Hopefully Interesting

As many of you know I switched jobs recently.  I'd been working at Vecna for three years and while I loved my work and my coworkers I wasn't as happy with the way the company was run.  When I was on the west coast this last summer for Ross Hatton's wedding I ran into Lael Odhner who I knew from MIT.  One thing led to another and a while later I had joined RightHand Robotics. What does RightHand Robotics do?  Well, as you might guess from the name we work with robotic grasping.  If you go to  our webpage  you can see a bunch of videos with our robotic hands doing things.  I'll just embed this one video of the hand we make picking up and moving a bunch of different objects. The arm you see there is a relatively off the shelf model made by  Universal Robots , the UR5.  The hand at the end was made by us and is called the Reflex gripper. The Reflex grippers are actually open source.  On Github you can go to  this  re...

You might have heard of the  famous self-photographing monkey  shown below.  Well, there was a bit of a to do regarding who owns the copyright to the photo.  The person who owned the camera thinks he owns the copyright for some reason but there was also a group that went to court hoping to have the copyright assigned to monkey.  Well, it seems that as everybody expected monkeys  can't own copyrights .   While I'm experimenting with putting images in blog posts here's a git of the heliocentric and geocentric models of the solar system.  You can see that the planets would have had to have moved in really weird ways in order to explain their apparent position.  On the other hand at the time of Galileo people had been adding so many corrective terms or epicycles  to the geocentric model that it explained observations very well.  Kepler would eventually figure out that planets moved in  ellipses  but when heliocentrists...