If you lived through the great depression and are reading this, say "ah"

I just had a "woah, I'm old" moment. I was reading something and imagined explaining it to a class of children to make sure I understood it. I do that when I read something really interesting and I'm not sure I understand the concepts involved, which happens a lot.

The story talked about the Great Depression, and so imaginary Murray talked about it to his imaginary students.  If I ever teach a class of children, my students will probably never meet a person who lived through the Great Depression. That was strange and a little uncomfortable to think about. I know there are people alive today who grew up in the 1920s/30s, but there won't be for long. [Alex says that last sentence sounded like a threat. I didn't intend it that way.]

Mrs. Harvey, my grade 11 Social Studies teacher, told us that our grandparents’ weird hoarding/recycling habits were a side effect of the Great Depression. I was surprised she knew something so personal about my grandparents.

Now that I think about it, my elementary-teacher-sister-in-law and my elementary-teacher-friend already have classrooms of kids who haven't ever met a person who grew up in the Great Depression because they teach at a Sikh school and a Muslim school. Is this what a cultural divide looks like?

Notes:

• Social Studies is the Canadian high school equivalent of history and current events.
• One of the best teachers I've ever had, Michael Adams, was having a hard time explaining something about mother-wavelets and daughter-wavelets to me last year, and I suggested he try to break it down into terms a child could understand. He said wavelets were way too complicated for a child to understand, which is probably true, but I didn't enjoy hearing. I now understand why I didn't like hearing it, it's because if I can't explain a concept to the satisfaction of my imaginary class of children then I'm not sure I understand it.

LaserHarp: Robots do all the heavy lifting, again.

I was tinkering with the laser harp today, and wanted to do some testing. I tried waving my arms around in fun patterns for a while, but I got pretty tired. Obviously, I needed an arm-waving robot. Luckily, I had one of those bolted to my ceiling! And look how many hands it has!

The yellow dots are hands. Really, they must be, I measured them with my hand-recognition program to be sure ;)

Important Message to Future Murray

#pragma once

Recording Image/Video from a Kinect using PCL

I wanted to record some images and videos from my Kinect sensor Here's an easy way to do it.

I tried getting a demo together based on the OpenNI examples and the ofxOpenNI examples, which was a rough start. It turns out the PCL project has a much wider array of useful examples, and in my opinion it is just much better.