Today I found myself in chaplaincy eating lunch and helping Rhiannon celebrate her birthday, initially this involved eating cake (which I was quite happy to do) before we moved on to playing a wink-murder style game (I think) called Mafia. In this game a small number of people are selected as Mafia characters while a doctor and detective are also selected, the others being villagers, by a narrator and all identities are secret. The game proceeds on a day-night cycle and each night the named characters attempt to do their jobs under the direction of the narrator while everyone is 'asleep' overnight during the day the villagers discuss the death (caused by the Mafia) and decide who to lynch, trying to kill off all the Mafia before the villagers are all killed off. This game fails to work with very few players, as we discovered attempting to play it in a group of seven.
After a brief respite we moved on to Ratchet-Screwdriver, a game hitherto only known by its reputation. A detailed explanation of the Quaker version of the game can be found here (apologies for breaking the first rule...) whilst Wikipedia lists it under the name Wink and it has a number of facebook groups. Basically it involves an odd number of people sitting in pairs in a circle, with one person alone, the front person of the pair tries to reach the lone person (in order to kiss them on the cheek) when called by name or by a general call of 'Ratchet-Screwdriver', the back person tries to prevent this. Of course this results in very energetic, if not very fast moving, mildly intimate wrestling match, amongst evenly matched pairs, while less even pairs may find the weaker player immobilised or the stronger person ends the round very quickly. The person who succeeds to kiss the lone player becomes their partner and any other pairs who were active in that round switch their front-back alignment.
We found that seven people was more than sufficient to make this a highly entertaining game, indeed most of the afternoon had passed before we decided to move onto a game that was both less active and less likely to generate carpet burns. The latter point sparked a discussion into the potential perfect surface to play on, we decided that a beach was probably quite good, but that carpet was definitely better than both a smooth lino type surface and a wooden floor. I can well imagine that played on grass (as suggested by the facebook group's picture) the game would result in even less injuries, though for indoors our best solution was jelly. I believe that I have since managed to find a less messy alternative to jelly in the form of Teflon, the surface on non-stick cookware (comments please).
The only failing that we found with the Ratchet-Screwdriver was that the pairings eventually became near static, probably due to the small number of people playing and the relative strengths of the players. In this regard I would be interested in trying a variant for small groups suggested by Wikipedia that it calls Smut (up for a rematch next Friday guys?).
Friday, December 5, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
Traditions
This morning I was listening to the radio (the BBC's local radio station, known as Solent) when I heard that the firing of some muskets in a village called Wimborne as part of a practice known as scouring (which is intended to frighten off any spirits in the Christmas Tree as the town decoration lights are turned on) has been banned because 'it might scare the children'. A caller to the station compared scouring to bear bating as a tradition that should be lost as there is little need for such things.
Clearly this is a ridiculous standpoint as almost everything that makes Great Britain great is based in its traditions (however silly they might sound, I mean why would a spirit be hiding in the Tree to begin with?).
Christmas is not a tradition as such (no more so than my birthday or yours), but it has been joined to some, and had others joined to it, such as the tree - which, if I remember correctly, was brought over from Germany by Prince Albert when he married Queen Victoria.
So if we're to get rid of traditions such as the muskets then how many are we going get rid of and what would we actually have left? All because some pansy got scared by some noise?
Clearly this is a ridiculous standpoint as almost everything that makes Great Britain great is based in its traditions (however silly they might sound, I mean why would a spirit be hiding in the Tree to begin with?).
Christmas is not a tradition as such (no more so than my birthday or yours), but it has been joined to some, and had others joined to it, such as the tree - which, if I remember correctly, was brought over from Germany by Prince Albert when he married Queen Victoria.
So if we're to get rid of traditions such as the muskets then how many are we going get rid of and what would we actually have left? All because some pansy got scared by some noise?
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Student Robotics
Student Robotics (SR) is a project that I have been a part of since I started Uni almost two years ago. It started as a group of electronic engineering students thought that they could replicate the formula that's used by FIRST but on a slightly smaller scale and with alterations so it would work in the UK.
From that basis they recruited other students at the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), including myself, to help them build some kits that could be handed out to the students invited to the competition, as well as organise the competition. The group grew from a small, now depreciated, facebook group and meetings of a few people to its own website and larger meetings, organised by a dedicated committee in a matter of a little over a term. The committee was formalised just before the Easter break of 2007, and I found myself in the position of Vice President, responsible for overseeing the mechanical side of the project. Stephen English was elected Chairman, supported by Robert Spanton as President, Nick Greatbatch as Treasurer and Áron Kisdi as Secretary.
During the summer term the group worked on a suitable competition concept that would allow teams less able to compete easily, but would also allow more able teams to be more creative with their solutions: the teams would build roughly shoebox sized robots which would use a provided vision system to locate brightly painted wooden blocks or 'tokens' and then return them to a home area to score points. This, of course, went through a number of revisions and rule changes before the rules were published. Meanwhile a number of local schools were contacted and invited to be part of the competition, with varying responses and the hardware kits were prepared. Activity necessarily lessened due to exam pressures, but picked up again with renewed vigour once they were over and during the summer holidays the electronics kits for the students were further improved such that by September they were almost ready for release. Sponsors were also found in the form of ECS, the SCA, SUSU and most notably Motorola via the Motorola Foundation and the website prepared for use by the teams and sponsors, on this front we used Joomla, an open source Content Management System, and trac for ticketting and wiki.
In September of 2007 the group held a KickStart event for the sixth-form students invited from the local schools which began the first year's competition. This would be a six month planning and building period for the students, far longer than anything else many of them had ever participated in, and six months of mentoring for the university students who made up the SR group. The day consisted of four short talks on Prototyping, Time Management, Programming and Our Kits, given by SR menbers as well as an activity in which the teams made rubber band / balloon powered cars whilst being bombarded with distractions to simultate the competition and the time pressures that would be experienced then.
During the Easter term of 2008 a University film crew made up of student on Media and Film courses requested to follow one of the teams progress in the competition and has since made a documentary of the selected team, which happened to win this year's competition.
Easter 2008 brought the mentoring / building time to a close with the competition which everyone had been looking forward to. The competition was preceded by a day's crash course in programming for those who needed it provided by the mentors, some of whom, myself included, were learning the python language at the same time. The day also allowed the teams to compare their robots against those of other teams for the first time and for the mentors as a whole to check the viability of the robots.
The Competition Day day dawned a mere two days later and too early in the morning to really think about stuff the SR mentors and others met to build the arena and otherwise prepare for a long day in the Cube. After breakfast the teams started arriving with their robots and were each allocated a pit area. In the pit areas were a table with a networked computer on, each running a live CD of Ubuntu Linux, which had been set out the previous evening. This enabled them to work on the programming of their robots as the competition went on, allowing for bug fixes and improvements in their code, as well as to the SR code that was downloaded with theirs when they hit save. From the pits each robot would progress to the arena, an 8x8 metre square laid out in white coated hardboard with more hardboard up the sides, where it would (hopefully) drive around in search of tokens. Some of the robots were more successful than others, with some teams merely scoring points using a basic search algorithm, not using the vision system. The day was filmed both by the film crew making a documentary, but also by a crew from the local Daily Echo, who posted a video on their site.
The competition was regarded by all as a major success, and as SR plans next year, including various upgrades to the website, which now uses Drupal; hardware and software a new committee has been elected: Áron Kisdi is now Chairman, supported by Chris Cross as President, Dan Mulvaney as Vice President, Jeremy Morse as Treasurer and myself as Secretary. As such the new committee hopes to make next year's competition as good as this years.
From that basis they recruited other students at the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), including myself, to help them build some kits that could be handed out to the students invited to the competition, as well as organise the competition. The group grew from a small, now depreciated, facebook group and meetings of a few people to its own website and larger meetings, organised by a dedicated committee in a matter of a little over a term. The committee was formalised just before the Easter break of 2007, and I found myself in the position of Vice President, responsible for overseeing the mechanical side of the project. Stephen English was elected Chairman, supported by Robert Spanton as President, Nick Greatbatch as Treasurer and Áron Kisdi as Secretary.
During the summer term the group worked on a suitable competition concept that would allow teams less able to compete easily, but would also allow more able teams to be more creative with their solutions: the teams would build roughly shoebox sized robots which would use a provided vision system to locate brightly painted wooden blocks or 'tokens' and then return them to a home area to score points. This, of course, went through a number of revisions and rule changes before the rules were published. Meanwhile a number of local schools were contacted and invited to be part of the competition, with varying responses and the hardware kits were prepared. Activity necessarily lessened due to exam pressures, but picked up again with renewed vigour once they were over and during the summer holidays the electronics kits for the students were further improved such that by September they were almost ready for release. Sponsors were also found in the form of ECS, the SCA, SUSU and most notably Motorola via the Motorola Foundation and the website prepared for use by the teams and sponsors, on this front we used Joomla, an open source Content Management System, and trac for ticketting and wiki.
In September of 2007 the group held a KickStart event for the sixth-form students invited from the local schools which began the first year's competition. This would be a six month planning and building period for the students, far longer than anything else many of them had ever participated in, and six months of mentoring for the university students who made up the SR group. The day consisted of four short talks on Prototyping, Time Management, Programming and Our Kits, given by SR menbers as well as an activity in which the teams made rubber band / balloon powered cars whilst being bombarded with distractions to simultate the competition and the time pressures that would be experienced then.
During the Easter term of 2008 a University film crew made up of student on Media and Film courses requested to follow one of the teams progress in the competition and has since made a documentary of the selected team, which happened to win this year's competition.
Easter 2008 brought the mentoring / building time to a close with the competition which everyone had been looking forward to. The competition was preceded by a day's crash course in programming for those who needed it provided by the mentors, some of whom, myself included, were learning the python language at the same time. The day also allowed the teams to compare their robots against those of other teams for the first time and for the mentors as a whole to check the viability of the robots.
The Competition Day day dawned a mere two days later and too early in the morning to really think about stuff the SR mentors and others met to build the arena and otherwise prepare for a long day in the Cube. After breakfast the teams started arriving with their robots and were each allocated a pit area. In the pit areas were a table with a networked computer on, each running a live CD of Ubuntu Linux, which had been set out the previous evening. This enabled them to work on the programming of their robots as the competition went on, allowing for bug fixes and improvements in their code, as well as to the SR code that was downloaded with theirs when they hit save. From the pits each robot would progress to the arena, an 8x8 metre square laid out in white coated hardboard with more hardboard up the sides, where it would (hopefully) drive around in search of tokens. Some of the robots were more successful than others, with some teams merely scoring points using a basic search algorithm, not using the vision system. The day was filmed both by the film crew making a documentary, but also by a crew from the local Daily Echo, who posted a video on their site.
The competition was regarded by all as a major success, and as SR plans next year, including various upgrades to the website, which now uses Drupal; hardware and software a new committee has been elected: Áron Kisdi is now Chairman, supported by Chris Cross as President, Dan Mulvaney as Vice President, Jeremy Morse as Treasurer and myself as Secretary. As such the new committee hopes to make next year's competition as good as this years.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
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