I would like to bring to the attention of my readers an impressive technological advance made by one David Worden, lately graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a well-deserved degree in Electrical Engineering. Mr. Worden enlivened his graduation ceremony with a light show built into his mortarboard: 64 LEDs driven by a microcontroller programmed to produce a variety of animated effects. Let me be the first to congratulate Mr. Worden on his splendid achievement in Mad Science—but as a Mad Scientist myself, let me also remind the young upstart that he was not the first to have this idea!

In the long-past days of my miss-spent youth (err … 2004), I also graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and sported a light-show hat of my own at the ceremony. The mortarboard had four diagonal lines of 8 white LEDs each, controlled by a central PIC microcontroller; all five circuit boards were painted black and atttached to the top of the hat with velcro. Though I must admit, Mr. Worden's design is rather more complex, with twice as many LEDs as mine and a fully-concealed circuit.

As a small project for my Inventive Thinking class, I worked on a simulation of creatures avoiding each other or performing tasks like crossing a street or forming a swarm. The creatures navigate by choosing simple actions (like turning right or left) based on the "Looming" principle of obstacle avoidance studied by my thesis advisor, among others. The simulation runs in your web browser (Firefox or recent IE have been tested, but probably others as well). You can view it (fun to watch) and play with the parameters to your heart's content at this link: Looming Simulation

Our desalination project was profiled in FAU's engineering recruitment newsletter, The Pinnacle. Many thanks to them for the recognition.

Also, two conference papers were submitted and accepted, one in Portugal and one by the Conference on Desalination and the Environment in Greece. Should be fun.

As for my desalination thesis, it crawls inexorably toward completion. Call it done by this summer.

Another newspaper generously and quite unexpectedly weighed in on our desalination project. The City Link, one of South Florida's A&E weeklies, gave us this Resounding Endorsement:

Say it with me, readers: there ain't no such thing as bad publicity.

Two new items made it into my geek resume lately:

My own page on freshpatents.com, due to a recently published patent application on the desalination device I've been working on for nearly two years.

Fellow student Brandon Moore and I have been announced as finalists in this year's Collegiate Inventor's Competition, one of the fine programs offered by the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, for the same invention. Many thanks to the NIHF!

Check this space to see how I do—I'll update in a week after the competition.

UPDATE—October 27: Unfortunately, we didn't win the CIC, although simply being one of the eleven was victory enough. Many congratulations and good luck to the winners and other finalists, especially to dedicated inventor and all-around nice guy Dr. Haugland for his grand prize winning nighttime temperature prediction model.

And thanks again to the NIHF and the USPTO for so generously hosting this event, and for treating all of us humble students in a manner we are definitely NOT accustomed to—I've never been met at the airport by my own limo before!

UPDATE—November 20: Thanks are due also to the Palm Beach Post, for running a story about this project in their Monday edition today.

UPDATE—November 23: Last update—I swear I'll start a new post if anything else happens. Another one of our local newspapers, The Boca Raton News, picked up the story: "FAU grad students team up to develop low-cost desalination process".