User:Zetaroid
Contents
- Zetaroid's Internet Alias
Interests:
- running
- games (ie. Magic the Gathering, Smash Bros, Xbox, PC)
- ENGINEERING WOO
- saxophone (didn't bring it with me :'( maybe next semester)
- other stuff...just ask
Grand Challenges for Engineering Article Selection:
5 Things Your Car Will Finally Do in 2020, John Brandon, CNN, last updated: March 12th 2008, accessed: August 27th 2015
This article has, so far, held true. It predicts the future of cars in 2020 based on 2008's technology and four of the five points made in the article frequently make headlines today as the technology involved advances. The only point we don't hear about much is the road itself giving off a wireless signal to control traffic, albeit there are many similar things to this in the news.
The relation of the article to the Grand Challenge is that Sebastian Thrun won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 for his autonomous car named Stanley. Thrun went on to make a more advanced autonomous car for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. His ideas behind the vehicles, albeit at the time designed for military use, have since spread industry wide as many companies are working towards a perfected autonomous car.
MATLAB Demos - The Best of the Best:
So my favorite MATLAB demonstration was definitely "Basic Matrix Operations"....ha yeah no. Certainly not that one. My favorite was probably a toss up between "Visualizing Four-Dimensional Data" and "Displaying Topography Data". The 4D data visualization demonstration was a very intriguing read. I had never really considered the need to graph more than three variables at one time let alone how to actually do it. The idea of using either symbols, colors, or slices on a variety of different 3D plots to visualize a fourth variable is something that seems so simple yet I had never even though of it. I won't pretend I understood the entire page...I did not...but the concept was certainly very interesting. The topography data demonstration was, to me, even cooler because I actually understood it rather well. I had never thought of MATLAB in the way that this demonstration depicts it. Taking real topography data and creating a globe out of it that corresponds to that data? Amazing! The process isn't even overly complicated. All MATLAB needs is commands to create a contour plot of the data with limits, commands to color code the plot, and finally commands that pretty much create a sphere and map the topographical plot onto it. The result is a 3D globe you can rotate and view the topographical map of the Earth at many different angles. The possibilities to extend this idea are endless.
