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primitive robot
Thursday, February 9 2006
My teeth hurt all day yesterday from that professional cleaning they'd received. It was as if they'd been slightly rearranged in my mouth, the same way your intestines typically are after a doctor grubs through them in search of a kidney. But today they felt perfectly fine and, more interestingly, it seemed my gums were truly healthy for the first time in my/their life. I've had my teeth cleaned about a dozen times in my life but the cleaning has never corrected a perennial problem with my gums. They have always bled when I brush my teeth and have done so with such reliability that I've always assumed it was their natural condition to do so. But they haven't bled at all since yesterday's tooth cleaning, even when I've brushed my teeth aggressively.
This afternoon my friend Mr. Tillson, the mustachioed gentleman who attends Mass. Art in Boston, brought over an early 80s relic from his parents' attic. It was an Androbot Topo, a base-model robot designed to be controlled wirelessly by programs running on an Apple ][e computer. As robots go, it's primitive. It cannot react to its environment or send back data to the computer controlling it. But it stands three feet tall, is powered by two industrial-strength motors, and has a radio range of 75 feet. So there's no telling what I'll be able to do with it. Mr. Tillson will be bringing me the Apple computer with the controller card the next time he returns from Boston. He tells me his parents paid well over $2000 for it with early '80s money, so imagine what it's worth now!
Mr. Tillson and I spent a couple hours in the laboratory working out some primitive Flash animations for his website, where all he needed was a way to initiate the playing of an MP3 with the display of a photograph. Once we were actually in Flash, though, the scope of our afternoon immediately began to creep upward. It's hard no to want to use all the capability that Flash sets before your feet.
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