we all evolved from the same people, so all of the world’s cultures are just chance-based offshoots from the initial state, separated by the the random and deliberate events of history. your culture could just as easily have evolved exactly like any other, or completely differently from anything we know. all of this thought because of an explanation from a friend last night, that “anime is a medium, not a genre. saying you should watch anime is like saying you should watch tv shows.” people who watch anime are just peeking into the media world of an alternate culture, just like people who like BBC programming are enjoying the fruits of another branch of the world tree.

Reading, came across this:

“They found nothing remarkable there except the numerous swarms of bees; all of the soldiers who ate of the honey went out of their senses, and vomited and purged, and not a man of them could stand stand straight on his feet. Those who ate only a little seemed very drunk; those who had eaten much were like madmen, some even like dying men. So they lay in heaps as if there had been a rout, and there was great despondency. But the next day no one was dead, and about the same time of day they began to return to their senses; in another three or four hours they were getting up dazed as if they had been drugged.”

Footnote: “The bees are still, after 2,300 years, making this intoxicating honey from the flowers of the wild azaleas still growing in this region”

- Xenophon’s Anabasis: The March Up Country

Did a little research, found this:

Honey made from the plants has been reported to cause cardiac arrhythmias, emesis, mild paralysis and convulsions in humans and is known as “mad honey”

londonprophecy:

rusty-chevy:

randomredux:

natreidess:

While trying to find Chekov Bones stops to do some awesome doctoring 

Bones’ reactions in the hospital in this movie were some of the best moments.

SOUNDS LIKE THE GODDAMN SPANISH INQUISITION

This will always be one of my fav Bones moments

really now?

laughing because cheese on a tray flying through a park.

in my last major arduino project, an autonomous sailboat, i shied away from object oriented coding. setting up hardware driver classes for every component would have taken more time than it saved, and just didn’t seem worth it. that’s different this time around, since i’m going going to be simultaneously controlling four motors and reading four encoders. i started out writing something similar to what the boat used, and saw myself drowning in variables in my arduino file. 

so this time around,

new project, and i’m already bit behind on posting about it, so i’ll break up my progress so far into a couple-few posts. now that i’m employed and rolling in a comfortable amount of money, i’ve decided it’s time to get back into mechatronics as a well-funded hobby. i’ve always been intrigued by mecanum wheels, and wanted to build a wheeled something or other that’s equipped for sweet sideways strafing. ordered some components from Sparkfun a few weeks ago, and i’ve been poking at assembly and coding on and off since then. 

their Rover 5 platform is a pretty nifty all-in-one chassis that includes four motors, each equipped with a quadrature encoder and gear train. i took off the belts and pulleys, and replaced them with a set of mecanum wheels. the wheels require a bit of assembly, and their mounting holes are too small for the Rover 5’s axels. one of these days i’ll get around to getting a drill press, but for now a hand drill and vice worked fine to get them on. i also hit each of the roller axels with some lithium grease, and may still need to glue the rubber rollers in place. we’ll see once i get the thing moving.

also got a fancy new arduino board, the Due. i’d been meaning to get one for awhile, attracted by its native USB host hardware, and generally badassery. it’s got a 32 bit ARM cortex M3, so it should definitely be overkill for this project. 

lastly, a rover 5 motor drive board, which i was disappointed to find doesn’t actually line up with the mounting holes on the rover 5 chassis, despite being designed for it =/. that’s not too big of a deal though, as i’m sure whatever i end up using this for will require some construction above the chassis anyways. 

before i get too much into what i’ve done code-wise, here’s the assembled and mostly wired-up 4wheel device: