1) Your devices, and your contest kit materials, will be impounded from 5:00pm on Friday December 8th until 8:00am on Wednesday January 3rd. You will not be permitted to do any fabrication of your device during the impoundment period. You are free to continue to do engineering (drawing, analyzing) during the impoundment period, but no fabrication or testing with your contest device or kit materials.

2) I understand that 8 AA batteries in series not only are current limited at about 3 Amps, but also can only deliver a maximum of 8 Watts (Watts = Volts * Amps). I have not independently tested and verified this.

3) Version 1.3 of the rules are now on the ME72 Web site. Minor clarifications.

4) Note that Version 1.1, and subsequent versions, of the rules indicate that only *one* machine must be connected to the ends of the chain. It is not necessary to have both devices connected to the chain at t=0.

5) The simulations of mesh climbing that I showed and discussed in class today are on the ME72 Web site. See:
     http://me72.caltech.edu/specs.html
and click on "Simulation".
The plotting program that I use (xmgrace) can be found at:
     http://math.nyu.edu/aml/software/xmgrace.html
or
     http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/

-erik
--