Dad’s Year

When acting in his capacity as a solitary, Dad is spending the academic year on a number of pursuits. With the kids, he is working on robotics. We have a fleet of small robots, based on the Legobug, and run by home-built computers called Handy Boards. (The kids built one of these processors, and the Earlham students built the rest.) Both Bug and Board were designed by Fred Martin of MIT. Sample Java applets for simulating a fleet of legoBugs can be found on our Robot simulation page.

Dad is also starting to play with software development in Smalltalk, mostly working with Squeak, a portable freeware implementation of Smalltalk, written in itself. For a good time, visit the Squeak Home Page and start hacking!

On a more scholarly note, Dad is also doing some mathematics. In particular, he’s trying to learn something about analytic number theory. For a very quick introduction to this sort of math, you could start reading here.

Back to school.