06.17.09
Posted in Science at 12:03 am by admin
The New Journal of Physics has a paper describing how periodic forcing of oscillating systems form repeating patterns.
Wavenumber locking and pattern formation in spatially forced systems
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/11/6/063016/?rss=2.0
Rotem Manor, Aric Hagberg, and Ehud Meron
This result matches empirical observations of experiment I made (Porcino, 1990) on how the ratio of the length of an insect’s rear legs to its forelegs governs the wave patterns seen in their walking patterns. The rear legs provide the periodic forcing, and the locomotory neural network is the analogous oscillator system. The phase diagrams in their paper are very reminiscent of my experimental data charted in Figure 9 of (Porcino 1990). I am quite intrigued by the results of Manor et al., as I had been unable to derive a mathematical foundation for my results but they provide it very neatly.
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06.16.09
Posted in Code, Science at 11:50 pm by admin
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/11/6/063019/njp9_6_063019.html
Border detection in complex networks
Bruno A N Travençolo, Matheus Palhares Viana, and Luciano da Fontoura Costa
The open-access New Journal of Physics has a paper on detecting the interior and exterior nodes of a complex graph using a concept called “diversity entropy”. Diversity entropy measures how many different walks of a particular length can reach other nodes in the network. Since exterior nodes of a graph will have fewer options to reach other nodes, the diversity entropy measure can identify them. The illustration below shows the concept quite succinctly.
The large unstructured graph is the most important data structure in the world today (hint, think social networks, or the Internet itself). The diversity entropy measurement is potentially a breakthrough analysis tool; it offers an extraordinarily interesting way to partition a graph as a precursor to other hard analyses such as cycle detection.
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06.06.09
Posted in Games, Rendering at 1:30 am by admin
nVidia can impose SSAO on a game via a driver setting. It looks good, although I’m not entirely convinced it’s kosher to go back in and modify a game’s look that way without involving the developers.
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_ambientocclusion_home.html
I must admit that SSAO provides visible improvement in some of the examples they’ve posted. If a driver provides anti-aliasing or texture filtering, that’s legit; those definitely provide a qualitative improvement to an image. SSAO however invokes an aesthetic modification on the game. I imagine that I would appreciate it in the case that a game was not strongly art directed, but if a game had a strong aesthetic sense, this seems like maybe not such a good thing. What do you think?
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06.02.09
Posted in Code, Rambling at 1:20 am by admin
I think I heard about one too many trivial problems today.
If you’re a programmer, you’ve probably told someone on more than one occasion, “oh, that’s trivial”. The problem is, there’s two kinds of trivial that you probably mean.
- That’s trivial (and I can have it finished before you even get back to your office), or
- That’s trivial (it presents no particular challenge or difficulty, but it might take some amount of time to complete).
If you don’t qualify which trivial you mean, your listener will probably assume (1) even if you meant (2). Next time, if it really is (1), they might recall that the last time you said something was trivial it actually took a while, and so they won’t believe you any more when you say “trivial”, no matter which one you mean.
Nowadays, I still say “trivial”, I am a programmer after all, but I always attach a work estimate to it. “It’s trivial, but I’ll need a couple of days to get it done.” Then if it really is trivial and you get it done before your listener gets back to their office, they’ll thank you for it; kind of like when Scotty finds one more dram of power to eke out of the engines and the Captain thanks him for it, even though you kind of knew he had it in reserve, just in case. It’s about being reliable.
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05.31.09
Posted in Film at 11:36 pm by admin
May 16, 2002, the release of Attack of the Clones marked the first feature film shot entirely on digital 24p high def.
I was lucky enough to see the set up for a model shoot on Utapau. The whole set up was custom; the camera surprisingly small in its handcrafted casing, with a cable as thick as a garden hose leading to a trolley piled with computers and hard drives ready to receive the data stream, and a huge tangle of cords leading from the trolley to the wall.
May 31, 2009, today; I was sitting on set casually downloading a few hundred gigs of 24p high def footage shot on a battery powered handheld camera onto P2 cards, a progress bar quickly filling up on the laptop as the transfer progressed; and I was utterly blown away at how far the technology has come in just a few short years; from a pioneering and challenging effort with a large and technical support infrastructure, to near ubiquity with off-the-shelf plug-and-shoot. Amazing, just amazing.
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05.24.09
Posted in Art, Rendering at 2:24 pm by admin
TM:379260-1
STARFLEET TECHNICAL ORDER
AUTHENTICATED STARDATE 6922.8
TO:01:03:26
BALLARD CLASS CARGO CARRIER
EARLY DEEP SPACE TRANSPORT VESSEL
PARTICULARS:
- CREW 33
- CARGO 100 kT
- WEIGHT 30 kT
- STD. RANGE 1 YEAR AT W/F 4
- MAX. SAFE CRUISING SPEED W/F 4
- EMERGENCY SPEED W/F 4.5
- LENGTH OVERALL 121 m
- BREADTH OVERALL 48 m
- HEIGHT OVERALL 40 m
- EMBARKED CRAFT 1 HSM
SEE BOOKLET OF GENERAL PLANS FOR DETAILS
I always thought it would be fun to imagine that the next thing to come after Matt Jeffries’ DY100 design might be Daedalus derived. I created this design and named it in homage to the late J.G. Ballard, mostly because of the cognitive dissonance, which I thought might amuse him.
On Drexfiles, you can see a ship John Eaves designed for Enterprise. His angular and modular design seems to combine the modular backbone of the DY100 with design features from The Animated Series such as the front end of the Huron.
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05.17.09
Posted in Art, Rendering at 4:59 pm by admin
TM:379260-1
STARFLEET TECHNICAL ORDER
AUTHENTICATED STARDATE 7304.15
TO:01:04:10
SHUTTLECRAFT - TYPE 9
2 PERSON WARP CAPABLE
PARTICULARS:
- CREW: PILOT AND ASTROGATOR
- CARGO: 500KG
- WEIGHT: 6300KG
- STD. RANGE: 150 HOURS AT W/F 2
- MAX. SAFE CRUISING SPEED: W/F 3
- EMERGENCY SPEED: W/F 4
- LENGTH OVERALL: 8.6m
- BREADTH OVERALL: 4.2m
- HEIGHT OVERALL: 2.6m
SEE BOOKLET OF GENERAL PLANS FOR DETAILS
I created this design as an homage to the Sternbach speedboat shuttle several years ago. Drexfiles has a feature on the speedboat, which inspired me to post this here.
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05.04.09
Posted in Art, Science, Travel at 12:06 am by admin
Terra Linda, a short hike from where I live
Bodega Bay
The carnivorous plants are all coming out of dormancy.
Drosera Binata
Sarracenia Flava crosses
Dionaea Muscipula Flowers
Dionaea, Drosera, Sarracenia Purpurea
Pinguicula, Drosera Adelaide, and some miniatures
Some giant Mexican pinguicula coming out of dormancy
A young Sarracenia Purpurea getting adult leaves at last
Nepenthes Miranda. It’s a couple of meters wide already, don’t know how big it might get! The new pitchers are growing in, they’re about ten cm. long at the moment. The pitchers grow nearly 30cm (a foot) long.
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04.25.09
Posted in Art at 11:54 pm by admin
Alexander Boswell has posted some code that generates a beautiful picture of the Mandelbrot set. It differs from the usual images which record the number of iterations a point takes goes through to escape from infinity - it instead traces the chaotic orbit of each point and colors each pixel the orbit passes through. I’ll let you read about it at his site. He’s chosen wonderful colors that make the set look like a nebula.
His sample code out of the box generates this image (click to enlarge):
via: Atom
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Posted in Film at 4:46 pm by admin
If you’re interested in production design, you will definitely appreciate this online catalog.
http://www.battlestarprops.com/downloads/BSG_auction_catalog.pdf
http://www.battlestarprops.com/downloads/BSG_Auction2_Web_watermark.pdf
It’s an exhaustive record of props, models, and costumes from the Reimagined series.
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Posted in InsectAI, Robotics at 2:38 pm by admin
Sometimes, when a revolution is under our noses, it’s impossible to see.
This is a response to a thoughtful piece by Dan Kline, who wonders what Jane McGonigal’s awesome talk presages for AI programmers.
It’s my opinion that what an AI programmer brings to the table is more relevant than ever. The thing about AI is that once it achieves viability, it is no longer recognized as AI. Expert systems, voice recognition, path finding; all started as AI research problems, but once practical, stop being considered AI.
AI Programmers are the Algorithmic Avante Garde
The title AI programmer is a almost a smear, but the AI programmer should wear the title proudly. The role of the AI programmer is to invent what comes next, so that the rank and file programmer can take the results for granted. The AI programmer should never expect to be feted, because it won’t happen. When you are inventing something new, people won’t understand what you’re doing. Once the inventing is done, they’ll wonder why such an obvious thing took so long to figure out. You can spot the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
The AI programmer has to be visionary and self-confident
Much like the absurd debate over whether games are art, trying to pin down any particular technique as AI is self-abrogating endeavor. The more you pin it down, the more you discover that something that might be AI is just a plain old algorithm after all. People forget,
Someone has to do the discovering
Ex-AI is all around you. Every repetitive or uninteresting job in the real world gets moved to AI in three stages. First, the cost of someone doing the job becomes high (example, secretaries answering phones). Second, the job goes to a low-labor cost locale (call centers). Third, AI gets the job (try checking the status of your flight). But then we don’t call it AI, it’s “call automation.”
Looking at Jane’s piece, which I love, I feel that you could possibly draw the conclusion that AI doesn’t have a place because people will do all the work and provide all the interaction. I draw the opposite conclusion. I believe that Jane’s piece implies a level of astonishing ubiquity of AI; so endemic and mind-blowing in its extent, that we, the ants in the mound, won’t even be able to see it - or to be blunt, we already don’t see it. Frankly, she proposes the Matrix, and she proposes that we will love it. And you, oh AI programmer, are building it.
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Posted in Science at 1:37 pm by admin
Very cool. There are dozens of charts available on the site if you dig a bit. Click the picture to visit Allan’s site.
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04.04.09
Posted in Code at 1:28 pm by admin
As a complement to Futurist Programming:
I program because I need to get things done, and I get things done. I know what needs to be built and what doesn’t. I build the smallest possible system with the maximum impact. I advise and mentor others to help them achieve their best. I live modestly and within my means. I enjoy my life and the pleasures my work brings. I don’t need a Wikipedia entry or acolytes, or to be featured in xkcd comics.
In response to Eight Levels of Programming.
Matt Manuel shared this highly relevant quote by Harry S. Truman:
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
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04.02.09
Posted in Art, Travel at 11:35 pm by admin
On the way to the airport (originals are 4k x 2k):
For Vik, night over Japan (click to enlarge)
For Florian, blurry out the window shots of clouds:
For Stunt Rabbit, an observation from the waiting lounge, International Departures, Osaka Airport:
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03.22.09
Posted in Sustainability at 1:34 pm by admin
Round and round it goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
…
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
…
There is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments.
- Clay Shirky
Quoted from this awesome article here.
How many more things is this true for? I tagged solar cells yesterday. What about your industry? What comes next?
Updated, April 5:
Bruce Sterling captures these thoughts from Brian Eno, in turn from The Guardian:
“When I finish something I want it out that day,” says Eno later, in a phone conversation. “Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later. So we decided to release on our websites first, then put it on the commercial websites, then as a CD, then with different packaging. It’s just trying to see what works. The business is an exciting mess at the moment.”
Similarly tagged by Bruce is this quote from Bob Garfield:
Long ago newspapers based their online strategy on advertising, at which point traffic became the holy grail. Times Select — the walled garden of premium columnists available by subscription only — generated income but depressed traffic. So out it went. The Times and 99% of its brethren opted to give away all content in exchange for audience, neglecting to understand two structural facts of online life: 1) Nobody clicks on ads, because why would they? 2) The virtually infinite supply of online ad inventory will always depress the price even the best publisher can fetch. Always. Immutably. Forever. Mass media thrived on the economics of scarcity. The internet represents an economy of unending abundance.
Let me highlight that last bit. What does it imply?
The internet represents an economy of unending abundance.
Physical media and paid content aren’t dead, despite the lamentations of the pulped-trees crowd. Not only that, the media was delivered bricks’n'mortar. I bet the crowds were driven by social networking online.
In the first truly shocking box office result of the year, Fast & Furious sped away from expectations to gross a humongous $72.5 mil, according to early estimates from Media by Numbers.
Who said people aren’t willing to pay for content? Consider this:
Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., predicts that Amazon is on track to sell 500,000 to 750,000 more Kindles over the next four quarters (including this one). He estimates that Kindle owners will buy an additional $120 to $150 worth of books and other content for each device, bringing the total revenues over that time period to somewhere between $225 million and $355 million. Based on that, he values the Kindle as a $1 billion business for Amazon.
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