Interesting Stuff

There was a terrorist strike on the Mumbai train system reminiscent of the London and Madrid bombings. Several hundred people are injured/killed. I hope Rishad and his family are alright (edit: they’re fine, though his cousin got off one of the trains 10 minutes before the bombs went off. Scary!), though it’s statistically likely that they’re alright: there are 19 million people in Mumbai, and around 500 were in the bombings. No one is certain who did this yet or what their reasons were. I suspect this is going to be really big news.

Congress has begun debating tribunal systems for Guantanamo inmates. It sounds like very little has been accomplished so far, but at least it’s starting.

Finally, the UN may be gearing up for sanctions against Iran for dragging its feet about the nuclear fuel compromise it has been offered. I suspect that sanctions will be imposed but ineffectual (when was the last time that sanctions actually brought about the intended changes to countries?), and eventually either Iran will become a nuclear power or someone will invade the country and find that, like in Iraq, no nuclear weapons program exists. My bet is on the second option, but we shall see. I liked Scott Adams’ take on this whole issue:

I’ll discuss this more soon, but I’m going to bed now.

I played bridge with Jim again this evening. We had a rather poor game (41% gave us last place out of 10 partnerships), at least partly because I had 29 points on the first hand of the night and got flustered (there are typically 40 points in the deck, so 10 points is an average hand, to put things in perspective). I opened this monster with 2C even though I could have opened 3NT. Jim replied 2D (we use the control-showing step response: he had no aces and at most one king, but I faltered a bit explaining it to our opponents, since I only use it with Jim and it almost never comes up). I bid 2NT (balanced, stronger than previously shown), to which he replied 3H (apparently, this was a transfer, but I missed it). I bid 3NT, he went to 4S (trying to correct for my lack of transfer), and I paused for a bit and bid 6NT. We made an overtrick. That hand gave us an above average result, but made me really nervous (particularly when I learned in the postmortem that I was the only one who didn’t interpret Jim’s heart bid as a transfer to spades), so I was a bit off for the rest of the evening.

One of the last hands of the night had a squeeze play in it. I saw the squeeze play. I set it up correctly. The last thing I needed to do was lose one final club trick. After that, I had a simple squeeze against my left-hand opponent in clubs and diamonds. However, LHO won the club trick, pondered for a very long time, and… gave me a free finesse. I had accidentally endplayed her while trying to squeeze her! Oops. I took the rest of the tricks, but this was little consolation after being robbed of my squeeze play (which would have worked if RHO had won the club trick or if LHO had returned a spade instead of a club). I’m still trying to execute my first squeeze in a sanctioned game, but at least I got darn close this time! I wish I could remember the hand in greater detail, but the third-to-last and second-to-last boards of the night are running together for me (I declared both of them in major-suit games, one making exactly and one making an overtrick).

The 5-card squeeze play, if I had been able to do it →

First off, you may recall that last week the Supreme Court ruled the Guantanamo tribunals unconstitutional. Urged on by this, Congress is gearing up to tackle the issue. It sounds like it’s possible Congress will just give the Bush Administration the blank check he needs to continue the same trials, but a more likely scenario is that legislation will be enacted that reaffirms the Geneva convention and gives prisoners a fair trial. Here’s hoping!

Japan is still pushing for a UN resolution enacting sanctions against North Korea. China will certainly not support the harsh language proposed, but if Russia abstains from the vote, China will be the only country with veto power to go against the measure, which puts them in an awkward spot. We shall see what happens.

The Pope made a visit to Spain to try to rally the people against gay marriage. Last year, Spain legalized it (as well as adoptions by gay couples), but the Pope seems to be mobilizing a lot of people against these laws. He apparently said that “acting as if (God) did not exist or relegating faith to the purely private sphere, undermines the truth” about the world. Whoa! I can understand if you want to believe in whatever deity you do (and if you want to believe that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong), but I have major issues with anyone trying to force their religion of choice onto others. and this guy is explicitly stating that making your religion a private choice is bad!? The Pope went on to yearn for the good old days when Spain was under Catholic rule (presumably this includes things like the Spanish Inquisition). The odd thing is that lots of Spaniards seem to agree with the Pope’s statements. Having never been to Spain, this all strikes me as kinda scary, but I could be getting a skewed viewpoint. Is this actually typical of the Spanish populace?

While I’m still thinking about movie reviews, I saw A Prairie Home Companion (the movie) the other day. I give it 3 1/2 out of 4 stars, no spoiler warning →

Pirates was sold out, so I saw Superman with Emily and Jenna tonight. Although the local newspaper gave it 4 stars, I was sorely disappointed in the movie. My rating: 2 1/2 out of 4 stars, but with a SPOILER WARNING →

Tonight I played bridge with Jim for the first time in about a month. It turns out that this week is the big Aquatennial tournament, so instead of the typical 6-table game, we had a huge 25-table monstrosity that was actually split into two different flights. Some of the tables were downstairs because they ran out of room on the ground floor! Jim and I didn’t have any unusually good plays, but we were consistently above average, and ended the night with a 52% game (5th of the 14 east/west pairs in our flight). This netted us each 0.61 Silver Master Points! All the ones I have previously gotten are Black, though at my rank, color doesn’t affect anything yet (it simply denotes that I got them at a larger tournament which presumably attracted stronger competition). Jim missed bidding two slams at which he instead signed off in game (only one of which I can fault him for; the other one was quite tricky), and I misinterpreted our opponents’ bidding in one hand, overbid, and went down two doubled tricks (this was our only bottom board). Other than that, though, we had no noticeable mistakes or miscommunications! We just had solid bidding and play throughout the evening. Hurrah!

One one hand, I managed to recognize a situation for a squeeze play (this was another Vienna Coup), and executed it correctly. However, it didn’t actually work (it would have worked only if the opponent with the Ace of Spades also held the Queen of Diamonds). Still, I’m proud of myself for recognizing the situation and responding correctly to it.

Also, remember not to hold up your winners too long, even in notrump: I made 12 tricks in a notrump contract because my opponent refused to take her king the first two opportunities she had, and I didn’t give her a third. This was our only top board of the evening, since everyone else made only the 11 tricks to which they were entitled. For the non-bridge enthusiasts who aren’t familiar with this strategy, a hold-up play is when you choose not to take your winner now, and instead take it later. Assuming you are still able to take it later, you don’t lose any tricks. However, this can cut the transportation between your opponents’ hands, so that one hand has remaining winners in the suit but no longer has a way to get to them (and hence cannot cash these winners). This is a particularly useful technique in notrump contracts, where the hand that becomes void in the suit cannot get in with a ruff.

Nothing interesting has happened for nearly a week, and all of a sudden, lots of things are out there! The space shuttle Discovery appears to have launched without incident, and is on its way to take a German dude to the ISS. Former Enron executive Ken Lay died of a heart attack (note that this brought up an excellent example of why Wikipedia should not be trusted (edit: link is broken; use the WayBack Machine to see the article) as much as an actual encyclopedia, since its information is not guaranteed to be correct). Although neither of thise is particularly important news, I thought I’d add them in anyway. More importantly, North Korea had a failed missile test which has prompted much of the rest of the world to be quite alarmed. UN Security Council meetings and economic sanctions appear to be following quite quickly. The test included a Taepodong-2 missile which, if successful, could hit the west coast of the USA. It appears as though Korea will have another missile test in the near future. In Europe, the Italians are cracking down on people who supposedly helped the CIA kidnap people and transfer them to countries where they were tortured. If this is part of the alleged secret CIA torture system throughout Europe, there is a lot more to be uncovered. However, it appears so far to just be a few people. Finally, Israel has continued its incursion into the West Bank, this time attempting to stop Palestinians from firing grenades into villages. The military activity began a week ago when Palestinians kidnapped an Israeli soldier, the first such abduction in over a decade.

Right. I think that’s all for the moment… Oh! and the World Cup final seems to be Italy versus France.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that the tribunals used to try prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are unconstitutional. It’s high time the courts stepped in and said that the US needs to follow both the Geneva Conventions and its own laws about military trials. However, some people are outraged that the courts have limited the power of the Bush administration. The ruling did not indicate what should be done with the prisoners, except that the current system won’t work. Still, some groups are calling this a success, going so far as to say that this might even force the prison to close (though I doubt that will happen any time soon). The tricky thing is that most of the subsequent trials are out of the jurisdiction of US courts (including the Supreme Court). Consequently, it seems like from here on in there will be nothing that the Supreme Court can do regarding the constitutionality of the prison.

Steven Colbert brought up an interesting point last week—if we let the prisoners go (even if it’s just the ones who were originally innocent), they surely hate America at this point, and are more likely than ever to try to attack the country. and yet, if we don’t let them go, the rest of the world will grow to despise the US even more. Either way, it’s a nasty quagmire, and I doubt it will be resolved for years to come, unfortunately.

Today’s vision meeting totally made my day. Now that the batteries are fully charged, we can proceed: the camera works, it works beautifully, and it works simply. We got it to work with the software that FIRST gave us. We got it to work with the software developed at CMU. We got it to work with a Python script David and I wrote last week. Kick ass! We got it to move the servos, capture images, track different colors around the image, and move the servos to center the camera on a swath of color. The next step, I feel, is to get the robot’s processor to interface with the camera and do all of this (we’re currently doing it from a desktop computer). The cool thing is that the hard part of this has already been solved by this awesome dude online; we just need to look through the code and figure out how he interfaces with the TTL stuff, and we should be good to go.

Some of the robotics kids have expressed interest in learning to program the processor on the robot but have no prior programming experience. Consequently, today I held a meeting about learning C (the only language with a compiler for our processor). If you think Mudd was like drinking from a firehose, you got nothing on me. In 2 hours, I attempted to teach three kids and a mom nearly all of C. We covered

• compiling code before running it
• basic syntax: semicolons, curly braces, and their ilk
• built-in types: int, bool, char, short, long, unsigned
• variables, and declaring and defining them
• if statements, and for and while loops
• boolean logic: && || ! == etc.
• creating functions, including arguments and returning values
• header files and the actual .c files
• scoping
• precompiler commands like #include and #define
• structs, though we only covered these briefly
• pointers, including pointers to pointers, dangling pointers, and the array/pointer duality (again, kinda briefly, except their utility in affecting things outside the current scope)
• cout and cin, though again only briefly (not really necessary for programming a robot that lacks both of these)
• compiler errors
• other odds and ends that were mentioned in the sample robot drivers (extern, static, and other keywords like that)

We’ll see how much of this actually stuck, but at the time the kids seemed to understand a lot of the stuff we covered.

Looking back on it, it took me months to get the hang of all of this! Though to be fair, I was supposed to be learning this stuff and applying it to tricky situations (creating my own hash tables, memory allocators, etc) at the same time.