I’ve ordered an ultrasonic rangefinder, which will look sort of Wall-E-ish. It should fit into the same “face”, but if not, it’ll be easy to make a new one.

I would add that the executive branch has been figuring out ways to get more power pretty much from the beginning of the Republic, with crises fueling the power grabs. Usually, Congress gets some of its power back some years after the crisis passes.

The problem is that for various reasons, Congress isn’t always very responsive to the needs of the country, and the needs are more pressing in some senses than perhaps they were in the beginning.

Robot right view

Robot left view

Robot center view

And here’s a movie. Click the image to play it.

My plan is to put some thermal motion detectors on it and go towards the motion.

At the moment it just goes in squares. Forwards for a second and a half, then counter-rotate the wheels to make a rough 90-degree turn. Repeat.

Obviously, loose wires will need to be fastened, or cats will chew on them.

Robot right view

Front view

Robot left view

Maybe the citizenry should demand a Voter Bill of Rights.

Article One: Freedom from being forced to choose between two dreadful candidates when the temperature is higher than 90 degrees.

Article Two: Candidates cannot talk about their childhood beyond attesting that they had one.

Article Three: Candidates are required to list all the really serious issue disagreements they have with their party. If they reach six, they should find a different ticket.

Article Four: Less talking about mosques.

Article Five: More cat stories.

I’ve thought this for some time. I’ve read quite a bit in history and although the reasons that the Roman Republic gave way to the Empire are not exactly analogous to our situation, there are nevertheless similarities.

Rome had a government designed to prevent tyranny and to govern a city state. It worked well enough as they dominated Latium and later the whole of Italy, but it began to break down as they ended up conquering the entire Mediterranean region and beyond. (I won’t comment on the lack of a city police force in the Republican period, but it’s amazing that a city that size lacked one.)

What Augustus did was to reorganize the government, preserving the forms of the Republic while gutting its substance. He basically turned Rome into a monarchy, with a civil service responsible to him rather than to the Senate. At the time, that may have been the best that could be done with an empire, and not all that dissimilar to what the Persians had done centuries earlier.

This “principate” phase of the Empire lasted for a couple hundred years and then began breaking down because of other pressures, both internal and external, and was replaced with a “dominate” phase under the Diocletian reforms in the late third century CE.

I’ve been thinking for the last decade or so that the US is doing much the same thing. We have a government designed for the late eighteenth century to handle the fears of a group of newly independent states of any one region or person dominating the government. Our constitution, designed at a time when the population was just under 4 million people, was almost immediately amended to fix some glaring issues, but in the main, lasted until the civil war, when we then got the 13th and 14th amendments, fixing some civil rights issues, though we still have some problems there.

But our population is now over 300 million. Instead of 13 states we have 50. Instead of being a largely agrarian nation hugging the coast of a continent, we are now an empire occupying a large swath of a continent and economically and militarily dominating the planet.

Leaving aside the question of whether these are reasonable things for us to be, our form of government doesn’t seem to be working all that well at addressing the issues of the decade.

I’m not in favor of a revolution, because lots of people suffer during them and I and those I care about would likely be among them. I’m not in favor of a new constitutional convention because I don’t think we have the statesmen that we were damned lucky to have in 1787. We would end up with an even worse system than we have now, I fear.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I would suggest that we could start with a reformation of Senate rules to make it more responsive. The House of Representatives has gone through periods of being dysfunctional and has come out of them with rules changes. I think the same could be said of the Senate.

But a deeper problem is that we have no way currently to handle informing the public. Our current news media including the Internet, aren’t serving us well. Information gets out, possibly better than it ever has, but it is drowned in a sea of hogwash. How do we get a media that actually informs people so that decisions are made based on reason instead of inflamed emotions?

I don’t know. I could go on, but I’m tired.

I was rather hoping for an ideal Android tablet to come out with a screen size around 7 inches and that had phone functionality. (The size of the phone doesn’t matter as much when you carry a bag and have a headset.)

I was hoping that the Dell Streak at 5″ or its announced sibling, the Looking Glass at 7″ would be the solution, but it seems that Dell has crapped up Android in ways that I don’t care for.

Since I’m a developer, I want both an iPhone type device and an Android device in the house, and I had pretty much decided that it would either be an iPhone 4 and some as yet unreleased Android tablet, or an Android phone and an iPad.

I just tried the Samsung Captivate from AT&T, a Galaxy-S phone. (I’m rather locked to AT&T because of family plans. I hate Sprint and would not use it if it were the only cell carrier in North America. I have no anger towards Verizon or T-Mobile, though. I might switch if it weren’t for carrying my mother’s phone on my plan.)

I really like the Captivate, and I’m sure I’d like its siblings at the other carriers, too. Unless I change my mind in the next month or so, I’m going with a Captivate for my phone and an iPad, probably without a data plan. (When traveling, I can use my GF’s wifi hotspot. She has a CradlePoint.)

Now, thanks to the Arduino platform I can do it with a minimum of soldering!

Behold:

Thermostat project

And some detail on the LCD:

LCD Detail

At the moment, it just tells the temperature. The tiny pushbutton on the right of the breadboard turns on the backlight for the LCD. It stays lit for 10 seconds after you release the button. The little snaky-wired thing at the top-right is a thermistor, which has a resistance that varies based on the temperature. The processor detects this and uses the Steinhart–Hart equation to determine the temperature.

I also have a running clock, which will be necessary to figure out when to change the temperature when I actually attach this as a thermostat.

It’s a bit different programming a processor this simple from my usual work. This system has no operating system, 32KB of system memory, and runs at 16MHz. My development laptop, on the other hand, has 4GB of system memory and runs at 2.5GHz with two processor cores. It runs an advanced operating system.

But I’ve spent about $70 on the parts, so it’s not terribly expensive. And it’s kind of fun!

He hits it out of the park today with his Obama needs to stand up to ‘reverse racism’ ploy article.

He and Rachel Maddow talked about this on her show last night.

Good stuff!

Newt Gingrich writes:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

In this context, “double standards” means that the United States maintains a more pluralistic attitude toward religious minorities than Saudi Arabia does. Now, you could make the same kind of argument about any repressive policy in a place like Saudi Arabia. If women are not allowed to walk around freely in Saudi Arabia, then men should not be allowed to walk around freely in the United States!

I love it!

Chait goes on to make more points following this, and the post is worth reading in full. (Gingrich’s original comments are also worth reading just because they are so typically Newt and so typically absurd.

BTW, I’ll just say that I’m no fan of Islam or, indeed, any organized religion, but Cordoba House is a very good name. The heyday of Muslim Spain is a good example of a time and place where, for a brief time, Islam was a tolerant religion.