For the mid-month blog this time, I've decided I'll tell a silly story about me, from back when I was getting my Master's degree and working as a Research Assistant. I hope it entertains and reveals that we aren't always as polished as we look.
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| Oh, no. Is that *me*? Yeah, that's me. *Hides under the table* At the Museum of the Rockies "Science Night," I think, with our primitive early version of the robot and its bean mining play area. |
At the time this story takes place, my advising professor/principal investigator is also supervising our university's team for the Lunabotics Mining Competition. I myself had been on the team back when I was an undergraduate, and he thinks he can take a load off the crop of students building this year's robot, by assigning me to do some of the side activities -- in particular, public outreach. In the technical professions, the goal of "outreach" is to enhance public interest in our work, partly so that we can encourage kids to study it when they grow up.
The Lunabotics Mining Competition is about building a robot that can dig up, transport, and deposit as much simulated moon dirt[1] as possible within a time limit. So my professor's bright idea for outreach is to build a kid-friendly version of this. We'll use a LEGO Mindstorms kit plus a custom part or two[2] to create a rough model of the design team's robot. We'll make a miniature arena to put the robot in, and fill it with dry beans. Then we'll hand the controller over to kids at the outreach events and let them "mine" the beans. Very cute.
I do some work on the LEGO robot, and my professor makes the arena, and soon everything is ready. There are several places we want to run the demonstration, one of which is the Billings Clinic Research Center Science Expo. We're in Bozeman - so my professor tasks me with going to Billings and running our booth all by myself. I accept.
Narrator: "Sometimes Jenny Sue is bad at estimating the relative sizes of objects."
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| The LunArena in its pristine state. |
The night before I'm supposed to leave for the event, I bring the "Lunarena" down to my little Honda Civic and realize it doesn't fit. The arena has a roof, to represent the fact that the real competition arena is contained in a tent. So it's like a little house, almost, and I just can't stuff it into my car's back seat. It's made of foam-core board and dowels and fabric, it's all glued together, and there's no way to take it apart or fold it up.
"Well," I think to myself, "I said I would take this thing to Billings, so that is what I'm going to do." And I proceed to tie it onto the roof of my car.
Narrator: "However smart Jenny Sue may look, she sometimes displays a poor grasp of real-world physics."
The next morning I get up before sunrise and set off. My car must look absurd with that arena on top of it. But all goes well -- until I make it onto the highway. I gather speed gradually, testing the situation, and hear ominous sounds as the wind begins to tug at the big, flimsy object on the roof. I know I am in danger ... but I also know I can't putt-putt all the way to Billings at 30 miles per hour, and there are no cars behind me. So I start going faster, and faster.
And then I hear the big, scraping, clattering noise as the whole thing rips apart and goes tumbling off my car roof.
My saving grace is the lack of traffic. Montana highways can be lonely, and in the pre-dawn hours I have this one almost all to myself. So I pull over, hop out of my car, and hurry back to grab the wreckage before somebody else runs over it. Several pieces have pulled apart, one of the dowels is broken, and it's generally a mess ... but now that it has collapsed, it fits in my car! So I shove all the pieces in there and proceed to Billings.
I arrive at the outreach event with some time to spare. I repair the arena with what I have on hand (mostly masking tape), and actually get the thing to stand up and look passable. And then I run the booth like nothing ever went wrong, and show a bunch of little kids how to collect and unload beans with the robot all morning. When the event is over, I, uh, "disassemble" the arena so I can put it back in my car.
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| A photo from the Billings event (I cropped out the kids' faces for their privacy). You can see the Arena is ... leaning a bit. |
It all turned out well enough, and my professor didn't even seem mad ... though I had to help with a more permanent repair of the arena later. We even won second place in the outreach category of the competition! You can read a version of the year's successes *without* my inglorious background details here: MSU Students Earn Medals.
In hindsight, tying that arena onto my car roof was so stupid that I almost can't believe I did it. I guess I couldn't see any better option at the time. It goes to show that an apparently professional and successful project can get ridiculous behind the scenes.
[1] The fancy word for this is "regolith."
[2] We made the excavation drum from a Pringles can.
Love the CAT hat. Their phones, on the other hand, disappoint me.
ReplyDeleteAs someone almost killed via handling 700 pounds of plywood solo, working on a radioactive arcade game (apparently) and things I won't admit to in public, I get the roof lapse of judgment.
A radioactive *what*? How? I am burning to know this story now.
DeleteThat hat is a relic of the inaugural Lunabotics Mining Competition. Caterpillar sponsored it, so we all got one. I wore it until it started fraying.
Nice to see you here. I assumed you were just taking another break from Twitter, but I couldn't help feeling a little concerned when you vanished.
I don't know if the other post will clear moderation, but I found one! It wasn't a fever dream!
Deletehttps://twitter.com/turfmasta/status/833193704743641088/photo/1
Human interaction wears on me. Certain folk, like you and Alex, are great others . . . not so much. Every one in a while I simply disappear.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I cut my teeth in professional electronics in an arcade. The bosses were Japan crazy and we had Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, and so many other things right on the cusp of their popularity. The story of how the city used taxes as a punitive measure because they don't like children and how that had us go from 70+ arcade games to 10 is another story. As is the dam I wrote a proposal for showing that in 20 years nothing has changed, not even that dam's maintenance schedule.
That . . . went off topic. Anyway, we had a game called Irritating Stick. Think of it like a 12 foot wide game of Operation where you move a stick through gears and pistons without touching anything. It was really cool, technically, but not fun to play. We used it as a wall when it broke. Anyway, RFID tags to make sure the player didn't cheat, xenon strobes, the whole over the top nine yards. Well, during a repair someone (who wasn't me but it was an honest mistake) hooked together two red wires. One was an RS232 signal line. One was 330v. I spent a year repairing it, and it broke three months later.
Owners divorced, she didn't have the money, he didn't have the head for business. It was scrapped. When it got to the yard, it set off the radiological alarms, and I didn't hear that story until years later.
Might have been the only one in America at the time.
That's really neat. Pity it wasn't preserved. (Though I guess it was technically unsafe.)
DeleteI really only have comment approval on to keep spambots from junking up the place. Whenever the blog traffic gets high enough, they show up, and deleting all those comments after the fact was getting really tedious.
Yeah. We had a lot of things that didn't make it. Shame because some of that was a lot of work, and some was just really painful to move. But everyone always tells me about this stuff years later because I would've insisted it go somewhere other than the dump. I mean "Free to a good home" on any given website is better than what it got.
DeleteI figured. Spam is such an odd phenomenon. I guess if the frequency is high enough, even the most unlikely thing can happen, like someone falling for the "I'd like to do business with you, just send me all the source code" thing I see on DIY blogs.