on – and on top of that there [...]

I started reading this book, "How to build a mind" by Igor Aleksander – a somewhat outdated book on so-called artificially intelligent systems, and systems which model thought processes similar to animals and humans.  The book touches on thoughts of what it means to "be conscious," among other things.  It seems the majority of the [...]

 
Hamsters caught my attention when a friend showed me this picture:

from the site:
http://www.novaksblog.com/2007/08/26/stumble-on-sunday-3rd-part/
And in a search to find out just how much hamsters can really stuff into their pouches I came across these irresistibly cute videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfqNXADl3kU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-l-jshNYkA
So then my brother purchased one for me for Christmas.  She’s quite cute and usually entertaining, at least when she [...]

Kasou Taishou (In hiragana that would be かそうたいしょう, but see the footnote*…) has become one of my favorite Japanese shows.  It has been around Japanese television for quite a few years, and  I came across it while looking for videos where I could hear Japanese being spoken on YouTube, and there are many episodes on there [...]

Woodcarving has been a hobby of mine since discovering that I could do it a number of years ago.  It is one of the rare things that came naturally to me; most of my other hobbies have taken years of work to get to any decent level of skill.  Most of my carvings end up [...]

Indeed His Great and Tasty Noodliness exists, and our lab was blessed with His appearance during a bake-out of the vacuum chambers.  We have yet to encounter Real Pirates, but assume that our lab’s collective adherence to the observance and recognition of International Talk Like A Pirate Day has not gone without notice by His [...]

Back to Ultracold Atomic Experiment

Of all the cool projects I’ve been involved in during my school career through my Physics career, I’ve got to say that getting to build a custom laser is the one I’m going to have the most fun talking about.  Not that it is the most interesting project ever…but come on, [...]

This news article struck me as funny:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/4342884/RAF-ordered-to-shoot-down-UFOs.html

 
I have a Hyundai with a key fob which locks the door with one click and sets the alarm with another.  The alarm is in fact nearly useless, as it does not go off when the car is bumped or anything, nor would it be set by a broken window, but it does go off [...]

This little restaurant either changed owners or just food and name, and is now serves Greek food.
I’ve been once and had the Veggie Plate, a sampler of common vegetarian Greek items.  The dinner plates there are priced on the higher end of cheap food ($8.99 for the plate meals, and there are cheaper options), but [...]

I really enjoy hearing about groups of people who take the pursuit of knowledge into their own hands and build or create crazy projects.  That’s why I was excited to hear about people with home-built biology labs in their homes, in this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126881.400-rise-of-the-garage-genome-hackers.html?page=2 The article links to this site, which talks about [...]

I have been working for some time with an Ultracold Atomic Experiment group at the University of Washington.  This has been one of my more enjoyable jobs, and has kept me busy machining parts, soldering together circuits, building lasers, taking pictures, and all sorts of other fun things.  The entire series of chambers is pulled [...]

 Back to Motion Control home

A short list of companies from which to purchase parts for motion control.
Digi-Key:
www.digikey.com
A very large assortment of electronics.  Their site, however, is entirely text-based–so if you know what your part looks like but don’t know what it’s called, this is a tough place to find it!  They do have links to [...]

 Back to Motion Control home.

This list was compiled quite a few years ago in conjunction with and for Bruce Shapiro and his course, ‘From Bits, to Bytes…to Bots‘.
It is intended to aid in finding all of the right parts quickly and cheaply, through each phase of learning control via a computer parallel port.
How much will [...]

Motion Control
Companies
Parts
Outer Links:
http://www.taomc.com/
http://www.taomc.com/bits2bots/

This is the portion of my physics group project report that I wrote.
Interferometer Page 1

Measuring Static Frictional Forces using Interferometry

[...]

This article describes the physics project I was involved in.

Interferometer page 2

Interferometry: Measuring Displacement on a Molecular Level
Our project is to very precisely measure static frictional forces between various materials. The high precision comes in using a Michelson-type interferometer.

[...]