[XCSSA] Legos and Dark Matter

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

On Wednesday 20 September 2006 00:36, xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:
> Tom,
>
> Thanks for the great Lego Mindstorms adventure!  I made 3 different
> robots during the lab, the final one being a robot which changes
> direction after hitting a room boundary.
>
> Worst problem was the somewhat cumbersome GUI of the development
> environment, having a number of faults like a lack of undo, clunky
> methods for deleting things (and no way I could figure how to move
> things around),

Actually, the undo was the standard CTRL-Z, the delete was not to hard 
(highlight and DEL key), and to move stuff around you used the arrow icon 
instead of the default hand.  But you're right.. the GUI was still clunky and 
non-intuitive.

I would have rather had a command line programming interface myself...

> But it was still good enough to get programs working in a few minutes. 
> Fun!

It was fun.. :)


> ***** Dark Matter  *****
>
> Thanks also for mentioning the latest discovery about dark matter.  I'm
> pretty sure I didn't hear about it last month at the Dark Matter and
> Dark Energy seminar I went to.  I see it was posted to NASA more than a
> week after that seminar, so it's the latest stuff:
>
> http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html
[...]
> But it was really good to find this out before going!  This is the kind
> of late breaking news one always gets at XCSSA!

Hehe.. thanks for looking that up Charles. I knew I wasn't crazy and had heard 
about that dark matter finding.  :)


> the standard model of Quantum Physics.  The two theories just don't fit
> together in a lot of ways, and lots of scientists now are trying to find
> a new theory to replace both, just as Einstein failed to do in the last
> decades of his life.
>
> So much for science being near the end, like one recent book says.
>  Actually, it looks like we're due for another scientific revolution.

I just love how the more we learn, the more we end up staring straight into 
the mirror or our own ignorance.

Tweeks