Knowing .NET

Microsoft has released-to-manufacture Microsoft Robotics Studio (via Dan Fernandez).

We got a Roomba as an early Christmas present and I gotta’ tell you, it’s won over my extremely-skeptical wife. My least favorite chore is sweeping our long, steep driveway and I’m very tempted to get another and mod it for the task (put a plow on the front for the leaves and stones, desensitize or shut off the bump sensor, maybe turn off the brushes altogether. I looked at the Roomba API and it seems straightforward.). 

Man. If I had a robotic driveway cleaner and an autonomous frog-killing blimp? That would be totally sweet. Totally.

John Montgomery points to this interesting article on the physical effects of Coca Cola. (Short version: you get a sugar spike, one more potent than you could stand if the taste of sugar wasn’t cut by the use of phosphoric acid.) 

I gave up my daily Coke early this year and, doing very little else, dropped from The Most I’ve Ever Weighed to Less Than I’ve Weighed In Fifteen Years. ~240 calories a day ~= 7200 calories per month ~= 2 pounds worth of calories. Once I learned to diagnose the “coming off the morning coffee, ingest coke” urge and manage it with a not-vastly-sugary snack, I haven’t really missed it on a daily basis. I still keep a six-pack around and I admit that I drink a can before Ultimate games!

Here’s a scholarly, but clearly written, article on a generalized algorithm for implementing dataflow using shared memory. Dataflow is a very intuitive calculation model (think “spreadsheet”). When I saw this paper I thought “Wasn’t it known that dataflow could be automatically parallelized?” but maybe not. One way or the other, it is now. The authors even show how their algorithm can be tweaked to improve cache coherency. Nice.

Sadly, it sounds all artsy-fartsy with the blimps moving towards sound or somesuch. Sigh. If your autonomous blimps can detect and move towards sound, at least let paint the target with a laser sighting device to instill an appropriate feeling of dread.

Plus, the party’s being held in a wind tunnel, so that doesn’t make these things sound like they could do much to prevent escape from The Village.

If I had an autonomous blimp (how many times have I typed that phrase over the years?), I would outfit it with targeting lasers and set it to work discovering the calling places of the invasive coqui frog, a dime-sized creature that produces a 110 dB (!) whistle.