A Sad Day
All of us at Dodgeblogium, Liberty Cadre, and GoD: blog wish to extend our sincerest sympathies to Mommabear on the loss of her husband last night. If you are the praying kind, please say a few words on her and his behalf.
1 commentDick is the right name for this moron
Sen Dick Turbin has compared Gitmo to the Nazi Death Camps. Obviously he has been taking lessons on idiocy from MoveOn.org. Needless to say quite a few people are rather upset about this comment; quite right too.
1 commentFrom Me To Thee, M.I.T.
From my inbox:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is conducting an important academic study regarding weblogs. We are investigating the role of weblogs in the lives of their authors. Does your weblog make you more connected to the rest of society? Does it increase your chances of getting a job or finding information that you are looking for? To answer these questions, which are very important to our research, we ask for your help.
Top of the world, Ma! MIT wants to know my Secret Blogging Techniques!
So I completed the survey. Nothing too surprising. Stuff like age, sex, credit card #, schooling, the most terrible and damaging secrets of my life, how many hours I devote to this per week, etc, etc. Took about ten minutes in all. The results are expected out in mid-July and I’ll post about them if they’re interesting. Or even if they’re not.
Speaking of MIT, I ran across this guy a couple of days ago. His name is Simon Greenwold, and he is (or was—his resume ends in 2003, at which time he had completed his masters’ thesis) a researcher in the Aesthetics and Computation group at the MIT Media Lab.
A list of the projects he was working on is here. A couple that caught my eye:
I Like To Watch/CopVision is a program that scans the TV show Cops and attempts to pattern-match visual and audio elements in it. Mr. Greenwold explains it better than me:
CopVision learns its language from closed captioning subtitles transmitted in the television signal. Everything that is said on COPS is tucked away in its memory to help it understand what it’s seeing. It analyzes every frame, searching the field for outlines that remind it of something it has seen before. When it recognizes a contour it tags it with a guess as to what might be going on, gathered from its experience of words and pictures that go together. It sometimes tries to put words in the mouths of the characters. CopVision is funny when commercials come on because it doesn’t know that it isn’t COPS, and it keeps watching the same way.
The screenshot is somewhat unclear; here’s a video that’ll more clearly demonstrate what’s happening.
Another idea he had was for water-based communication. Now, any system that can represent data in a 0/1 binary format can in theory be used for that purpose and Mr. Greenwold, after consulting with professional fountain designers, thinks that the technical difficulties can be overcome. Of course, if you couldn’t reduce the size of the data bits to molecular-or-smaller scale, it’d be at best an interesting (and probably messy) idea. The frame at left is from a Java applet showing what a proposed installation would look like. It shows two kiosks exchanging information. Assuming that it would have been located on the MIT campus, I think that the wandering orange Shmoo-like creatures are intended to represent MIT students. Or students and faculty.
Or students and faculty and Shmoos, oh my!
2 comments
