Welcome back, ROTC

“The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools”

--Thucydides

Raytracing

Just rediscovered the website of Friedrich Lohmüller, raytrace artist extraordinaire. He made a couple of the pictures on the excellent POV-RAY Hall of Fame. (Back in high school, by the way, that gallery inspired me to write a simple raytracer. It was pretty much my first real programming project.)

At first glance, his prints seem to have the simplified geometry, flat planes of color, and "plastic" look characteristic of low-budget CG.

For other artists, those qualities are usually tacky (eg most of the 3D stuff on DeviantArt). Even their "good" renderings often come across as a tech demo, not as art (eg the countless renderings of beams of light hitting a glass ball).

But Lohmüller's prints transcend the kitsch. He uses those same rendering limitations to great effect, conveying order and perfection--utopia, even.

I think he captures the German engineer ethos very nicely... or, at least, my interpretation of it. The detail in the machines, the geometry, the emphasis on solitude, the perfect infinite expanse, it's all there.

That one reminds me of a picture I took of the salt flats in Utah.

One of my favorites, apparently made a very long time ago:

Having linked to some of his pictures, I will also link to Mr. Lohmüller's gallery, where he sells a bunch of gorgeous poster prints.

Solar Car Strategy

The Solar Car Project has been recruiting really successfully. We now have an absurd 10% of the new Class of 2014 on our mailing list, and more than a hundred people who have showed up at the shop for over the past week.

The strategy team has lots of cool projects Sam and I have been working on. Going from one- or two-person projects to full teams with a wide range of math and coding experience is going to be both difficult and awesome. The list will keep growing.

array power simulation

Onwards!

Another day, a new year

I just got back to Stanford. California is still glorious.

The summer was cool. I interned at a proprietary trading company that deals in equity options, in Chicago. Learned a ton. Didn't blog much because everything I worked on was, well, proprietary.

So today, I have two signs of the impending apocalypse.

#1. The flying robots from Half-Life have become reality

Yes, like this one

#2. The Solar Car Team's neighbors in VAIL are building a robotic rally car.

And when they say their fully autonomous car is going to climb Pike's Peak at "near race speed", it means quite a lot:

Cheers!

Round two, featuring Bruce Schneier

 Bruce Schneier just wrote a post on all the suggestions to add authentication to the internet. The idea behind those is that if nobody on the internet was anonymous, legitimate users would be largely unaffected and the bad guys would be out of business. Schneier does a nice job refuting this. He says that the technological problem of attaching real names to everyone on the internet is "insoluble", and that trying to implement such a scheme will only hurt free speech, especially in countries that try to censor their citizens. As his first commenter summarizes, "if you outlaw anonymity on the internet, only outlaws will have anonymity on the internet."

Then, Schneier draws a parallel between universal authentication and copy protection:

The whole attribution problem is very similar to the copy-protection/digital-rights-management problem. Just as it's impossible to make specific bits not copyable, it's impossible to know where specific bits came from. [...]

Just as the music industry needs to learn that the world of bits requires a different business model, law enforcement and others need to understand that the old ideas of identification don't work on the Internet. For good or for bad, whether you like it or not, there's always going to be anonymity on the Internet.

Couldn't agree more.

Back

It's been an adventure. After

• the race
• the vast expanse of nothingness that is Australia
• the carnivore's utopia of New Zealand
• the adventures of Thailand
• joining my dad's project, and
  
• chilling at home in Utah
  

...after all that, I'm back at Stanford now, five minutes out from my first lecture in six months. CS110: "Principles of Computer Systems." Based on MIT's 6.033, I hear. I'm also taking CS108, where I'll write an ungodly amount of Java, and CS109, stats for programmers, taught by the always-awesome Mehran.

The solar car team is meeting tonight for the first time since the race. A few fixes and, if all goes according to plan, we'll be rolling around campus on battery power, recruiting freshmen. Sometime between now and this summer, we'll have to build a new top shell and get ready for the North American Solar Challenge.

This will be an interesting quarter. More news as it comes in. Peace.