July 2, 2016:
Recently, I accidentally hit a threshold when going through all the emails Instructables had sent me and saving my favorites among the projects in those emails to my Instructables profile. I contacted the site admin, and that very weekend, someone contacted me back and upgraded my account to premium for free for three months! Instructables is definitely one of my favorite sites because it highlights people's ingenuity and skill in creating mostly useful projects.
---------
http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-This-Solar-Powered-Hydroponic-Water-Garden-o/
The thing I love about hydroponics is that you can combine plant growth directly with indoors (potentially very large buildings with many floors) and with fish farming. Along with that, I would get to use my electrical certification skillset to setup circuits to power the pumps and grow lights. One of the few remaining things that is bothering me is how to make the system completely enclosed as far as how to feed the fish without external inputs (potentially from wheat or something like that).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCCN4nq7BlQ&feature=youtu.be
--------
I have a feeling I am going to need this circuit type. This is a DC motor driver.
http://www.instructables.com/id/1-Motor-Driver-Circuit-for-Arduino/
--------
30 Dec, 2015:
https://blog.adafruit.com/2015/12/29/farmbots-makes-growing-food-easier-arduino/
This is a CNC machine scaled up over a grow area.
Comment on the project by Ed K:
"I greatly admire your engineering and design but the concept itself baffles me. One of the most attractive features of growing your own food is the low cost. It takes only a few simple garden tools and admittedly, some hard labor. It seems like an amusement for people who have more money than time. But, does it really save time?
If FarmBot could do the initial soil preparation that would be a huge plus. This (as you probably know) is a lot of work. Planting the seeds is a one-time-per-season thing (or maybe two at best). Watering is an important feature but a soaker hose and a timer valve are pretty effective for that. The part of having your own garden that is sheer drudgery is pulling weeds. This may not be a big issue in urban environments but it certainly is outside of cities. Identifying and eliminating weeds would be a great feature.
All this being said, there is a great deal of satisfaction to be had by actually planting seeds and touching soil with your hands. Yes, it’s hard work but it provides something that sitting at a desk and tinkering with a computer does not. You should try it!"
--------
20 Dec, 2015:
Going to try to make that EEG circuit again over the Christmas break. I found the DIY oscilloscope part of it on Makezine - you can use a very simple circuit combined with your computer's sound card & some sort of graphing program. That lets you see a lot more than you can with a multi-meter (a multimeter will give you one piece of information, which is reliable if the signal isn't varying - an oscilloscope will show you a graph over time).
http://makezine.com/projects/sound-card-oscilloscope/
http://www.swharden.com/blog/2009-08-14-diy-ecg-machine-on-the-cheap/
http://homediyelectronics.com/projects/howtomakeafreesoundcardpcoscilloscope/
https://www.zeitnitz.eu/scope_en
I had made a Python program using Pygame that graphed output - it was very basic and didn't connect the measured points with a line - it only showed dots where it got measurements. I've since lost the code :( Have to write something like it again.
I found the site with the original circuit I used in Hawaii to make my "EEG" - really it's an ECG circuit, but I was getting signal from the surface of my forehead - no idea what kind of signal it was - could have been simply electrical reflection from lights in the room, or muscle firings.
Waiting for the LM324N op-amps to arrive, then should have all the parts I need.
--------
21 Jun, 2015:
Linux terminal radar feed display program written in Python, uses ASCII to display out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/32l5kv/i_created_an_ascii_weather_radar_script_for/
http://media.giphy.com/media/xTiTnERTs8n5G6ggus/giphy.gif
--------
25 Apr, 2015:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/tag/mobile-phone/
I saw another post about using the pi to control a mini radio station, so figured someone must have figured out the cell protocol control. I'll have to read more about this later.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pirate-Radio/
-----------------
Apr, 2015:
Jeri Ellsworth was my pick for the Women's History month - she has a cool story about her bio on Wikipedia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFVgq3ZB0Mo&list=PLG55K_hPSNN4fK-uXzQmbV5DywTgRIhmq
-- Really cool thing about software defined radio is you have these people making their own boards and using their computers to process all the input from them, able to record a broad frequency spectrum and all signal sources coming from it. Imagine - you could have a private group of individuals, each with a computer, and you'd be able to make a 3D map of all the sources transmitting, and have a complete record of the whole area.
-- From there, it would be a simple matter of quickly figuring out number station sources. I mean, who in their right minds uses voices to transmit numbers when it's done computationally / digitally?
-- If you combine something like that with a Parallela board, or another type of FPGA, you could probably get a much broader spectrum, or higher resolution within the same spectrum range.
--------
29 Mar, 2015:
This is something I'd have to work with slowly and figure out / design an acceptable product out of in stages.
Really neat. Summary: a line drawn by a pencil on paper can conduct electricity, but its resistance will change based on how it's bent. You can tell which way it's bent by how the resistance changes - it's on par with commercial sensors.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27189-pencil-sketches-turn-paper-into-a-sensor/
-- The Chinese researchers found that wearing the paper with the graphite lines meant that they could measure movement of limbs. So you could make your own very cheap gloves and use your circuit & a short language of movements to be able to type in the air for instance (or some other form of interactive language).
--------
Feb, 2015:
This is one of the recent pico solar companies, which were buying scratched solar cells in China at very cheap prices.
http://www.instructables.com/id/SPF-DIY-the-Fanned-Light-A-Solar-Light-from-Scr/
--------
Feb, 2015:
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-AA-Batteries/
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Science
15 Feb, 2016 - On the search for life:
Just watched "The Search for Life: The Drake Equation" on Netflix. It was made by BBC, presented by Dallas Campbell. Fascinating material - it started with an interview with Drake where he explained each part of the equation and the guesses they used for the variables based on what they knew at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
Then the presenter (Campbell) began interviews to tie it into the question of how life develops - the last variables of the equation (how much life is there out there that may be emitting signals) concern how often life arises, whether it achieves intelligence, and how long it survives at that state. The amazing thing about the thinking behind the equation is that it also delineates the stepping stones of life in a systematic way. So the equation isn't only about finding other life in the galaxy, it's also about understanding ourselves.
He interviewed a few researchers to ask about what their research has exposed on each variable. For instance, he interviewed professor Gerry Joyce at the Scripps Institute in San Diego - Joyce is studying artificial RNA sequences that self replicate. So they're trying to find how the first self replication (the first building block of life in general - biogenesis) works and different ways it can start.
He interviewed a biologist, Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon, from San Francisco who was studying microbes in Mono lake in California, a highly arsenic body of water. The thinking there is that since the water is arsenic, it means that other life cannot freely interact with that life (because the other life would die) - so it may have developed separately (life may arise many times). See below in comments for Wikipedia article on Dr Wolfe-Simmons, there's still controversy on whether the microbe's biogenesis was indeed separate.
He interviewed another scientist, Dr Chris McKay of NASA Ames, who was studying cyanobacteria in the Mohave desert. The point of this was trying to figure out how likely and how life goes from single cellular to multi cellular. They went to the most dry place in the Mohave and turned over some rocks - in bubbles inside the quartz, colonies of cyonobacteria had little "greenhouses" and were carrying on photosynthesis (so you could see a green smudge once you turned the rock over). McKay said that once you have all these going on, you get a bunch of oxygen in the atmosphere, which leads to the ability of larger organisms to function. The statement there is that once single celled organisms are doing photosynthesis, it leads to multi-celled organisms quickly (because the oxygen energy pathway supercharges metabolism of an organism, meaning it's a lot faster).
The last variable of the equation concerns how common intelligence is. This is a complete guess. They looked at biologists studying crows, and mentioned dolphins and elephants as well.
Finally, he went to interview scientists at SETI. They think that they would have to ultimately listen to a broad spectrum of channels while focusing on a total of 10 million planets in order to increase the likelihood of discovering another intelligence out there to 1.
Notes: Drake Equation: N stands for number of intelligent civilizations out there (scope - our galaxy - the Milky Way). It is assumed to be equal to the following variables all multiplied together: Rate of star formation in our galaxy per year (10) * Fp (average fraction of formed stars which have planets - was assumed to be half, or .5) * ne (average number of those planets which could support life - Drake set this at 2 to mirror our solar system with the assumption that Mars could possibly support it) * Fl (the fraction of those planets that eventually develop life - Drake assumed this to be 1, if a planet can support life it WILL eventually develop) * Fi (fraction of that life which develops into intelligence) * Fc (fraction of the intelligent life which develops communications, which as it concerns SETI would be electromagnetic comm) * L (length of time that communication continues).
So all in all, very interesting show.
-- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0132352/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
-- http://www.scripps.edu/research/faculty/joyce
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felisa_Wolfe-Simon
-- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99132608 - "In Lab, Clues to How Life Began"
-- I read more on Joyce and RNA, and it seems like once life has moved on past that phase, it would be very hard for that step to occur again because of how fragile RNA is - any other activity going on would destroy it. http://www.nature.com/.../1998/030505/full/news030505-8.html
My comments on the content: I think that the reasons they aren't finding anything have to do with: A. Completely arbitrary guess of searched portion of spectrum (hydrogen wavelength, really?) B. Searching in a fashion that assumes an intelligent signal occurs on one frequency alone, when in fact we've already moved beyond that in order to boost bandwidth. This means that the Fc assumption is way too simplistic and L subject to our current search pattern is tiny - in the first 40 years of developing EM communications, we have already started using multiple frequencies for transmissions. That means that L may be much shorter than the overall time that the civilization is transmitting (it may be only 40-50 years, until no one is transmitting on a single frequency).
What this means is that we're going to have to use our AI techniques and GPUs on SETI.
Chris Miller's comments: The Drake equation reminds me of the Fermi Paradox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQkVqno-uI
--------
4 Feb, 2016: On GMO/non-GMO co-existance:
http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2016/jan/24
--------
Field genetic testing kit (24 hour turn-around time):
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/03/from-ebola-to-zika-tiny-mobile-lab-gives-real-time-dna-data-on-outbreaks?CMP=fb_a-science_b-gdnscience
--------
10 January, 2016:
I have no expertise on cancer. The following movie seems to cast doubt on our cancer treatments. I do know that the survival rate once patients are treated with chemotherapy is so low that it makes me wonder whether we should even be using it.
http://www.amazon.com/Burzynski-Movie-Eric-Merola/product-reviews/B003X3CF68
http://fabweb.org/2015/12/11/burzunsky-cancer-cure-finally-released-by-the-feds/
--------
2 Jan, 2016:
Job market is hot for ag science majors.
http://harvestpublicmedia.org/article/good-news-ag-science-majors-job-market-hot
--------
30 Dec, 2015:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/liver-hormone-may-be-the-off-switch-for-sweet-tooth-cocktail-cravings/ I bet there are activation networks like this for drug addiction as well. If we got rid of the war on drugs and simply made it a medical research issue, we'd save on prisons and drastically lower violence rate.
--------
2 Dec, 2015:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/infinitypv/heli-on?utm_medium=email&utm_source=other&utm_campaign=notifications.auto.WaARtpjQEeWE7RK-AWCOaQ
Organic solar cells are finally coming out - here's a first project with them on Kickstarter. This came out from the people that gave a class on organic solar cells on Coursera (that's how I got the message - I had subscribed to the class).
--------
28 November, 2015:
On time and its flow:
Just read a story on Wikipedia about an engineer from the early days of powered flight, John William Dunne. In addition to developing aircraft, he tried to make a theory about time based on precognitive dreams. He wrote a book (among others), An Experiment with Time (Studies in Consciousness), which has been given very high reviews on Amazon (along with several interesting comments).
--------
24 Oct, 2015:
So there's been a bunch of quantum physics articles out lately - here's an interesting one:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/24/1343248/zeno-effect-verified-atoms-wont-move-while-you-watch
Then there was another I saw recently in which a university did an experiment linking electrons inside two diamonds at a distance of 1.3km from one another. When one is affected, the other is as well - with information traveling instantaneously instead of at light speed.
Here's another link from a different posting (6 Oct, 2015):
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/06/1757228/team-constructs-silicon-2-qubit-gate-enabling-construction-of-quantum-computers
--------
23 Sep, 2015: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/639996/?sc=dwhn
--------
20 Sep, 2015: Things are never as simple as they are made out to be. http://www.livescience.com/51682-vaccines-evolve-deadlier-viruses.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=more-from-livescience
--------
12 Sep, 2015: http://qz.com/500409/doctors-have-implanted-a-3d-printed-ribcage-in-an-actual-human-being/
--------
21 Jul, 2015:
So Tyler's interested in world building simulations. Tectonic plate interaction, weather systems, river flow evolution, etc. I'm interested in learning about/coding in OpenCL - so it might be nice to have something to simulate for fun.
On my first look out on the net for tectonic plate simulations, I didn't find much in the way of source code. Probably because people at the world building sub-reddit are not really that serious (or not coders). I did find a bachelor degree thesis paper written about a simulator, but no source code for it. Maybe I'll find more later. http://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/40422/Viitanen_Lauri_2012_03_30.pdf?sequence=1
Weather systems: now this one - so much more available that it actually becomes a very confusing matter that you'd have to spend a lifetime on in order to be fluent on any percentage of the models. Here's the term for what we'd need: Global Climate Models (GCMs):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#GCM_code
There are a lot of comments on forums from various people about how they are frustrated by how complex it is with all the different models and no way for the general public / interested people to easily get in and play with one (no easy to understand simulators).
Comments:
(me) This is interesting - the closest real world analogy to The Core. Talks about the Soviet project to reach the Mohorovičić discontinuity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_discontinuity
Found some tectonic plate simulation software:
http://www.earthbyte.org/category/resources/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vohv-kVfFAs
And this looks to be the Global Climate Model I'd be interested in using:
http://mitgcm.org/public/r2_manual/latest/online_documents/node3.html#fig:finite-volumes
----------
28 June, 2015: Might the universe be a 3D hologram or simulation in a computer? Let's find out!
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Spectrometer-Explore-the-Unknown-/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Desktop-Michelson-Morely-Interferometer/
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/meet-the-government-researcher-trying-to-prove-the-universe-is-a-hologram?trk_source=recommended I'm not sure this guy will be able to find anything significant and provable using only one of these. If he had a bunch of them in a grid, I bet you could see ripples in the grid.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-weight-of-quantum-entanglement?trk_source=recommended
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wave-particle-duality-when-quantum-behavior-bleeds-into-our-classical-world-2?trk_source=recommended
-------
30 Apr, 2015: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/post2468343_b_2468343.html
-------
8 Feb, 2015:
Interesting - your weight may have more to do with the DNA code of your gut bacteria than anything in your diet:
-- http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-to-weight-loss-might-be-poop-transplants-fro-1265888152
-- It may also be worth looking into further whether gut bacteria are involved in depression / mood swings. I saw an article earlier about how some bacteria release toxins into the bloodstream in return for increased food supply (the toxins make the host depressed, leading to them binging on food).
Just watched "The Search for Life: The Drake Equation" on Netflix. It was made by BBC, presented by Dallas Campbell. Fascinating material - it started with an interview with Drake where he explained each part of the equation and the guesses they used for the variables based on what they knew at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
Then the presenter (Campbell) began interviews to tie it into the question of how life develops - the last variables of the equation (how much life is there out there that may be emitting signals) concern how often life arises, whether it achieves intelligence, and how long it survives at that state. The amazing thing about the thinking behind the equation is that it also delineates the stepping stones of life in a systematic way. So the equation isn't only about finding other life in the galaxy, it's also about understanding ourselves.
He interviewed a few researchers to ask about what their research has exposed on each variable. For instance, he interviewed professor Gerry Joyce at the Scripps Institute in San Diego - Joyce is studying artificial RNA sequences that self replicate. So they're trying to find how the first self replication (the first building block of life in general - biogenesis) works and different ways it can start.
He interviewed a biologist, Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon, from San Francisco who was studying microbes in Mono lake in California, a highly arsenic body of water. The thinking there is that since the water is arsenic, it means that other life cannot freely interact with that life (because the other life would die) - so it may have developed separately (life may arise many times). See below in comments for Wikipedia article on Dr Wolfe-Simmons, there's still controversy on whether the microbe's biogenesis was indeed separate.
He interviewed another scientist, Dr Chris McKay of NASA Ames, who was studying cyanobacteria in the Mohave desert. The point of this was trying to figure out how likely and how life goes from single cellular to multi cellular. They went to the most dry place in the Mohave and turned over some rocks - in bubbles inside the quartz, colonies of cyonobacteria had little "greenhouses" and were carrying on photosynthesis (so you could see a green smudge once you turned the rock over). McKay said that once you have all these going on, you get a bunch of oxygen in the atmosphere, which leads to the ability of larger organisms to function. The statement there is that once single celled organisms are doing photosynthesis, it leads to multi-celled organisms quickly (because the oxygen energy pathway supercharges metabolism of an organism, meaning it's a lot faster).
The last variable of the equation concerns how common intelligence is. This is a complete guess. They looked at biologists studying crows, and mentioned dolphins and elephants as well.
Finally, he went to interview scientists at SETI. They think that they would have to ultimately listen to a broad spectrum of channels while focusing on a total of 10 million planets in order to increase the likelihood of discovering another intelligence out there to 1.
Notes: Drake Equation: N stands for number of intelligent civilizations out there (scope - our galaxy - the Milky Way). It is assumed to be equal to the following variables all multiplied together: Rate of star formation in our galaxy per year (10) * Fp (average fraction of formed stars which have planets - was assumed to be half, or .5) * ne (average number of those planets which could support life - Drake set this at 2 to mirror our solar system with the assumption that Mars could possibly support it) * Fl (the fraction of those planets that eventually develop life - Drake assumed this to be 1, if a planet can support life it WILL eventually develop) * Fi (fraction of that life which develops into intelligence) * Fc (fraction of the intelligent life which develops communications, which as it concerns SETI would be electromagnetic comm) * L (length of time that communication continues).
So all in all, very interesting show.
-- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0132352/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
-- http://www.scripps.edu/research/faculty/joyce
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felisa_Wolfe-Simon
-- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99132608 - "In Lab, Clues to How Life Began"
-- I read more on Joyce and RNA, and it seems like once life has moved on past that phase, it would be very hard for that step to occur again because of how fragile RNA is - any other activity going on would destroy it. http://www.nature.com/.../1998/030505/full/news030505-8.html
My comments on the content: I think that the reasons they aren't finding anything have to do with: A. Completely arbitrary guess of searched portion of spectrum (hydrogen wavelength, really?) B. Searching in a fashion that assumes an intelligent signal occurs on one frequency alone, when in fact we've already moved beyond that in order to boost bandwidth. This means that the Fc assumption is way too simplistic and L subject to our current search pattern is tiny - in the first 40 years of developing EM communications, we have already started using multiple frequencies for transmissions. That means that L may be much shorter than the overall time that the civilization is transmitting (it may be only 40-50 years, until no one is transmitting on a single frequency).
What this means is that we're going to have to use our AI techniques and GPUs on SETI.
Chris Miller's comments: The Drake equation reminds me of the Fermi Paradox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQkVqno-uI
--------
4 Feb, 2016: On GMO/non-GMO co-existance:
http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2016/jan/24
--------
Field genetic testing kit (24 hour turn-around time):
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/03/from-ebola-to-zika-tiny-mobile-lab-gives-real-time-dna-data-on-outbreaks?CMP=fb_a-science_b-gdnscience
--------
10 January, 2016:
I have no expertise on cancer. The following movie seems to cast doubt on our cancer treatments. I do know that the survival rate once patients are treated with chemotherapy is so low that it makes me wonder whether we should even be using it.
http://www.amazon.com/Burzynski-Movie-Eric-Merola/product-reviews/B003X3CF68
http://fabweb.org/2015/12/11/burzunsky-cancer-cure-finally-released-by-the-feds/
--------
2 Jan, 2016:
Job market is hot for ag science majors.
http://harvestpublicmedia.org/article/good-news-ag-science-majors-job-market-hot
--------
30 Dec, 2015:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/liver-hormone-may-be-the-off-switch-for-sweet-tooth-cocktail-cravings/ I bet there are activation networks like this for drug addiction as well. If we got rid of the war on drugs and simply made it a medical research issue, we'd save on prisons and drastically lower violence rate.
--------
2 Dec, 2015:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/infinitypv/heli-on?utm_medium=email&utm_source=other&utm_campaign=notifications.auto.WaARtpjQEeWE7RK-AWCOaQ
Organic solar cells are finally coming out - here's a first project with them on Kickstarter. This came out from the people that gave a class on organic solar cells on Coursera (that's how I got the message - I had subscribed to the class).
--------
28 November, 2015:
On time and its flow:
Just read a story on Wikipedia about an engineer from the early days of powered flight, John William Dunne. In addition to developing aircraft, he tried to make a theory about time based on precognitive dreams. He wrote a book (among others), An Experiment with Time (Studies in Consciousness), which has been given very high reviews on Amazon (along with several interesting comments).
--------
24 Oct, 2015:
So there's been a bunch of quantum physics articles out lately - here's an interesting one:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/24/1343248/zeno-effect-verified-atoms-wont-move-while-you-watch
Then there was another I saw recently in which a university did an experiment linking electrons inside two diamonds at a distance of 1.3km from one another. When one is affected, the other is as well - with information traveling instantaneously instead of at light speed.
Here's another link from a different posting (6 Oct, 2015):
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/06/1757228/team-constructs-silicon-2-qubit-gate-enabling-construction-of-quantum-computers
--------
23 Sep, 2015: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/639996/?sc=dwhn
--------
20 Sep, 2015: Things are never as simple as they are made out to be. http://www.livescience.com/51682-vaccines-evolve-deadlier-viruses.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=more-from-livescience
--------
12 Sep, 2015: http://qz.com/500409/doctors-have-implanted-a-3d-printed-ribcage-in-an-actual-human-being/
--------
21 Jul, 2015:
So Tyler's interested in world building simulations. Tectonic plate interaction, weather systems, river flow evolution, etc. I'm interested in learning about/coding in OpenCL - so it might be nice to have something to simulate for fun.
On my first look out on the net for tectonic plate simulations, I didn't find much in the way of source code. Probably because people at the world building sub-reddit are not really that serious (or not coders). I did find a bachelor degree thesis paper written about a simulator, but no source code for it. Maybe I'll find more later. http://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/40422/Viitanen_Lauri_2012_03_30.pdf?sequence=1
Weather systems: now this one - so much more available that it actually becomes a very confusing matter that you'd have to spend a lifetime on in order to be fluent on any percentage of the models. Here's the term for what we'd need: Global Climate Models (GCMs):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#GCM_code
There are a lot of comments on forums from various people about how they are frustrated by how complex it is with all the different models and no way for the general public / interested people to easily get in and play with one (no easy to understand simulators).
Comments:
(me) This is interesting - the closest real world analogy to The Core. Talks about the Soviet project to reach the Mohorovičić discontinuity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_discontinuity
Found some tectonic plate simulation software:
http://www.earthbyte.org/category/resources/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vohv-kVfFAs
And this looks to be the Global Climate Model I'd be interested in using:
http://mitgcm.org/public/r2_manual/latest/online_documents/node3.html#fig:finite-volumes
----------
28 June, 2015: Might the universe be a 3D hologram or simulation in a computer? Let's find out!
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Spectrometer-Explore-the-Unknown-/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Desktop-Michelson-Morely-Interferometer/
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/meet-the-government-researcher-trying-to-prove-the-universe-is-a-hologram?trk_source=recommended I'm not sure this guy will be able to find anything significant and provable using only one of these. If he had a bunch of them in a grid, I bet you could see ripples in the grid.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-weight-of-quantum-entanglement?trk_source=recommended
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wave-particle-duality-when-quantum-behavior-bleeds-into-our-classical-world-2?trk_source=recommended
-------
30 Apr, 2015: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/post2468343_b_2468343.html
-------
8 Feb, 2015:
Interesting - your weight may have more to do with the DNA code of your gut bacteria than anything in your diet:
-- http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-to-weight-loss-might-be-poop-transplants-fro-1265888152
-- It may also be worth looking into further whether gut bacteria are involved in depression / mood swings. I saw an article earlier about how some bacteria release toxins into the bloodstream in return for increased food supply (the toxins make the host depressed, leading to them binging on food).
Mathematics
Post from 4 Mar, 2016:
I have been watching a mathematical history series on Netflix, called The Story of Maths with Oxford professor Marcus du Sauto as the presenter.
The second episode was eye opening - he alludes to Carl Frederick Gauss getting his inspiration from two prior non-western mathematicians - an Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta, and a Chinese mathematician, Qín Jiǔsháo 秦九韶. Brahmagupta was responsible for the first recorded solutions to quadratic equations, and Qín Jiǔsháo for the Chinese Remainder Theorem and Horner's Method to get roots of polynomials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horner's_method. By the way, the Wikipedia page on Qín Jiǔsháo really needs more material on him. Apparently, he was a corrupt scoundrel who liked to poison people and had to move around the country as a result. Interesting story there.
I'm really going to have to watch that episode again, I'm sure I'm missing some things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGrmEWj38bs - Youtube video on Horner's method.
This is the book Qin Jiushao wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Treatise_in_Nine_Sections, which was in turn incorporated into an encyclopedia commisioned by a Ming dynasty emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia
---------------
Post from 2 Mar, 2016:
Today I, between working on a charting function, got to play with the Monty Hall problem. This is a question of probability which is not obvious at all, and people get it wrong when just guessing.
Monty Hall was the game show host on Let's Make a Deal. The contestant would have three doors, one of which had an awesome prize. The contestant would pick a door, and Hall would pick another door that didn't have a prize to open. He'd ask the contestants whether they wanted to switch to the final door or stay with their guess. Apparently, switching always has a 66% probability of success and staying only a 33%. It's not at all obvious, and I couldn't believe what I was reading on Quora.com, so I made a simulator. Then I wrote another function to spam the cap out of the strategy tester, with millions of attempts. Nothing like finding out for yourself.
---------------
Post from 27 Feb, 2016:
Link shared: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/welcome-to-the-turkish-village-dedicated-to-maths
---------------
19 Sep, 2015: The Zipf Mystery (word frequency in language):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
---------------
1 Aug, 2015: When I took Linear Algebra, one of the hardest things to wrap my head around was the concept of basis. I found this really good explanation on this link under the header transformations:
Basically, if you imagine holding a coordinate system (like you have a set of 3 axis lines), and imagine an object projected by hologram inside it, I think those axises would be the basis for the space. Then, when you perform a transformation, you're really taking those axises and moving them around or rotating them - when you do that, it affects the hologram inside them.
http://www.codinglabs.net/article_world_view_projection_matrix.aspx
Still reading about OpenGL/3d math. Got an artist sketch pad to keep the most notes possible together, and have collected all matrices for all the transform types on the first page. Next up - projection transformation.
-----------------
24 Jul, 2015 Introduction to Quaternions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVwd8gYLnI
I think that learning about these may explain the w term (4th term in matrices / vectors), which are somehow related to matrix rotations.
-----------------
23 Jul, 2015:
Found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvLZfs2qxcE
So I'd been doing a bunch of reading earlier about the Fourier transform. I still haven't gotten the FFT down. The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) is the fast version of the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform). Apparently, you can use this algorithm to simulate ocean waves. Check out the video for a look (there's better results out there after different lighting operations are done). The algorithm which uses the FFT to simulate ocean waves is named after the guy who wrote a paper on it, Jerry Tessendorf (here it is):
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/courses/rendering/2005/jdewall/tessendorf.pdf
The results of this algorithm are awesome, and there are plenty of resources out on the web about different people using it.
Reason I'm looking at this is that I don't want to hand type a bunch of triangles into OpenGL - so I need a bit of logic / math to have the computer generate a list on its own. First thing for me to look at is terrain. Static terrain is boring. Ocean waves are a kind of dynamic terrain...so...
--------
20 Jul, 2015:
The talk tonight on HAAR Wavelets went very well. I spoke for about twenty minutes, took ten minutes of questions. The Odroid booted up fine and the LCD screen in the conference room worked perfectly with it, unlike my two at home. I got there about half an hour early to set up, drew an additional white board full of algorithm notes. I didn't have everything I wanted as far as Python code - had spent a lot of that time changing out computers and getting environments setup / actually took a good part of today configuring yet another image for the Odroid.
In the end, there were only three questions (two were not fully formed) which I felt I didn't have the knowledge to answer. They serve as good reference points for further reading. I think I gave them an extremely good overview of the HAAR wavelet / they probably all know exactly how to implement one now. I know a lot of times people are just being nice when they say that a talk was good, but quite a few thanked me and said that.
One interesting thing is that normally I don't do this well in talks - didn't practice the talk at all / have an exact outline for what I was going to say - but when I started putting out the algorithm implementation notes on the white board, I did that entirely from memory - no stopping to reference anything. Six months of preparation goes a long way.
I think I'll do more talks for the group in the future. I'm looking forward to Kyle Pointer's talk - he told me beforehand that he was probably going to do it on matrix math / Linear algebra. For future talks, I'm going to try harder to have more colors / running Python code.
--------
20 Jul, 2015 The US team wins worldwide Math Olympiad for the first time in 21 years: http://www.maa.org/news/us-team-takes-first-place-at-international-mathematical-Olympiad
--------
21 Jun, 2015:
So the clock is ticking - I have until July 20th to finish preparing my talk to Papers We Love, Saint Louis.
Last time, I was supposed to give the talk in April, but due to some miscommunication with the coordinator, had the talk delayed. Didn't sound very confident in my IMs and emails with him, so he didn't schedule it. This time, it's already set.
It's probably a good thing - last time I was getting on a serious tangent reading about Fourier instead of really digging into wavelets. I also didn't understand wavelets very well at all.
It'll be interesting to see how I handle this talk - I really shouldn't get too deep into the math, but it's a mathematical process / algorithm (so is Fourier). If I do a bunch of algebraic operations to show points, people may get lost quickly or bored. I can talk about the history, but the talk should really be more about what subjects it can be used with and what it relates to. My Comments:
http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/141448/Wavelets_and_Their_Applications.pdf
http://uprt.vscht.cz/prochazka/ps/08ISCCSPa.pdf
And the last link, which I thought I'd lost when I logged out: http://feihu.eng.ua.edu/NSF_TUES/w7_1a.pdf This one has so far been my favorite.
I'm basically trying to use these as a way to generalize the process of looking through an image (can be used for any data source) and simplifying it as much as possible without losing anything important. It's used a lot for compression, but I think I see the ability to use it in real time as well. One thing I especially like about it is that when you output the data, you get many levels, at the top not very detailed, and at the bottom as detailed as it gets. So once the first step of getting those levels is done, you can have classification / sorting logic that can run a lot faster and step up and down through the levels - only when there's something there to look at / ignoring any large spaces with no detail or no changes.
Another really cool thing about wavelets is that it uses some of the same math that physicists use when studying quantum mechanics. I like having more universal methods. That's not to say I understand quantum mechanics at all - I don't. Just that it's neat that studying one thing could possibly lead to more understanding in another.
--------
18 Apr, 2015:
Oh my goodness, check out what I've found! The lady who came up with the concept of wavelet families. Here she is giving a talk, and it directly relates to performing wavelets on images! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_aPcoRKUz0
This woman is very accomplished - definitely deserves a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies
The first bit she talks about with averaging is the concept behind HAAR wavelets - getting these is a very simple algorithm, just split all the pixel values into pairs, and average them. That gives you a new list of pixels. Do it again and get another one...and so on until you end up with just one value. All the lists you generate along the way are each a level of detail of the image.
The cool thing about wavelets is that they allow you to at first look at the image very briefly, and based on that, decide whether the very course information warrants a closer look. Because this process is very well defined as well as simple, it's easy to bake into programs.
--------
18 Apr, 2015:
So apparently, both the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Nyquist Sampling arise from the math behind Fourier, which physicists use to measure energy at the atomic level, treating it like any other wave function. I still am not understanding all the math (I have forgotten/never completely mastered all the rules of integration), but it's certainly a very interesting study area. I've also moved on to studying wavelets, and the HAAR wavelet transform is very simple. However, there are many types of wavelet functions, so I have only just entered that.
--------
22 Mar, 2015:
So, I've been watching video after video on Fourier transforms, reading on it, and on imaginary numbers. I figured something kind of cool out.
So imaginary numbers are used to move in a circle by doing simple multiplication (they give an angle and distance when you combine an imaginary number and a real number). If you keep multiplying by i, you'll be moving around the axis clockwise.
I hate imaginary numbers with a passion. I don't like the name, I don't like the notation, and I don't like the idea of having an "imaginary" number. I see that you can do the same thing with cross products. If you take the cross product of x and y, that puts you out on z. Then z and x puts you out on y. Then y and z puts you out on x. So basically, cross product the newest vector with the one before it, and you'll keep moving around in the same way with no screwy concepts like imaginary numbers.
--------
21 Feb, 15:
This site has a lot of lego machines, some of which remind me of Babbage's machine (has mechanical calculator with carry functions).
http://www.nico71.fr/small-mechanical-loom/
This is actually my weakest area - even though I can visualize things in 3 dimensions very well, I have no experience with mechnical workshops / terms. I think given the automatic fourier analysis machine based on Michelson's device that I posted about earlier, I should look into this more. It might provide a new way for me to look at the process so I could simply program based on the mechanistic process, then take another look at the math algorithms. Most of the obstacles I've seen so far have been my lack of understanding of the math background, with its many disparate systems of notation and terms that require a lot of further study.
--------
16 Feb, 2015:
So once again - thinking about the Fourier transform and what I'm going to do to understand it. The reason I need it is that it reduces any signal to a much simpler pattern, which is easier to compute on / easier to match patterns with others.
I've been reading more about Fourier, as well as about complex numbers. One thing that I've noticed is that when you're reading about mathematical concepts, while doing Google searches, always include the word "intuition" in the search. That results in better explanations, especially if you are not up to speed on the math (having intuition on the subject will help you get there).
So this is where I am: I've learned that the complex number 'i' basically involves telling you about rotations. It can have four values. If you are using it to describe information in a sinusoidal wave, then these four values can be the top of the wave, the next zero point, the bottom of the wave, and the final zero point (and it just repeats, cycling through the four values). In fact, using complex numbers is the simplest way to describe waves, or circular direction / angles (where the angle can describe any direction in 360 degrees).
So the easiest way to describe the Fourier transform is the equation with the complex number. I'm still really stuck with the math on it. I just need to approach the Calculus again...
Found a cool video about how Michelson's machine is related to Fourier (the machine used in the experiment to find the speed of light):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAsM30MAHLg
Comments:
(me): It's really neat - the video shows how each part in the machine relates to a specific portion of the equation.
(me): It's a four video set for starters, then they have a PDF that goes through the machine and a guide video talking about every page of the PDF. The machine resides at the University of Illinois's Department of Mathematics.
-------
Feb, 2015:
http://www.mersenne.org/various/works.php
I have been watching a mathematical history series on Netflix, called The Story of Maths with Oxford professor Marcus du Sauto as the presenter.
The second episode was eye opening - he alludes to Carl Frederick Gauss getting his inspiration from two prior non-western mathematicians - an Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta, and a Chinese mathematician, Qín Jiǔsháo 秦九韶. Brahmagupta was responsible for the first recorded solutions to quadratic equations, and Qín Jiǔsháo for the Chinese Remainder Theorem and Horner's Method to get roots of polynomials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horner's_method. By the way, the Wikipedia page on Qín Jiǔsháo really needs more material on him. Apparently, he was a corrupt scoundrel who liked to poison people and had to move around the country as a result. Interesting story there.
I'm really going to have to watch that episode again, I'm sure I'm missing some things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGrmEWj38bs - Youtube video on Horner's method.
This is the book Qin Jiushao wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Treatise_in_Nine_Sections, which was in turn incorporated into an encyclopedia commisioned by a Ming dynasty emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia
---------------
Post from 2 Mar, 2016:
Today I, between working on a charting function, got to play with the Monty Hall problem. This is a question of probability which is not obvious at all, and people get it wrong when just guessing.
Monty Hall was the game show host on Let's Make a Deal. The contestant would have three doors, one of which had an awesome prize. The contestant would pick a door, and Hall would pick another door that didn't have a prize to open. He'd ask the contestants whether they wanted to switch to the final door or stay with their guess. Apparently, switching always has a 66% probability of success and staying only a 33%. It's not at all obvious, and I couldn't believe what I was reading on Quora.com, so I made a simulator. Then I wrote another function to spam the cap out of the strategy tester, with millions of attempts. Nothing like finding out for yourself.
---------------
Post from 27 Feb, 2016:
Link shared: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/welcome-to-the-turkish-village-dedicated-to-maths
---------------
19 Sep, 2015: The Zipf Mystery (word frequency in language):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE
---------------
1 Aug, 2015: When I took Linear Algebra, one of the hardest things to wrap my head around was the concept of basis. I found this really good explanation on this link under the header transformations:
Basically, if you imagine holding a coordinate system (like you have a set of 3 axis lines), and imagine an object projected by hologram inside it, I think those axises would be the basis for the space. Then, when you perform a transformation, you're really taking those axises and moving them around or rotating them - when you do that, it affects the hologram inside them.
http://www.codinglabs.net/article_world_view_projection_matrix.aspx
Still reading about OpenGL/3d math. Got an artist sketch pad to keep the most notes possible together, and have collected all matrices for all the transform types on the first page. Next up - projection transformation.
-----------------
24 Jul, 2015 Introduction to Quaternions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVwd8gYLnI
I think that learning about these may explain the w term (4th term in matrices / vectors), which are somehow related to matrix rotations.
-----------------
23 Jul, 2015:
Found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvLZfs2qxcE
So I'd been doing a bunch of reading earlier about the Fourier transform. I still haven't gotten the FFT down. The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) is the fast version of the DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform). Apparently, you can use this algorithm to simulate ocean waves. Check out the video for a look (there's better results out there after different lighting operations are done). The algorithm which uses the FFT to simulate ocean waves is named after the guy who wrote a paper on it, Jerry Tessendorf (here it is):
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/courses/rendering/2005/jdewall/tessendorf.pdf
The results of this algorithm are awesome, and there are plenty of resources out on the web about different people using it.
Reason I'm looking at this is that I don't want to hand type a bunch of triangles into OpenGL - so I need a bit of logic / math to have the computer generate a list on its own. First thing for me to look at is terrain. Static terrain is boring. Ocean waves are a kind of dynamic terrain...so...
--------
20 Jul, 2015:
The talk tonight on HAAR Wavelets went very well. I spoke for about twenty minutes, took ten minutes of questions. The Odroid booted up fine and the LCD screen in the conference room worked perfectly with it, unlike my two at home. I got there about half an hour early to set up, drew an additional white board full of algorithm notes. I didn't have everything I wanted as far as Python code - had spent a lot of that time changing out computers and getting environments setup / actually took a good part of today configuring yet another image for the Odroid.
In the end, there were only three questions (two were not fully formed) which I felt I didn't have the knowledge to answer. They serve as good reference points for further reading. I think I gave them an extremely good overview of the HAAR wavelet / they probably all know exactly how to implement one now. I know a lot of times people are just being nice when they say that a talk was good, but quite a few thanked me and said that.
One interesting thing is that normally I don't do this well in talks - didn't practice the talk at all / have an exact outline for what I was going to say - but when I started putting out the algorithm implementation notes on the white board, I did that entirely from memory - no stopping to reference anything. Six months of preparation goes a long way.
I think I'll do more talks for the group in the future. I'm looking forward to Kyle Pointer's talk - he told me beforehand that he was probably going to do it on matrix math / Linear algebra. For future talks, I'm going to try harder to have more colors / running Python code.
--------
20 Jul, 2015 The US team wins worldwide Math Olympiad for the first time in 21 years: http://www.maa.org/news/us-team-takes-first-place-at-international-mathematical-Olympiad
--------
21 Jun, 2015:
So the clock is ticking - I have until July 20th to finish preparing my talk to Papers We Love, Saint Louis.
Last time, I was supposed to give the talk in April, but due to some miscommunication with the coordinator, had the talk delayed. Didn't sound very confident in my IMs and emails with him, so he didn't schedule it. This time, it's already set.
It's probably a good thing - last time I was getting on a serious tangent reading about Fourier instead of really digging into wavelets. I also didn't understand wavelets very well at all.
It'll be interesting to see how I handle this talk - I really shouldn't get too deep into the math, but it's a mathematical process / algorithm (so is Fourier). If I do a bunch of algebraic operations to show points, people may get lost quickly or bored. I can talk about the history, but the talk should really be more about what subjects it can be used with and what it relates to. My Comments:
http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/141448/Wavelets_and_Their_Applications.pdf
http://uprt.vscht.cz/prochazka/ps/08ISCCSPa.pdf
And the last link, which I thought I'd lost when I logged out: http://feihu.eng.ua.edu/NSF_TUES/w7_1a.pdf This one has so far been my favorite.
I'm basically trying to use these as a way to generalize the process of looking through an image (can be used for any data source) and simplifying it as much as possible without losing anything important. It's used a lot for compression, but I think I see the ability to use it in real time as well. One thing I especially like about it is that when you output the data, you get many levels, at the top not very detailed, and at the bottom as detailed as it gets. So once the first step of getting those levels is done, you can have classification / sorting logic that can run a lot faster and step up and down through the levels - only when there's something there to look at / ignoring any large spaces with no detail or no changes.
Another really cool thing about wavelets is that it uses some of the same math that physicists use when studying quantum mechanics. I like having more universal methods. That's not to say I understand quantum mechanics at all - I don't. Just that it's neat that studying one thing could possibly lead to more understanding in another.
--------
18 Apr, 2015:
Oh my goodness, check out what I've found! The lady who came up with the concept of wavelet families. Here she is giving a talk, and it directly relates to performing wavelets on images! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_aPcoRKUz0
This woman is very accomplished - definitely deserves a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies
The first bit she talks about with averaging is the concept behind HAAR wavelets - getting these is a very simple algorithm, just split all the pixel values into pairs, and average them. That gives you a new list of pixels. Do it again and get another one...and so on until you end up with just one value. All the lists you generate along the way are each a level of detail of the image.
The cool thing about wavelets is that they allow you to at first look at the image very briefly, and based on that, decide whether the very course information warrants a closer look. Because this process is very well defined as well as simple, it's easy to bake into programs.
--------
18 Apr, 2015:
So apparently, both the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Nyquist Sampling arise from the math behind Fourier, which physicists use to measure energy at the atomic level, treating it like any other wave function. I still am not understanding all the math (I have forgotten/never completely mastered all the rules of integration), but it's certainly a very interesting study area. I've also moved on to studying wavelets, and the HAAR wavelet transform is very simple. However, there are many types of wavelet functions, so I have only just entered that.
--------
22 Mar, 2015:
So, I've been watching video after video on Fourier transforms, reading on it, and on imaginary numbers. I figured something kind of cool out.
So imaginary numbers are used to move in a circle by doing simple multiplication (they give an angle and distance when you combine an imaginary number and a real number). If you keep multiplying by i, you'll be moving around the axis clockwise.
I hate imaginary numbers with a passion. I don't like the name, I don't like the notation, and I don't like the idea of having an "imaginary" number. I see that you can do the same thing with cross products. If you take the cross product of x and y, that puts you out on z. Then z and x puts you out on y. Then y and z puts you out on x. So basically, cross product the newest vector with the one before it, and you'll keep moving around in the same way with no screwy concepts like imaginary numbers.
--------
21 Feb, 15:
This site has a lot of lego machines, some of which remind me of Babbage's machine (has mechanical calculator with carry functions).
http://www.nico71.fr/small-mechanical-loom/
This is actually my weakest area - even though I can visualize things in 3 dimensions very well, I have no experience with mechnical workshops / terms. I think given the automatic fourier analysis machine based on Michelson's device that I posted about earlier, I should look into this more. It might provide a new way for me to look at the process so I could simply program based on the mechanistic process, then take another look at the math algorithms. Most of the obstacles I've seen so far have been my lack of understanding of the math background, with its many disparate systems of notation and terms that require a lot of further study.
--------
16 Feb, 2015:
So once again - thinking about the Fourier transform and what I'm going to do to understand it. The reason I need it is that it reduces any signal to a much simpler pattern, which is easier to compute on / easier to match patterns with others.
I've been reading more about Fourier, as well as about complex numbers. One thing that I've noticed is that when you're reading about mathematical concepts, while doing Google searches, always include the word "intuition" in the search. That results in better explanations, especially if you are not up to speed on the math (having intuition on the subject will help you get there).
So this is where I am: I've learned that the complex number 'i' basically involves telling you about rotations. It can have four values. If you are using it to describe information in a sinusoidal wave, then these four values can be the top of the wave, the next zero point, the bottom of the wave, and the final zero point (and it just repeats, cycling through the four values). In fact, using complex numbers is the simplest way to describe waves, or circular direction / angles (where the angle can describe any direction in 360 degrees).
So the easiest way to describe the Fourier transform is the equation with the complex number. I'm still really stuck with the math on it. I just need to approach the Calculus again...
Found a cool video about how Michelson's machine is related to Fourier (the machine used in the experiment to find the speed of light):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAsM30MAHLg
Comments:
(me): It's really neat - the video shows how each part in the machine relates to a specific portion of the equation.
(me): It's a four video set for starters, then they have a PDF that goes through the machine and a guide video talking about every page of the PDF. The machine resides at the University of Illinois's Department of Mathematics.
-------
Feb, 2015:
http://www.mersenne.org/various/works.php
Humor
4 Mar, 2016:
I would like a song to the tune of Mulan "I will make a man out of you" changed to "I will make a programmer out of you." Any takers?
Maybe Google translate can help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRLreV7uVy0
-----------
4 Mar, 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzLtF_PxbYw
"Ukraine is game to you?" Seinfeld clip.
-----------
18 Feb, 2016:
NASA Tests Effects Of Space On Fat Astronaut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxe6s_-iYy8
----------
Martin Shkrelli Pays Only $3 for "Tops in Blue" Album:
http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/12/28991/
----------
25 December: Just Doing the Job You Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lhAKbVWyDY&app=desktop
Kids were watching Sponge Bob Square Pants, and that's from "Help Wanted", where he gets the job for the first time at Krabby Patty.
----------
3 Nov, 2015: http://weknowmemes.com/2013/01/excuse-me-sir-hippo/
----------
30 Sep, 2015: Report: Man Uses Raccoon To Start Breathalyzer Equipped Car; Raccoon Then Attacks Driver http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/09/30/man-uses-raccoon-to-start-breathalyzer-equipped-car-raccoon-then-attacks-driver/ (HOAX)
----------
19 Sep, 2015:
You do count. You have always counted.
----------
18 Sep, 2015:
This is Intense!
https://blog.adafruit.com/2014/05/13/coding-quickly-becoming-a-core-subject-makereducation/
Oh God - faster, code faster!!! This class isn't about slow coding, it's about fast coding! GO GO GO!
You see how focused and strained that kid is? He's going to get kicked out if he doesn't code FASTER!
The other two wait their turn with worried looks on their faces.
No thinking, just code.
----------
5 Sep, 2015: I'm so sorry. I promise I don't dislike Bernie Sanders. It's seriously funny though.
I would like a song to the tune of Mulan "I will make a man out of you" changed to "I will make a programmer out of you." Any takers?
Maybe Google translate can help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRLreV7uVy0
-----------
4 Mar, 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzLtF_PxbYw
"Ukraine is game to you?" Seinfeld clip.
-----------
18 Feb, 2016:
NASA Tests Effects Of Space On Fat Astronaut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxe6s_-iYy8
----------
Martin Shkrelli Pays Only $3 for "Tops in Blue" Album:
http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/12/28991/
----------
25 December: Just Doing the Job You Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lhAKbVWyDY&app=desktop
Kids were watching Sponge Bob Square Pants, and that's from "Help Wanted", where he gets the job for the first time at Krabby Patty.
----------
3 Nov, 2015: http://weknowmemes.com/2013/01/excuse-me-sir-hippo/
----------
30 Sep, 2015: Report: Man Uses Raccoon To Start Breathalyzer Equipped Car; Raccoon Then Attacks Driver http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/09/30/man-uses-raccoon-to-start-breathalyzer-equipped-car-raccoon-then-attacks-driver/ (HOAX)
----------
19 Sep, 2015:
You do count. You have always counted.
----------
18 Sep, 2015:
This is Intense!
https://blog.adafruit.com/2014/05/13/coding-quickly-becoming-a-core-subject-makereducation/
Oh God - faster, code faster!!! This class isn't about slow coding, it's about fast coding! GO GO GO!
You see how focused and strained that kid is? He's going to get kicked out if he doesn't code FASTER!
The other two wait their turn with worried looks on their faces.
No thinking, just code.
----------
5 Sep, 2015: I'm so sorry. I promise I don't dislike Bernie Sanders. It's seriously funny though.
Game Design
The reason for this blog thread is that game design is fundamentally different from the tech aspect of actually writing a game. The latter doesn't really address whether the game will be enjoyable or not - if you mess it up, then the game can be less enjoyable, but it doesn't provide the construct for a winning game.
-------------
5 March, 2016: Neat game on Kickstarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903579097/dueling-samurai-a-fast-and-furious-game-of-conques
--------------
4 March, 2016: Including this because art is such a huge part of games.
You may have seen this - it has 6mil views on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
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Review of post 2 Jun, 2015:
For some reason I have a Wikipedia article on a Polish painter posted. Not sure how I got there (usually it'd be a long click chain by the time I post a Wikipedia article - I do a ton of online reading).
The guy's life reminds me of my own in a way - very dark. The emotions he kept inside must've been grim, and art was a release:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski
His art also reminds me very much of my own. In art class in high school, I could quite literally paint nothing but scenes of death and dying.
On "gun control"
5 March, 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFBsFDN1LUg
People who think that widespread gun ownership is the reason for violence haven't thought through the situation at all. Humans are violent - there's no other way to put it. Without guns, people would still be subject to violence from other people using any number of tools. Hear what this immigrant from Venezuala has to say on the subject.
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2 January, 2016:
https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2015/12/21/book-excerpt-gun-control-in-the-third-reich/ Essentially, governments tend to disarm their citizens immediately before massacre/genocide. We have severe economic problems which are currently being masked over by our government. Social Security and Medicare will be bankrupt soon, with the different funds projected to be entirely drained between 2028 and 2034 (various funds are projected to go bankrupt at different times). When that happens, many people are going to go hungry, and they are going to be very angry due to the poor management of the money which was seized from their paychecks with the promise that they would have money when they got older. Instead, many other agencies are "borrowing" from these funds with no way to replace the money.
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7 Dec, 2015: No amount of laws will stop a mass killing (the killer knows he/she will die and already doesn't care - no law will stop them at that point). However, a citizen with a gun can. Here: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-driver-with-concealed-handgun-prevents-mass-shooting-in-chicago-2015-4
http://controversialtimes.com/issues/constitutional-rights/12-times-mass-shootings-were-stopped-by-good-guys-with-guns/?utm_source=AFY
http://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/03/do-civilians-with-guns-ever-stop-mass-shootings/
Finally, people who are insane and mean to die while killing as many as possible will inevitably prefer gun-free zones, as the people there cannot return fire, having been disarmed by their government: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/10/11/report-92-percent-of-mass-shootings-since-2009-occured-in-gun-free-zones/
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2 Sep, 2015: Every 13 seconds, a US citizen uses a gun in self-defense against a criminal.
http://www.pulpless.com/gunclock/noframedex.html
I was listening to NPR Monday night, and while conspiring with each other to establish more gun control, several callers suggested mandating gun insurance. One caller even explicitly linked home burglaries with gun defense, stating that if the homeowner were forced to buy gun insurance over a period of years prior to a burglary, they most likely wouldn't want the expense, and therefore wouldn't have the gun at hand. In their twisted minds, that was a positive.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/26/survivors-of-rape-speak-out-against-gun-control-i-was-denied-the-one-equalizing-factor-that-i-had/
Simply put, these people would deny innocent civilians the right to defend themselves against armed rapists, mass killers, thugs, and thieves. It is more probable that they worry what will happen to their government positions should the safety net run out of money than that they want to protect any actual civilians' lives or property. They want government to have a massive advantage in moving people to internment camps should that happen. Nothing else makes a bit of sense.
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30 Aug, 2015:
Britain is not satisfied with the gun ban now that they have successfully disarmed their citizens. Now they want knives too. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-28/knife-murders-spiking-after-gun-ban-uk-urges-save-life-surrender-your-knife
While several high profile knife attacks have occurred in China (another country with severe anti-gun laws), these would not have happened if the many victims had tools to defend themselves.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/01/world/asia/china-railway-attack/index.html
http://www.mining.com/fifty-killed-in-a-knife-attack-at-a-chinese-colliery/
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30 Aug, 2015:
Britain is not satisfied with the gun ban now that they have successfully disarmed their citizens. Now they want knives too. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-28/knife-murders-spiking-after-gun-ban-uk-urges-save-life-surrender-your-knife
While several high profile knife attacks have occurred in China (another country with severe anti-gun laws), these would not have happened if the many victims had tools to defend themselves.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/01/world/asia/china-railway-attack/index.html
http://www.mining.com/fifty-killed-in-a-knife-attack-at-a-chinese-colliery/
Knives can be used to kill large numbers of people, but only in a disarmed society. Government can never successfully stop killings from happening. The people who think that by removing tools from others we are safer do not understand that where there's a will, there's a way. The best you can hope for is to have a means to defend yourself.
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30 Sep, 2015 (out of order, didn't add it earlier): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqhyWd0ZqNs&feature=youtu.be This is an NRA ad. I fully agree. Our media organizations are dishonest, heavily biased in favor of making innocent people more in danger, and quite frankly, a danger to themselves and others.
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Link posted 29 Apr, 2015. Commentary posted to this blog 3 Jul, 2015, day before "Independence Day". May we not have to do it again. http://gov.texas.gov/news/press-release/20805#.VT_tOypAslI.facebook If we were ever to get into a fully "all in" scenario for gun grabbing, this is what it would look like (with many other agencies as well, like FEMA and the rest, such as the ATF, FBI, etc). I'm not sure that a governor and state militia could fully keep it from rolling, but they could definitely serve as a canary in the coal mine for the rest of us.
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16 Feb, 2015: Courageous 11 year-old girl saves herself from a criminal with a shotgun:
http://www.westernjournalism.com/preteen-girl-able-fend-off-attacker-grabbing-shotgun/
The folks (I use that term loosely) on NPR do not want that girl to have the shotgun. They want the criminal to be able to do what he will with your daughters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFBsFDN1LUg
People who think that widespread gun ownership is the reason for violence haven't thought through the situation at all. Humans are violent - there's no other way to put it. Without guns, people would still be subject to violence from other people using any number of tools. Hear what this immigrant from Venezuala has to say on the subject.
--------
2 January, 2016:
https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2015/12/21/book-excerpt-gun-control-in-the-third-reich/ Essentially, governments tend to disarm their citizens immediately before massacre/genocide. We have severe economic problems which are currently being masked over by our government. Social Security and Medicare will be bankrupt soon, with the different funds projected to be entirely drained between 2028 and 2034 (various funds are projected to go bankrupt at different times). When that happens, many people are going to go hungry, and they are going to be very angry due to the poor management of the money which was seized from their paychecks with the promise that they would have money when they got older. Instead, many other agencies are "borrowing" from these funds with no way to replace the money.
--------
7 Dec, 2015: No amount of laws will stop a mass killing (the killer knows he/she will die and already doesn't care - no law will stop them at that point). However, a citizen with a gun can. Here: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-driver-with-concealed-handgun-prevents-mass-shooting-in-chicago-2015-4
http://controversialtimes.com/issues/constitutional-rights/12-times-mass-shootings-were-stopped-by-good-guys-with-guns/?utm_source=AFY
http://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/03/do-civilians-with-guns-ever-stop-mass-shootings/
Finally, people who are insane and mean to die while killing as many as possible will inevitably prefer gun-free zones, as the people there cannot return fire, having been disarmed by their government: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/10/11/report-92-percent-of-mass-shootings-since-2009-occured-in-gun-free-zones/
--------
2 Sep, 2015: Every 13 seconds, a US citizen uses a gun in self-defense against a criminal.
http://www.pulpless.com/gunclock/noframedex.html
I was listening to NPR Monday night, and while conspiring with each other to establish more gun control, several callers suggested mandating gun insurance. One caller even explicitly linked home burglaries with gun defense, stating that if the homeowner were forced to buy gun insurance over a period of years prior to a burglary, they most likely wouldn't want the expense, and therefore wouldn't have the gun at hand. In their twisted minds, that was a positive.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/26/survivors-of-rape-speak-out-against-gun-control-i-was-denied-the-one-equalizing-factor-that-i-had/
Simply put, these people would deny innocent civilians the right to defend themselves against armed rapists, mass killers, thugs, and thieves. It is more probable that they worry what will happen to their government positions should the safety net run out of money than that they want to protect any actual civilians' lives or property. They want government to have a massive advantage in moving people to internment camps should that happen. Nothing else makes a bit of sense.
--------
30 Aug, 2015:
Britain is not satisfied with the gun ban now that they have successfully disarmed their citizens. Now they want knives too. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-28/knife-murders-spiking-after-gun-ban-uk-urges-save-life-surrender-your-knife
While several high profile knife attacks have occurred in China (another country with severe anti-gun laws), these would not have happened if the many victims had tools to defend themselves.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/01/world/asia/china-railway-attack/index.html
http://www.mining.com/fifty-killed-in-a-knife-attack-at-a-chinese-colliery/
--------
30 Aug, 2015:
Britain is not satisfied with the gun ban now that they have successfully disarmed their citizens. Now they want knives too. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-28/knife-murders-spiking-after-gun-ban-uk-urges-save-life-surrender-your-knife
While several high profile knife attacks have occurred in China (another country with severe anti-gun laws), these would not have happened if the many victims had tools to defend themselves.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/01/world/asia/china-railway-attack/index.html
http://www.mining.com/fifty-killed-in-a-knife-attack-at-a-chinese-colliery/
Knives can be used to kill large numbers of people, but only in a disarmed society. Government can never successfully stop killings from happening. The people who think that by removing tools from others we are safer do not understand that where there's a will, there's a way. The best you can hope for is to have a means to defend yourself.
--------
30 Sep, 2015 (out of order, didn't add it earlier): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqhyWd0ZqNs&feature=youtu.be This is an NRA ad. I fully agree. Our media organizations are dishonest, heavily biased in favor of making innocent people more in danger, and quite frankly, a danger to themselves and others.
--------
Link posted 29 Apr, 2015. Commentary posted to this blog 3 Jul, 2015, day before "Independence Day". May we not have to do it again. http://gov.texas.gov/news/press-release/20805#.VT_tOypAslI.facebook If we were ever to get into a fully "all in" scenario for gun grabbing, this is what it would look like (with many other agencies as well, like FEMA and the rest, such as the ATF, FBI, etc). I'm not sure that a governor and state militia could fully keep it from rolling, but they could definitely serve as a canary in the coal mine for the rest of us.
--------
16 Feb, 2015: Courageous 11 year-old girl saves herself from a criminal with a shotgun:
http://www.westernjournalism.com/preteen-girl-able-fend-off-attacker-grabbing-shotgun/
The folks (I use that term loosely) on NPR do not want that girl to have the shotgun. They want the criminal to be able to do what he will with your daughters.
Internet surveillance and my thoughts
3 July, 2015:
The director of this movie was murdered just before releasing it, along with his wife and 3 year old daughter. The local authorities declared it a murder/suicide and closed the case. Today, people post the move to Youtue and are answered by the censorship network using copyright claims under the DMCA to take it down. I was able to find ONE link:
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/195971/Gray_State_The_Rise_Rough_Cut_Directed_by_David_Crowley/
Gray State: The Rise.
3 July, 2015:
I suppose in a world where people are competing for resources, an open network will eventually be used by those who want to always maximize their profits at the expense of others, figure out where to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on their political enemies, or even censor those who speak out.
Here's what one of the Internet founders thinks:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2460894/sir-tim-berners-lee-internet-has-become-world-s-largest-surveillance-network
The problem isn't limited to just recording everything that comes across certain wires either. Companies like AT&T do their damndest to lock people out of changing their mobile devices' operating systems in order to keep their claws in (information gathering or just trying to own your eyeballs - I sincerely doubt is has that much to do with security). Every company wants to maintain a walled garden at the expense of their customers, which ultimately means the customer is / can be easily spied on.
In other news, the guy who lied to congress under oath about spying on the public, James Clapper, is involved in advising the government what they should do about the classified 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission, which may detail actions the Saudi government took to attack us. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pressure-builds-on-obama-administration-to-declassify-911-report/
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So essentially, if we want to have information freedom and privacy, we need to escape from walled gardens and see to our own digital security as a community (or communities of communities).
I'm sure this already exists in some form, though I don't know the name of the projects that might be related.
What if instead of connecting to a service like Facebook, we instead contacted a friend and had them download a piece of software. That piece of software would essentially run a combination webserver and private dyndns. In order to instantiate the connection (which would afterward be maintained by the underlying software), each of the two friends would visit a page that told them their public-facing IP address. They would share their respective public IPs with each other. Then each would enter the other's public-facing IPs into their software.
In order to permanently maintain a connection with each other, you would want to be in a group of users that would be at least 20 or so people. When your public facing IP address changes, the software would know because it would stop getting any auto connection pings from the others in the group. So it would start querying down the list of other users, and after a sufficient number had replied with the same public-facing IP address they were contacted from, this new information would be propagated to everyone else's underlying software list.
As far as the interface, each person would have their own, possibly customized, frontend. It would allow chat, post/blog wall, and viewing everyone else's wall. Because the interface is perfectly customizable, WebGL with 3D would be possible to be shared, etc.
-- Cool - there appears to be a way to do P2P communication using a webpage and javascript only (Nodejs and Socket.io).
-- This is so awesome, soon I'll have access to the processor and general computing on the GPU at the same time from within the browser. That means that I can offload stuff to the GPU and speed up the webpage. With P2P comm, we won't need Facebook much longer
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20 March, 2016: Another extremely weighty issue is that our politicians do NOT serve us. They work for people who are already wealthy, and their purpose is to deceive us whenever necessary and keep the balance weighted against us. Because of this, it becomes necessary to have a completely open source and distributed intelligence gathering network with capabilities which rival the most advanced nation state. In the face of this, no monopolized media network could fail to release important news when it is gathered by the open source network, because to do so would be to quickly lose followers. This offers us a way to finally keep them honest.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/03/20/0242204/building-a-global-network-of-open-source-sdr-receivers
Woah - some of the technical limitations of this implementation seem somewhat arbitrary, but this still could be an amazing tool. With it, you could download the spectrum from three different locations spaced around a given signal and localize the source. If there were receivers in the path of an instance like the airliner that disappeared in the Pacific, you may be able to do the same thing by focusing on engine radio transmissions and plot a path.
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19 March, 2016: https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/why-you-should-care-about-privacy/
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HAM radio is a good, slow means of transmitting/receiving information in emergencies. It could also serve as a foundation for learning more about radio before continually miniaturizing devices until we have a blanket system of retransmitting/autonomous devices which keep moving around and talking in spurts and are very hard to shut down. Here's a cheap/cruder setup: http://www.disasterrecoverymanager.com/dirt-cheap-ham-radio-antenna-tuner/
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4 Mar, 2016: The problem with having authorities whose decision making processes you do not trust is that anything they do to "help" comes frought with risks. If the FBI succeeds (they ultimately paid an Israeli company to do it) in cracking the iPhone of that dead terrorist, they will immediately use the technique to bypass due process in all of their other cases where it is possible: http://www.npr.org/2016/03/03/469005657/rep-issa-criticizes-fbi-s-strategy-to-get-into-terrorist-s-iphone
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1 Mar, 2016: More on that trust issue: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/found-in-translation/
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28 Feb, 2016: This is what it looks like when the police work for you and society instead of a corrupt, small, wealthy elite intent on sucking all the value out without putting any back in: https://bretigne.liberty.me/private-protection-co-puts-govt-police-to-shame/
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24 Feb, 2016:
Part of the overall process of reversing the information gulag (where government is opaque, the most valuable information is locked up tightly, and the wealthy keep the information close to their chest to maximize their investment and power is to ensure that money taxpayers pay into the educational process by way of grants leads to that work done under grant being released into the public domain in order to pay off the public's investment. This is a much different situation from locking up people for sharing this information, which the public arguably owns.
As of last month, National Science Foundation policy is open access: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q3
Repository here - search bar up top: http://par.nsf.gov/
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20 Feb, 2016:
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28 January, 2016:
Here's what's wrong (well, one set of wrongness) with government backdoors (any backdoors) in encryption, in a nutshell: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/researchers-solve-the-juniper-mystery-and-they-say-its-partially-the-nsas-fault/
The government is not one big homogenous entity. When one agency threatens the security of many other agencies by weakening security standards everyone relies on, everyone suffers (not just governments, but banks/pension funds, hospitals, power supply, etc).
Imagining that only one agency will have access to any backdoor is (to use a crude analogy) peeing in a wind that's coming right at your face. Holding security holes to use in the future also will inevitably backfire in the long run.
Bottom line, large breaches in data security like the OPM are likely to be caused by agencies like the NSA purposefully inserting vulnerabilities in core technologies like routers - downstream, various other agencies purchase the products. Years go by, and other countries find the holes, then use them to punch into their networks, compromising their private data and lurking inside their firewalls / on servers, watching network traffic and everything that's going on administratively.
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One way the stasis and balance (or imbalance, as our case may be) is kept constant is through the Federal Reserve.
Our federal government (USA) relies on it in order to run a massive deficit / spend far more than it takes in taxes.
Because of the above, congress does not question Federal Reserve decisions. Any attempt to audit the Fed results in voting down because they know we are in serious trouble.
http://truthinmedia.com/roll-call-us-senators-vote-audit-the-fed/
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The unaccountable and unconstitutional behavior of our current military intelligence / torture policy in war time will always ultimately end up being carried out back at home. First it will be used on the poor, and it will slowly move upward, the rotting culture festering like a corpse:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/rahm-emanuel-chicago-police-homan-square-scandal
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Spies are ultimately accountable to someone. What they will report has entirely to do with who stands to lose or benefit from an action. Because they aren't accountable to the public, it stands to reason that we should next focus on our politicians who are also not accountable to us (they, and our entire system, is basically for sale - a turn-key police state): http://www.10news.com/news/san-diegan-says-california-is-not-for-sale-110415
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26 Dec, 2015: https://bananas.liberty.me/youre-a-criminal-in-a-mass-surveillance-world-how-to-not-get-caught/ Today, we have 25% of the world's population of prisoners from only 5% of the total world population. This means that people in the US are 5X more likely to be imprisoned in our police state. We have agreements between government and for-profit prisons that make the government responsible by contract to provide X number of prisoners. The politicians have found that they can produce prisoners by producing more laws with more penalties. This is a serious societal problem and lack of accountability in our politicians - they do not represent us. Further, the intelligence community breaks down our system of justice through parallel construction.
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1 Dec, 2015: This technology will be needed for the visual aspect of the open source intelligence gathering system (which will be linked with AI). I know it seems hypocritical that I would advance the technology while angry about it. I think that the real reason I am angry is that the government is obviously lying about so many things in such a way that it hurts its citizens, while keeping the reality away from them. There is a power vaccuum caused by this imbalance that is terrible for the long term future of the nation and the citizens. The people in power are cynically draining the country, probably planning on stepping away once the country goes under. Bottom line, their decision making is oriented toward maximising return for a small number of people at the expense of the majority. https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/how-to-analyze-100-million-images-for-624 Apparently, you can now scan pretty much all the photos taken of local restaurants and bars and score each location by its patrons. You could make a bunch of tags by group, then take a picture of your office coworkers, scoring them / placing them into a category. If you had this running constantly, you could show changing demographics by location in your city. I wonder how many photos are taken per city per day? A further filter would be how many go up on Twitter or other website after they are taken. There's a further speedup possibility here - using OpenCL to push computing off to GPU or FPGA. I don't see why Amazon is really necessary here - something like hadoop (more research necessary) can be installed across multiple computers at home to make for a cluster. The biggest challenge then is how you get the millions of images found and downloaded in any kind of reasonable time period/cost.
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25 Nov 2015:
When I went to DLI, Noam Chomsky was mentioned maybe once (though there may have been a picture of him in the library or something like that). However, he's very important when it comes to the study of language. The reason is that some of the theories he was working on are important in the automatic graphing and understanding language structure. The Saint Louis Papers We Love group has a guy who has made a talk about these grammars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpbWoBG7_zw
It's still on my mind - I really would like to make some kind of chatbot that understands more about the conversation than just surface level detail, or matches words to phrases like pretty much all the chatbots created so far currently do.
Then there's that project my lead teacher had asked my class to do / that I couldn't get anyone interested in because we had more important things to tackle (studying to pass the end test). I feel like I let her down (though there wasn't much I could do without the support of the captain and therefore the rest of the class on that objective - they definitely didn't agree with her and weren't going to do it with the test coming up). She had wanted a mind-map of Chinese words/phrases/concepts mapped to a mind-map for English words/phrases/concepts.
It seems like you could use deep learning to create some kind of map like that, then use the grammar rules above to apply a conversational mapping / skeleton structure.
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1 Nov, 2015:
On the subject of information control by a small group of people for nefarious purposes (of which the heavy consolidation of media companies is a serious contributing factor), any open source intelligence gathering network will ultimately drive the news (with a very small group of companies employees ever fewer people, these people could never hope to provide the same quality or keep up).
In pursuit of ensuring that the information flow is not hampered, a watch must be kept on the DNS records, and they must be distributed as far as possible. Post follows.
I think that the best way to know when censorship is happening and defeat it is to have automatic DNS list comparisons. When sites are removed, it then becomes a task to figure out whether it's simply a technical matter (a question of how sites get to be in the server list) or who ordered the removal. Then, a master list of ordered removals can be created, as well as a tracking list of who is censoring what (we do not want child porn to flow for instance - we can keep people from profiting on that, at least on the public network through DNS record comparison and AI image filtering, but there are very few categories of information which should be kept from flowing, as most censorship is harmful to society).
Currently, changing the DNS server is the only way to try to get around censorship. I think we can do MUCH better through a system of auto comparisons for deletions.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/94931/how-to-defeat-us-dns-censorship-changing-your-dns-server/
Bitcoin-like DNS systems could also provide relative anonymity while also providing unique identification.
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31 October, 2015:
This scenario must NEVER be allowed to play out, such that government fully controls acceptable speech entirely in its own interests, and the interest of the ruling party of the time:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/chinas-nightmarish-citizen-scores-are-warning-americans
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24 Sep, 2015:
It looks as if in the future, Google will be the prime suppressor of free speech through refusing ad revenue to small news organizations if they hold views that Google does not approve of:
This year, Google changed the terms of service on Youtube to make political speech much more difficult as it relates to war:
Specifically, added under "Content Youtube considers inappropriate for advertising includes...":
"Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphical imagery is shown"
Effectively, this means that Youtube cannot be a medium for journalism. Further, if journalists (and I specifically include Youtubbers who report news of any kind in that category) report negatively on war in general, Google / Youtube will stop all advertising revenue.
In 2009, Google categorized Antiwar.com as satire. Earlier this year, Google stopped Antiwar.com's ad revenue.
Today, Google stopped StormCloudGathering's ad revenue.
In all cases, it has been because the channels or web sites were critical of war and showed imagery or highlighted issues which could reduce funding for wars in Syria and Iraq, etc. Because of this, I can only assume that the people who run Google are also war profiteers on the side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqkIr-rUNpg&feature=youtu.be
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20 Sep, 2015: I love Tor - makes it really hard for advertisers. Now we just need browsers that completely randomize all information that is given out (advertisers use every bit of information they can pull in order to generate a unique ID for you, track you and make a profile in order to advertise more effectively). If I want something, I'll just go to a search engine and start searching. I don't want an ever increasing stream of information coming at me due to having made a purchase in the past. http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-how-facebook-is-tracking-your-internet-activity-2012-9 From the comments: The models that the advertisers fit onto people they track are ultimately very limiting and not very accurate as far as that person's needs. The advertiser can only look at the past to predict the future. This is essentially a filter bubble. Sometimes filter bubbles become too strong, and your internet experience is greatly constrained. I made another comment following this about Tor/Tails (a Linux distro that runs Tor to connect to the internet): One really hard thing about running Tails is that it's definitely not built for doing things like I am now - social media. Once you log into a site under a profile on which you've built up a history, you've broken the model. The model is supposed to be based on non-persistent storage and anonymity. I've been meaning to install a very basic Linux distro, put several VirtualBox installations on top of that, and run multiple OSs, depending on what I'm doing - but have been procrastinating because it's such a mundane / mind-numbing task.
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20 Sep, 2015: Part of the reason our government is so out of touch with the people is that top politicians are taking millions from other countries, especially those with values which directly contradict those of our society, such as Saudi Arabia. This alliance, though in our general interest for availability of fuel, will only cost us in the long run.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/21600-u-s-military-trained-top-isis-commander?utm_content=fpelteson%40cox.net&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=U.S.+Military+Trained+Top+ISIS+Commander&utm_campaign=U.S.+Military+Trained+Top+ISIS+Commandercontent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-arabia-chosen-to-head-key-un-human-rights-panel-10509716.html
Since taking the role of lead on the UN Human Rights Panel, Saudi Arabia has continued to punish homosexuals, has threated Kofi Anan, the UN Secretary General, when he was about to place their country on a list of shame for killing so many innocent civilians in Yemen, and has threatened our government concerning release of information regarding its role in the 9/11 attack.
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4 Sep, 2015: More on the oathbreaker front: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/fbi-dea-and-others-will-now-have-to-get-a-warrant-to-use-stingrays/
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12 Aug, 2015:
Telecom companies and the media networks are basically compromised institutions. Any company that regularly receives NSLs and does not take measures to make it extremely difficult for government agencies to continue that behavior with a warrant from a judge (especially habitually and long term) does not deserve to remain in business and should be shut down by any means necessary. Also, any company that takes news directly from a news generating government agency and placces it as if it were a real news story has done their customers a disservice and weakened the country.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/08/12/revealed-how-to-destroy-cnn-msnbc-with-just-one-phone-call/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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1 Aug, 2015:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/how-the-way-you-type-can-shatter-anonymity-even-on-tor/
Reminds me of the stories I've read about morse code operators who could recognize each other on the wires simply by the signature tempo of their keystrokes.
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29 July, 2015:
The bill being proposed to congress concerning data sharing from Facebook and Google with the NSA with no warrant is nothing more than pissing on the graves of dead veterans and spitting in the face of those who sacrificed their all to maintain freedoms.
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23 Jul, 2015:
So this is what they were doing at the NIST instead of investigating the building collapse after 9/11: Explosion at the NIST today, looks like someone had tried to set up a meth lab....The Spokesman for NIST, when announcing it right after coming from a dentist appointment, and his mouth was numb, said "The asplosion made a real meth of the place". https://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/23/1831215/breaking-bad-at-the-national-institute-of-standards-and-technology
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June, 2015:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/25/how-the-feds-asked-me-to-rat-out-commenters.html
http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/19/government-stifles-speech
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25 May, 2015: There was nothing patriotic in this act. It was nothing but an attempt to impose control on citizens by a government which is failing in its duties, with no sense of responsiblity or accountability. We need to clone Rand Paul and print 50 more. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/in-a-box-with-a-fox?utm_term=.fl775LWxj#.rvXjwvx8p
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25 May, 2015: There was nothing patriotic in this act. It was nothing but an attempt to impose control on citizens by a government which is failing in its duties, with no sense of responsiblity or accountability. We need to clone Rand Paul and print 50 more. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/in-a-box-with-a-fox?utm_term=.fl775LWxj#.rvXjwvx8p If they were so concerned about terrorism, then perhaps they could dig up the records from the destroyed investigation on BCCI. The investigation was done in by the 9/11 attack, and no one in the FBI or elsewhere even tried to start it again. Such a farce the war on terror is. Instead of being truly concerned with terror, we (senior admin of the US) are causing it and are allies with some of the most problematic countries: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/30/congressman-massie-there-will-be-anger-frustration-and-embarrassment-when-redacted-pages-of-911-report-come-out/
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26 Mar, 2015:
I don't watch mainstream news media because they are worthless. Did anyone see anything about this on the news today?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-26/saudi-arabia-imposes-naval-blockade-red-sea-strait-deploys-150000-troops-iran-condem
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21 Feb, 2015:
Everybody makes a huge deal about ISIS, ebola, measles, etc. If anything is going to throw a major stick in our bike tire, it's going to be our completely unsustainable national debt. We should downgrade priority on every other problem and focus on fixing that. Even if there's no one size fix all measure that fixes it, we can take a massive series of half steps all focusing on the one problem and get mostly there.
Comments:
Sam: Here is an interesting relevant site: http://www.justfacts.com/nationaldebt.asp
Me: http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/06/think-national-debt-large-well-entitlements-deficit-even-bigger/
Me: http://peoplespension.infoshop.org/blogs-mu/2010/09/20/has-social-security-ever-been-%E2%80%9Craided%E2%80%9D/
Me: What it really comes down to is this: government raises money by taxing. When the interest rate on the total debt becomes a certain percentage of the total amount the government is able to raise in taxes, continuing to fund government obligations will become impossible. At that point, bankruptcy is a foregone conclusion.
Sam: The Fed will just print more money if it comes to that, then we have to deal with the consequences of inflation. I don’t think bankruptcy is ever going to happen to the government as long as the Fed is in control of the Dollar.
> Me: Yes, I am well aware of how the money supply works. Just note that they have the interest rate pegged at 0% for a reason. If they try to raise it, it raises the interest that the federal government has to pay on the debt, and therefore brings closer the bankrupty of the federal government (and therefore many of the states, which are dependant on fedgov taxes).
Me: Being able to print more money does not create more resources. It is not a magic ticket out of all of our problems.
Me: You have written an article for a financial journal before - check this out, you might find it interesting: http://danielamerman.com/va/Conflict.html
Sam: I follow his line of thinking and tend to agree with his prediction of future inflation. One aspect that was missing in his article is the stock market. While bond interest rates are at an all time low the stock market is at all time high. So while conservative investors that tend to only invest in bonds or mortgage backed securities have not done well and will not do well because of the low interest rates, more aggressive investors in stocks have done exceptionally well. He seems to intentionally left that fact out of his article.
This thread reminds me of many years ago when I was watching Alan Greenspan testify to the congress on the current tax allocation. Congress and Bush were pushing to cut U. S. taxes because the economy was doing so well (which they did), but Alan was say that that is the wrong course of action you should use the surplus to pay down the national debt. He testified for several hours and it went in one ear of the congress people and out the other.
Me: The reason why the article only included bonds is that government does not directly invest in the stock market. When we're discussing the possibility of government bankruptcy, we're talking about tax rates and the interest rates set by the Fed, and the effect of the Fed interest rates on government bonds. When stocks are doing so well, you have to remember that corporations have many ways to cut their taxes, from buying politicians to keeping assets off books or in other countries.
Me: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/01/17/you-think-the-deficit-is-bad-federal-unfunded-liabilities-exceed-127-trillion/#75f619b710d3
Tyler: I was under the impression that money and debt are basically just a magical concepts with no real basis. I didn't read all the articles above. Do they explain what happens when we get too much debt? Also, if we were going to have too much debt, wouldn't that have already happened at 18 trillion?
Me: No, it's not just magical concepts. Some really bad shit can happen when the system stops working. For instance, how many people do we have on goverment welfare? They stop eating.
Tyler: But when? (I did not answer - no crystal ball, though I am almost absolutely sure it will happen in our lfetime, and I think it will happen in the next 20 years, with a distinct possibility it could happen earlier).
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16 Feb 2015: (update 3 Jul, 2015 - I am placing my post from FB on this thread because Microsoft Windows has a lot to do with the current state of internet surveillance because it is purposefully full of vulnerabilties, Microsoft gives their code to governments and no one else (creating an imbalance favoring governments over the gov's civilians), and their OSs now constantly send telemetry back to the mothership (MS HQ) and who knows where else, compromising the security and privacy of their users. Linux distros do not do this (other than certain very commercial versions)):
Linux is so much better than Windows (all versions of Windows) that there is simply no comparison. I can't imagine running without apt-get (installs programs directly from the internet with one command, an install usually takes just seconds) and the fail safe package managers that enable you to get rid of everything a program puts on your computer (again, one command, no garbage still on your system like with the Windows registry issues, etc).
Usually, Linux installs last an extremely long time for the above reasons, even as I'm installing and uninstalling programs like mad. A typical Windows install would last me only a few months before it becomes unusable.
Lately, there have been a rash of games developed for Linux as well, so it's no longer the case that Linux does not have first rate games. If Valve continues its push, then Linux may yet pass Windows as the OS of choice for gamers, and then it'll be time to bury Windows for good.
If I had to choose among all the Windows versions, I'd say that XP was MS's best and it's gone downhill pretty fast from there. Having Linux is like having the XP 64 bit Pro version plus being a developer at Microsoft / being able to change everything about the OS, along with having full admin control over everything on your system (the way it should be). There's simply no comparison.
I couldn't say this just a year or so ago. Linux still had severe user friendliness issues and the games for it were complete garbage. Today, I can say that Linux is ready and a lot better than Windows (though it still hasn't caught up in terms of how may games are coming out / available for it).
Comments:
Me: http://linux.about.com/od/commands/tp/11-Linux-Terminal-Commands-That-Will-Rock-Your-World.htm
Me: https://www.linux.com/learn/get-your-data-back-linux-based-data-recovery-tools
James Crutchfield: James Crutchfield: The distro names are all live links:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
James Crutchfield: Running Linux Mint with Cinnamon here, started with Slackware and Red Hat way back in 1996. My home networks have morphed over time from OpenBSD servers/firewalls with MS and Linux desktops, to now include FreeBSD's pfSense and FreeNAS, OS X, and no MS whatsoever. I do give MS a nod, though, for enterprise-level policy controls that help maintain environments of thousands of workstations with a dozen or more user roles. That's the last frontier for *Nix OSs to take over, I believe
Pat: My husband installed Linux on mine. I'm a 66 year old Grandmother who loves Linux!
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16 Feb, 2015:
This is more of what happens when people in government have all the information, and the people they supposedly serve have very little, or none other than controlled information (by six major media companies which are all controlled by the same board):
http://www.infowars.com/42-admitted-false-flag-attacks/
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8 Feb, 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s976iyaO39A
In my opinion, what has been going on in our intelligence community constitutes treason. They are carrying out actions against the American people which only an enemy would do. To continue the work for them after knowledge of their policies and activities is to break your oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States. They continue to pursue actions which blind the citizens, compromise their privacy and security, and ultimately represent a dangerous and unfree future.
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8 Feb, 2015: Of course they would say this - the highest elected politicians work for the bankers, not the people:
http://thehill.com/policy/finance/232337-wh-official-audit-the-fed-bill-is-dangerous
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8 Feb, 2015:
Arduino cell phone:
http://www.geeetech.com/wiki/index.php/Arduino_GPRS_Shield
https://www.amazon.com/Geeetech-SIMCOM-Quad-band-Development-Arduino/dp/B00A8DDYB6?ie=UTF8&keywords=gprs%20shield&qid=1423378535&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
You can never be sure that the devices you use do not have backdoors inside them. However, by using a combination of different sources, it may be possible to eliminate the backdoors that you know exist (like AT&T controlled devices, etc).
This might not be the exact same piece of hardware used, but the only differences would be whether a camera has been connected / data combined in the stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwVgMdtKpYU
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7 Feb, 2015:
So would Facebook stand up to unlawful requests for information without a warrant (which completely ignores the rubber stamp FISA judges)? I doubt it.
We can completely replace Facebook with something like the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_%28software%29
http://namecoin.info/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle
The director of this movie was murdered just before releasing it, along with his wife and 3 year old daughter. The local authorities declared it a murder/suicide and closed the case. Today, people post the move to Youtue and are answered by the censorship network using copyright claims under the DMCA to take it down. I was able to find ONE link:
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/195971/Gray_State_The_Rise_Rough_Cut_Directed_by_David_Crowley/
Gray State: The Rise.
3 July, 2015:
I suppose in a world where people are competing for resources, an open network will eventually be used by those who want to always maximize their profits at the expense of others, figure out where to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on their political enemies, or even censor those who speak out.
Here's what one of the Internet founders thinks:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2460894/sir-tim-berners-lee-internet-has-become-world-s-largest-surveillance-network
The problem isn't limited to just recording everything that comes across certain wires either. Companies like AT&T do their damndest to lock people out of changing their mobile devices' operating systems in order to keep their claws in (information gathering or just trying to own your eyeballs - I sincerely doubt is has that much to do with security). Every company wants to maintain a walled garden at the expense of their customers, which ultimately means the customer is / can be easily spied on.
In other news, the guy who lied to congress under oath about spying on the public, James Clapper, is involved in advising the government what they should do about the classified 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission, which may detail actions the Saudi government took to attack us. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pressure-builds-on-obama-administration-to-declassify-911-report/
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So essentially, if we want to have information freedom and privacy, we need to escape from walled gardens and see to our own digital security as a community (or communities of communities).
I'm sure this already exists in some form, though I don't know the name of the projects that might be related.
What if instead of connecting to a service like Facebook, we instead contacted a friend and had them download a piece of software. That piece of software would essentially run a combination webserver and private dyndns. In order to instantiate the connection (which would afterward be maintained by the underlying software), each of the two friends would visit a page that told them their public-facing IP address. They would share their respective public IPs with each other. Then each would enter the other's public-facing IPs into their software.
In order to permanently maintain a connection with each other, you would want to be in a group of users that would be at least 20 or so people. When your public facing IP address changes, the software would know because it would stop getting any auto connection pings from the others in the group. So it would start querying down the list of other users, and after a sufficient number had replied with the same public-facing IP address they were contacted from, this new information would be propagated to everyone else's underlying software list.
As far as the interface, each person would have their own, possibly customized, frontend. It would allow chat, post/blog wall, and viewing everyone else's wall. Because the interface is perfectly customizable, WebGL with 3D would be possible to be shared, etc.
-- Cool - there appears to be a way to do P2P communication using a webpage and javascript only (Nodejs and Socket.io).
-- This is so awesome, soon I'll have access to the processor and general computing on the GPU at the same time from within the browser. That means that I can offload stuff to the GPU and speed up the webpage. With P2P comm, we won't need Facebook much longer
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20 March, 2016: Another extremely weighty issue is that our politicians do NOT serve us. They work for people who are already wealthy, and their purpose is to deceive us whenever necessary and keep the balance weighted against us. Because of this, it becomes necessary to have a completely open source and distributed intelligence gathering network with capabilities which rival the most advanced nation state. In the face of this, no monopolized media network could fail to release important news when it is gathered by the open source network, because to do so would be to quickly lose followers. This offers us a way to finally keep them honest.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/03/20/0242204/building-a-global-network-of-open-source-sdr-receivers
Woah - some of the technical limitations of this implementation seem somewhat arbitrary, but this still could be an amazing tool. With it, you could download the spectrum from three different locations spaced around a given signal and localize the source. If there were receivers in the path of an instance like the airliner that disappeared in the Pacific, you may be able to do the same thing by focusing on engine radio transmissions and plot a path.
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19 March, 2016: https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/why-you-should-care-about-privacy/
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HAM radio is a good, slow means of transmitting/receiving information in emergencies. It could also serve as a foundation for learning more about radio before continually miniaturizing devices until we have a blanket system of retransmitting/autonomous devices which keep moving around and talking in spurts and are very hard to shut down. Here's a cheap/cruder setup: http://www.disasterrecoverymanager.com/dirt-cheap-ham-radio-antenna-tuner/
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4 Mar, 2016: The problem with having authorities whose decision making processes you do not trust is that anything they do to "help" comes frought with risks. If the FBI succeeds (they ultimately paid an Israeli company to do it) in cracking the iPhone of that dead terrorist, they will immediately use the technique to bypass due process in all of their other cases where it is possible: http://www.npr.org/2016/03/03/469005657/rep-issa-criticizes-fbi-s-strategy-to-get-into-terrorist-s-iphone
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1 Mar, 2016: More on that trust issue: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/found-in-translation/
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28 Feb, 2016: This is what it looks like when the police work for you and society instead of a corrupt, small, wealthy elite intent on sucking all the value out without putting any back in: https://bretigne.liberty.me/private-protection-co-puts-govt-police-to-shame/
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24 Feb, 2016:
Part of the overall process of reversing the information gulag (where government is opaque, the most valuable information is locked up tightly, and the wealthy keep the information close to their chest to maximize their investment and power is to ensure that money taxpayers pay into the educational process by way of grants leads to that work done under grant being released into the public domain in order to pay off the public's investment. This is a much different situation from locking up people for sharing this information, which the public arguably owns.
As of last month, National Science Foundation policy is open access: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q3
Repository here - search bar up top: http://par.nsf.gov/
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20 Feb, 2016:
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28 January, 2016:
Here's what's wrong (well, one set of wrongness) with government backdoors (any backdoors) in encryption, in a nutshell: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/researchers-solve-the-juniper-mystery-and-they-say-its-partially-the-nsas-fault/
The government is not one big homogenous entity. When one agency threatens the security of many other agencies by weakening security standards everyone relies on, everyone suffers (not just governments, but banks/pension funds, hospitals, power supply, etc).
Imagining that only one agency will have access to any backdoor is (to use a crude analogy) peeing in a wind that's coming right at your face. Holding security holes to use in the future also will inevitably backfire in the long run.
Bottom line, large breaches in data security like the OPM are likely to be caused by agencies like the NSA purposefully inserting vulnerabilities in core technologies like routers - downstream, various other agencies purchase the products. Years go by, and other countries find the holes, then use them to punch into their networks, compromising their private data and lurking inside their firewalls / on servers, watching network traffic and everything that's going on administratively.
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One way the stasis and balance (or imbalance, as our case may be) is kept constant is through the Federal Reserve.
Our federal government (USA) relies on it in order to run a massive deficit / spend far more than it takes in taxes.
Because of the above, congress does not question Federal Reserve decisions. Any attempt to audit the Fed results in voting down because they know we are in serious trouble.
http://truthinmedia.com/roll-call-us-senators-vote-audit-the-fed/
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The unaccountable and unconstitutional behavior of our current military intelligence / torture policy in war time will always ultimately end up being carried out back at home. First it will be used on the poor, and it will slowly move upward, the rotting culture festering like a corpse:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/rahm-emanuel-chicago-police-homan-square-scandal
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Spies are ultimately accountable to someone. What they will report has entirely to do with who stands to lose or benefit from an action. Because they aren't accountable to the public, it stands to reason that we should next focus on our politicians who are also not accountable to us (they, and our entire system, is basically for sale - a turn-key police state): http://www.10news.com/news/san-diegan-says-california-is-not-for-sale-110415
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26 Dec, 2015: https://bananas.liberty.me/youre-a-criminal-in-a-mass-surveillance-world-how-to-not-get-caught/ Today, we have 25% of the world's population of prisoners from only 5% of the total world population. This means that people in the US are 5X more likely to be imprisoned in our police state. We have agreements between government and for-profit prisons that make the government responsible by contract to provide X number of prisoners. The politicians have found that they can produce prisoners by producing more laws with more penalties. This is a serious societal problem and lack of accountability in our politicians - they do not represent us. Further, the intelligence community breaks down our system of justice through parallel construction.
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1 Dec, 2015: This technology will be needed for the visual aspect of the open source intelligence gathering system (which will be linked with AI). I know it seems hypocritical that I would advance the technology while angry about it. I think that the real reason I am angry is that the government is obviously lying about so many things in such a way that it hurts its citizens, while keeping the reality away from them. There is a power vaccuum caused by this imbalance that is terrible for the long term future of the nation and the citizens. The people in power are cynically draining the country, probably planning on stepping away once the country goes under. Bottom line, their decision making is oriented toward maximising return for a small number of people at the expense of the majority. https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/how-to-analyze-100-million-images-for-624 Apparently, you can now scan pretty much all the photos taken of local restaurants and bars and score each location by its patrons. You could make a bunch of tags by group, then take a picture of your office coworkers, scoring them / placing them into a category. If you had this running constantly, you could show changing demographics by location in your city. I wonder how many photos are taken per city per day? A further filter would be how many go up on Twitter or other website after they are taken. There's a further speedup possibility here - using OpenCL to push computing off to GPU or FPGA. I don't see why Amazon is really necessary here - something like hadoop (more research necessary) can be installed across multiple computers at home to make for a cluster. The biggest challenge then is how you get the millions of images found and downloaded in any kind of reasonable time period/cost.
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25 Nov 2015:
When I went to DLI, Noam Chomsky was mentioned maybe once (though there may have been a picture of him in the library or something like that). However, he's very important when it comes to the study of language. The reason is that some of the theories he was working on are important in the automatic graphing and understanding language structure. The Saint Louis Papers We Love group has a guy who has made a talk about these grammars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpbWoBG7_zw
It's still on my mind - I really would like to make some kind of chatbot that understands more about the conversation than just surface level detail, or matches words to phrases like pretty much all the chatbots created so far currently do.
Then there's that project my lead teacher had asked my class to do / that I couldn't get anyone interested in because we had more important things to tackle (studying to pass the end test). I feel like I let her down (though there wasn't much I could do without the support of the captain and therefore the rest of the class on that objective - they definitely didn't agree with her and weren't going to do it with the test coming up). She had wanted a mind-map of Chinese words/phrases/concepts mapped to a mind-map for English words/phrases/concepts.
It seems like you could use deep learning to create some kind of map like that, then use the grammar rules above to apply a conversational mapping / skeleton structure.
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1 Nov, 2015:
On the subject of information control by a small group of people for nefarious purposes (of which the heavy consolidation of media companies is a serious contributing factor), any open source intelligence gathering network will ultimately drive the news (with a very small group of companies employees ever fewer people, these people could never hope to provide the same quality or keep up).
In pursuit of ensuring that the information flow is not hampered, a watch must be kept on the DNS records, and they must be distributed as far as possible. Post follows.
I think that the best way to know when censorship is happening and defeat it is to have automatic DNS list comparisons. When sites are removed, it then becomes a task to figure out whether it's simply a technical matter (a question of how sites get to be in the server list) or who ordered the removal. Then, a master list of ordered removals can be created, as well as a tracking list of who is censoring what (we do not want child porn to flow for instance - we can keep people from profiting on that, at least on the public network through DNS record comparison and AI image filtering, but there are very few categories of information which should be kept from flowing, as most censorship is harmful to society).
Currently, changing the DNS server is the only way to try to get around censorship. I think we can do MUCH better through a system of auto comparisons for deletions.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/94931/how-to-defeat-us-dns-censorship-changing-your-dns-server/
Bitcoin-like DNS systems could also provide relative anonymity while also providing unique identification.
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31 October, 2015:
This scenario must NEVER be allowed to play out, such that government fully controls acceptable speech entirely in its own interests, and the interest of the ruling party of the time:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/chinas-nightmarish-citizen-scores-are-warning-americans
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24 Sep, 2015:
It looks as if in the future, Google will be the prime suppressor of free speech through refusing ad revenue to small news organizations if they hold views that Google does not approve of:
This year, Google changed the terms of service on Youtube to make political speech much more difficult as it relates to war:
Specifically, added under "Content Youtube considers inappropriate for advertising includes...":
"Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphical imagery is shown"
Effectively, this means that Youtube cannot be a medium for journalism. Further, if journalists (and I specifically include Youtubbers who report news of any kind in that category) report negatively on war in general, Google / Youtube will stop all advertising revenue.
In 2009, Google categorized Antiwar.com as satire. Earlier this year, Google stopped Antiwar.com's ad revenue.
Today, Google stopped StormCloudGathering's ad revenue.
In all cases, it has been because the channels or web sites were critical of war and showed imagery or highlighted issues which could reduce funding for wars in Syria and Iraq, etc. Because of this, I can only assume that the people who run Google are also war profiteers on the side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqkIr-rUNpg&feature=youtu.be
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20 Sep, 2015: I love Tor - makes it really hard for advertisers. Now we just need browsers that completely randomize all information that is given out (advertisers use every bit of information they can pull in order to generate a unique ID for you, track you and make a profile in order to advertise more effectively). If I want something, I'll just go to a search engine and start searching. I don't want an ever increasing stream of information coming at me due to having made a purchase in the past. http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-how-facebook-is-tracking-your-internet-activity-2012-9 From the comments: The models that the advertisers fit onto people they track are ultimately very limiting and not very accurate as far as that person's needs. The advertiser can only look at the past to predict the future. This is essentially a filter bubble. Sometimes filter bubbles become too strong, and your internet experience is greatly constrained. I made another comment following this about Tor/Tails (a Linux distro that runs Tor to connect to the internet): One really hard thing about running Tails is that it's definitely not built for doing things like I am now - social media. Once you log into a site under a profile on which you've built up a history, you've broken the model. The model is supposed to be based on non-persistent storage and anonymity. I've been meaning to install a very basic Linux distro, put several VirtualBox installations on top of that, and run multiple OSs, depending on what I'm doing - but have been procrastinating because it's such a mundane / mind-numbing task.
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20 Sep, 2015: Part of the reason our government is so out of touch with the people is that top politicians are taking millions from other countries, especially those with values which directly contradict those of our society, such as Saudi Arabia. This alliance, though in our general interest for availability of fuel, will only cost us in the long run.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/21600-u-s-military-trained-top-isis-commander?utm_content=fpelteson%40cox.net&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=U.S.+Military+Trained+Top+ISIS+Commander&utm_campaign=U.S.+Military+Trained+Top+ISIS+Commandercontent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/anger-after-saudi-arabia-chosen-to-head-key-un-human-rights-panel-10509716.html
Since taking the role of lead on the UN Human Rights Panel, Saudi Arabia has continued to punish homosexuals, has threated Kofi Anan, the UN Secretary General, when he was about to place their country on a list of shame for killing so many innocent civilians in Yemen, and has threatened our government concerning release of information regarding its role in the 9/11 attack.
-----------------
4 Sep, 2015: More on the oathbreaker front: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/fbi-dea-and-others-will-now-have-to-get-a-warrant-to-use-stingrays/
-----------------
12 Aug, 2015:
Telecom companies and the media networks are basically compromised institutions. Any company that regularly receives NSLs and does not take measures to make it extremely difficult for government agencies to continue that behavior with a warrant from a judge (especially habitually and long term) does not deserve to remain in business and should be shut down by any means necessary. Also, any company that takes news directly from a news generating government agency and placces it as if it were a real news story has done their customers a disservice and weakened the country.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/08/12/revealed-how-to-destroy-cnn-msnbc-with-just-one-phone-call/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
-----------------
1 Aug, 2015:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/how-the-way-you-type-can-shatter-anonymity-even-on-tor/
Reminds me of the stories I've read about morse code operators who could recognize each other on the wires simply by the signature tempo of their keystrokes.
-----------------
29 July, 2015:
The bill being proposed to congress concerning data sharing from Facebook and Google with the NSA with no warrant is nothing more than pissing on the graves of dead veterans and spitting in the face of those who sacrificed their all to maintain freedoms.
-----------------
23 Jul, 2015:
So this is what they were doing at the NIST instead of investigating the building collapse after 9/11: Explosion at the NIST today, looks like someone had tried to set up a meth lab....The Spokesman for NIST, when announcing it right after coming from a dentist appointment, and his mouth was numb, said "The asplosion made a real meth of the place". https://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/23/1831215/breaking-bad-at-the-national-institute-of-standards-and-technology
-----------------
June, 2015:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/25/how-the-feds-asked-me-to-rat-out-commenters.html
http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/19/government-stifles-speech
-----------------
25 May, 2015: There was nothing patriotic in this act. It was nothing but an attempt to impose control on citizens by a government which is failing in its duties, with no sense of responsiblity or accountability. We need to clone Rand Paul and print 50 more. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/in-a-box-with-a-fox?utm_term=.fl775LWxj#.rvXjwvx8p
-----------------
25 May, 2015: There was nothing patriotic in this act. It was nothing but an attempt to impose control on citizens by a government which is failing in its duties, with no sense of responsiblity or accountability. We need to clone Rand Paul and print 50 more. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/in-a-box-with-a-fox?utm_term=.fl775LWxj#.rvXjwvx8p If they were so concerned about terrorism, then perhaps they could dig up the records from the destroyed investigation on BCCI. The investigation was done in by the 9/11 attack, and no one in the FBI or elsewhere even tried to start it again. Such a farce the war on terror is. Instead of being truly concerned with terror, we (senior admin of the US) are causing it and are allies with some of the most problematic countries: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/30/congressman-massie-there-will-be-anger-frustration-and-embarrassment-when-redacted-pages-of-911-report-come-out/
-----------------
26 Mar, 2015:
I don't watch mainstream news media because they are worthless. Did anyone see anything about this on the news today?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-26/saudi-arabia-imposes-naval-blockade-red-sea-strait-deploys-150000-troops-iran-condem
-----------------
21 Feb, 2015:
Everybody makes a huge deal about ISIS, ebola, measles, etc. If anything is going to throw a major stick in our bike tire, it's going to be our completely unsustainable national debt. We should downgrade priority on every other problem and focus on fixing that. Even if there's no one size fix all measure that fixes it, we can take a massive series of half steps all focusing on the one problem and get mostly there.
Comments:
Sam: Here is an interesting relevant site: http://www.justfacts.com/nationaldebt.asp
Me: http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/06/think-national-debt-large-well-entitlements-deficit-even-bigger/
Me: http://peoplespension.infoshop.org/blogs-mu/2010/09/20/has-social-security-ever-been-%E2%80%9Craided%E2%80%9D/
Me: What it really comes down to is this: government raises money by taxing. When the interest rate on the total debt becomes a certain percentage of the total amount the government is able to raise in taxes, continuing to fund government obligations will become impossible. At that point, bankruptcy is a foregone conclusion.
Sam: The Fed will just print more money if it comes to that, then we have to deal with the consequences of inflation. I don’t think bankruptcy is ever going to happen to the government as long as the Fed is in control of the Dollar.
> Me: Yes, I am well aware of how the money supply works. Just note that they have the interest rate pegged at 0% for a reason. If they try to raise it, it raises the interest that the federal government has to pay on the debt, and therefore brings closer the bankrupty of the federal government (and therefore many of the states, which are dependant on fedgov taxes).
Me: Being able to print more money does not create more resources. It is not a magic ticket out of all of our problems.
Me: You have written an article for a financial journal before - check this out, you might find it interesting: http://danielamerman.com/va/Conflict.html
Sam: I follow his line of thinking and tend to agree with his prediction of future inflation. One aspect that was missing in his article is the stock market. While bond interest rates are at an all time low the stock market is at all time high. So while conservative investors that tend to only invest in bonds or mortgage backed securities have not done well and will not do well because of the low interest rates, more aggressive investors in stocks have done exceptionally well. He seems to intentionally left that fact out of his article.
This thread reminds me of many years ago when I was watching Alan Greenspan testify to the congress on the current tax allocation. Congress and Bush were pushing to cut U. S. taxes because the economy was doing so well (which they did), but Alan was say that that is the wrong course of action you should use the surplus to pay down the national debt. He testified for several hours and it went in one ear of the congress people and out the other.
Me: The reason why the article only included bonds is that government does not directly invest in the stock market. When we're discussing the possibility of government bankruptcy, we're talking about tax rates and the interest rates set by the Fed, and the effect of the Fed interest rates on government bonds. When stocks are doing so well, you have to remember that corporations have many ways to cut their taxes, from buying politicians to keeping assets off books or in other countries.
Me: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/01/17/you-think-the-deficit-is-bad-federal-unfunded-liabilities-exceed-127-trillion/#75f619b710d3
Tyler: I was under the impression that money and debt are basically just a magical concepts with no real basis. I didn't read all the articles above. Do they explain what happens when we get too much debt? Also, if we were going to have too much debt, wouldn't that have already happened at 18 trillion?
Me: No, it's not just magical concepts. Some really bad shit can happen when the system stops working. For instance, how many people do we have on goverment welfare? They stop eating.
Tyler: But when? (I did not answer - no crystal ball, though I am almost absolutely sure it will happen in our lfetime, and I think it will happen in the next 20 years, with a distinct possibility it could happen earlier).
--------
16 Feb 2015: (update 3 Jul, 2015 - I am placing my post from FB on this thread because Microsoft Windows has a lot to do with the current state of internet surveillance because it is purposefully full of vulnerabilties, Microsoft gives their code to governments and no one else (creating an imbalance favoring governments over the gov's civilians), and their OSs now constantly send telemetry back to the mothership (MS HQ) and who knows where else, compromising the security and privacy of their users. Linux distros do not do this (other than certain very commercial versions)):
Linux is so much better than Windows (all versions of Windows) that there is simply no comparison. I can't imagine running without apt-get (installs programs directly from the internet with one command, an install usually takes just seconds) and the fail safe package managers that enable you to get rid of everything a program puts on your computer (again, one command, no garbage still on your system like with the Windows registry issues, etc).
Usually, Linux installs last an extremely long time for the above reasons, even as I'm installing and uninstalling programs like mad. A typical Windows install would last me only a few months before it becomes unusable.
Lately, there have been a rash of games developed for Linux as well, so it's no longer the case that Linux does not have first rate games. If Valve continues its push, then Linux may yet pass Windows as the OS of choice for gamers, and then it'll be time to bury Windows for good.
If I had to choose among all the Windows versions, I'd say that XP was MS's best and it's gone downhill pretty fast from there. Having Linux is like having the XP 64 bit Pro version plus being a developer at Microsoft / being able to change everything about the OS, along with having full admin control over everything on your system (the way it should be). There's simply no comparison.
I couldn't say this just a year or so ago. Linux still had severe user friendliness issues and the games for it were complete garbage. Today, I can say that Linux is ready and a lot better than Windows (though it still hasn't caught up in terms of how may games are coming out / available for it).
Comments:
Me: http://linux.about.com/od/commands/tp/11-Linux-Terminal-Commands-That-Will-Rock-Your-World.htm
Me: https://www.linux.com/learn/get-your-data-back-linux-based-data-recovery-tools
James Crutchfield: James Crutchfield: The distro names are all live links:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
James Crutchfield: Running Linux Mint with Cinnamon here, started with Slackware and Red Hat way back in 1996. My home networks have morphed over time from OpenBSD servers/firewalls with MS and Linux desktops, to now include FreeBSD's pfSense and FreeNAS, OS X, and no MS whatsoever. I do give MS a nod, though, for enterprise-level policy controls that help maintain environments of thousands of workstations with a dozen or more user roles. That's the last frontier for *Nix OSs to take over, I believe
Pat: My husband installed Linux on mine. I'm a 66 year old Grandmother who loves Linux!
--------
16 Feb, 2015:
This is more of what happens when people in government have all the information, and the people they supposedly serve have very little, or none other than controlled information (by six major media companies which are all controlled by the same board):
http://www.infowars.com/42-admitted-false-flag-attacks/
--------
8 Feb, 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s976iyaO39A
In my opinion, what has been going on in our intelligence community constitutes treason. They are carrying out actions against the American people which only an enemy would do. To continue the work for them after knowledge of their policies and activities is to break your oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States. They continue to pursue actions which blind the citizens, compromise their privacy and security, and ultimately represent a dangerous and unfree future.
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8 Feb, 2015: Of course they would say this - the highest elected politicians work for the bankers, not the people:
http://thehill.com/policy/finance/232337-wh-official-audit-the-fed-bill-is-dangerous
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8 Feb, 2015:
Arduino cell phone:
http://www.geeetech.com/wiki/index.php/Arduino_GPRS_Shield
https://www.amazon.com/Geeetech-SIMCOM-Quad-band-Development-Arduino/dp/B00A8DDYB6?ie=UTF8&keywords=gprs%20shield&qid=1423378535&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1
You can never be sure that the devices you use do not have backdoors inside them. However, by using a combination of different sources, it may be possible to eliminate the backdoors that you know exist (like AT&T controlled devices, etc).
This might not be the exact same piece of hardware used, but the only differences would be whether a camera has been connected / data combined in the stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwVgMdtKpYU
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7 Feb, 2015:
So would Facebook stand up to unlawful requests for information without a warrant (which completely ignores the rubber stamp FISA judges)? I doubt it.
We can completely replace Facebook with something like the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_%28software%29
http://namecoin.info/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle
OpenDataSTL, Code Until Dawn, and Papers We Love
The Meetup groups in the title are what I would consider my current favorites as far as Saint Louis tech meetups.
Since arriving in St Louis and going to these, I've started keeping a github repository with my own projects. At Code Until Dawn recently, I did the final work on my neural net code. I got to talk to a lot of programmers (20-30ish) and saw what each of them were working on. One of them was doing tutorials and website learning projects on FreeCodeCamp (this was on 29 April 2016). I decided to try it out myself.
Freecodecamp.com walks you through learning to code in several key areas in a systematic way. There are a few area I can strengthen (front end development) and new areas I can learn about to increase my Javascript knowlede (NodeJS). www.freecodecamp.com
It also makes it easy to link up with nonprofit and do projects for them to build a portfolio.
Since the above, I've gotten a little more familiar with Node.js and installing projects for it using npm. I got to the first project module, and it is for making your first website. I am working on two other areas, Three.js and Leaflet web mapping, which will lend themselves to that project when I'm at a good milestone point.
I've gone through the whole CSS bit (there are 76 small lessons in the HTML/CSS category), but feel like I need to go back and take notes this time.
Other notes from the 29 April Code Until Dawn meetup at TechArtista:
Super cheap GPS chip for small projects - the NavSpark mini ($6).
A $25 software defined radio device called the NooElec.
While helping BK on his RPi speed issue, I also found https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK/tree/master (which has the source code for running a neural net on the RPi GPU).
The RPI has an open sourced SDK for deep learning on the GPU (Broadcomm open sourced the design notes for the GPU) now.
Was reading some blogs, and found that the RPi also comes with an FFT library that uses the GPU (after doing an update): http://www.raspberrypi.org/accelerating-fourier.../ This would be perfect for software defined radio project work.
Other: this talks about machine learning on the Pi: https://scientistnobee.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/machine-learning-with-raspberry-pi/
------
8 February, 2016: Relevant to open government / OpenDataSTL:
I was browsing Kaggle.com, a website focused on teaching people data analytics and about deep learning (and also trying to be a hub for the emerging career field of data scientist), and I saw that the US Department of Education has a competition there. For that competition, they are using a dataset pulling from student aid records and tax records. That means there's an open resource for seeing what the cost/profit tradeoff will be for a specific school and degree:
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
------
20 Sep, 2015:
Went to a OpenDataSTL / Coders for America meetup tonight. There were five mapping / GIS companies represented. Most of them worked in the mapping companies or were web developers. One guy was from the history museum and wanted help taking pictures of the 1904 World Fair that was here in Saint Louis and mapping it in 3D. Apparently, the mapping companies have processes to do that. I might help them out with that project.
------
4 Sep, 2015:
Another technology that the intelligence community has attempted to keep out of the hands of the citizens it is supposed to be protecting:
Went to a 2600 meeting at the Arch Reactor for a pgp key signing party. Exchanged signatures with 7 people, and spent the rest of the time listening to them talk. Essentially what a key signing party does is let groups of people make an open source verified web of trust. The larger these get, the more crypto communications happen, which makes widespread warrantless surveillance much harder.
There is a web of key servers that peer, exchanging keys and key relationships. A key has a hash, a name, and an email address, all of which are searchable via the key servers' web pages. From many different clients or the linux command line, you can perform the functions to interact with any of the key servers. Commands follow.
To make your own key from the command line: "gpg --gen-key" Follow the instructions, choose the defaults for your first time, select a pass phrase. You'll likely have to hit keys and move the mouse around to help it generate some random numbers.
At the end, it should list your key information. To show it again, "gpg --list-keys". Mine shows: "pub 4096R/8F6B884E 2015-09-04" as the first line. "pub" just means that's the public key, the one you'll want to share/put on the key-servers. 4096 is the key length, R has to do with the key generation algorithm (RSA), and 8F6B88E is the key hash. You need the key hash for the next command.
This command sends the key to a public key server: "gpg --send-keys --keyserver sks-keyservers.net 8F6B884E" (note that there is a large community of key servers which are synching their key directories with each other every hour or so)
After exchanging key hashes with everybody, people looking at my ID to verify who I was and signing the key, I got back home and am going through signing everyone's keys who signed mine. Here are those commands:
I wrote down enough information on each person to find their keys on the key servers via the sites' search - either the hash or an email address. Next, I use this command to retrieve the public key for that person: "gpg --recv-keys --keyserver pgp.archreactor.org 42B7C552"
Note that I used a different key-server this time - not important, all the key-server peers exchange keys with each other every hour.
Once that's done, send the key back in so that other people can see that you've signed their key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.archreactor.org --send-key 42B7C552"
That's it as far as creating a new PGP key and putting it out on the public key server / address lists, and making a web of trust by signing peoples' keys / having them sign yours. The only other thing to do is to encrypt and decrypt messages using each others keys.
------
I think I posted this on FB sometime in July, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7osNm5raw
-------
28 Mar, 2015: So, I've been slowly working toward this talk I'm supposed to do for Papers We Love Saint Louis on basis functions / Wavelets. I've scanned through a bunch of scholarly articles linked by Google Scholar and have downloaded a bunch of them. I've noticed that when I research a subject, I get a ton of browser tabs open, end up with a lot of disparate files, and don't have very effective ways to keep things organized. What I end up with is a lot of folders with files in them, and I end up losing track / forgetting about half of them. I think what I need is a mindmapper (type of software) that will allow you to quickly link a file locally, as well as allow links to URLs that will open in a browser. -- dad commented "go for it, you can do it"
-------
7 Mar, 2015:
Ouch, still scanning papers. Stressful. Not sure exactly on layout of the talk either, only have a vague idea at this point, and I have to keep studying because it's over my level.
http://www.meetup.com/Papers-We-Love-in-saint-louis/events/220109658/ (update Jul 3, 2016: I was trying to get ready for an advanced talk for Papers We Love on Apr 20th - it was over my head and I was struggling - I ended up not being ready by that first date, but gave the talk in June, if I remember correctly on the date - it went very well that time - I ended up talking about Wavelet functions).
I've been reading about basis functions, and one of the things I've noticed is how they are kind of thrown over a data set, falling like a web around the data points (well, getting adjusted around it I guess, need to keep reading).
Comments:
(me): One of the cool parts about the project I've been working on for my job lately is that it's forced me to learn about CSS. So now I'm actually proficient in making a bit nicer looking web pages. Probably will put a page back up, maybe link it with an FTP server, and share a folder with groups of papers, along with links to another github directory (will probably put one up myself - the Papers We Love github directory is too sparse).
(me): Working on configuring the ftp server (vsftpd process) - this page is useful for finding things on LInux: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-find-a-directory-linux-command/
(me): I've been having one problem at work in which in my CSS configuration, trying to do div show and hides from javascript (using several different methods to do so) keeps completely failing. Not sure what the issue is, but after spending 3-4 hours on it, I talked to a coworker who mentioned using CTRL-F5 to refresh the browser cache...also saw some comments on forums of people having the issue that indicated the CSS config might be the problem. Not sure at this point.
(me): http://www.staroceans.org/documents/Wavelets%20for%20computer%20graphics%20%20A%20primer.pdf
(me): I found this very relevent MIT lecture set that I've been watching, and I'm going to use the above paper as a placeholder. I'm not going to constrain myself to the paper by any means, but intend to give an overview of how basis functions are used, as well as the process of throwing them against an image / going back and forth between the input image and output matrix. I'm going to try to have working code and bring a webcam. The video will be thrown up on Youtube of me giving the talk.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/video-lectures/lecture-28-similar-matrices-and-jordan-form/
---------
19 Feb, 2015:
Update:
I've found out that I can get access to a very large amount of research papers for free via Google Scholar. If you type in a search term, any link without a PDF to the right is behind a paywall. If you were to buy papers at the rate they are being sold by these middlemen, you would be out of money faster than you'd even have enough material to do anything with. However, about three per page of results have a PDF download link to the right. I've found that multiple resources often have the same papers, with some being available for download for free, and the majority charging a high price for access. This is because the academics themselves are not getting paid by the paywalls for their papers, but they are uploading to a lot of locations - the great many of them which turn around and charge outrageous fees for work they are getting for free.
There is a web of key servers that peer, exchanging keys and key relationships. A key has a hash, a name, and an email address, all of which are searchable via the key servers' web pages. From many different clients or the linux command line, you can perform the functions to interact with any of the key servers. Commands follow.
To make your own key from the command line: "gpg --gen-key" Follow the instructions, choose the defaults for your first time, select a pass phrase. You'll likely have to hit keys and move the mouse around to help it generate some random numbers.
At the end, it should list your key information. To show it again, "gpg --list-keys". Mine shows: "pub 4096R/8F6B884E 2015-09-04" as the first line. "pub" just means that's the public key, the one you'll want to share/put on the key-servers. 4096 is the key length, R has to do with the key generation algorithm (RSA), and 8F6B88E is the key hash. You need the key hash for the next command.
This command sends the key to a public key server: "gpg --send-keys --keyserver sks-keyservers.net 8F6B884E" (note that there is a large community of key servers which are synching their key directories with each other every hour or so)
After exchanging key hashes with everybody, people looking at my ID to verify who I was and signing the key, I got back home and am going through signing everyone's keys who signed mine. Here are those commands:
I wrote down enough information on each person to find their keys on the key servers via the sites' search - either the hash or an email address. Next, I use this command to retrieve the public key for that person: "gpg --recv-keys --keyserver pgp.archreactor.org 42B7C552"
Note that I used a different key-server this time - not important, all the key-server peers exchange keys with each other every hour.
Once that's done, send the key back in so that other people can see that you've signed their key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.archreactor.org --send-key 42B7C552"
That's it as far as creating a new PGP key and putting it out on the public key server / address lists, and making a web of trust by signing peoples' keys / having them sign yours. The only other thing to do is to encrypt and decrypt messages using each others keys.
------
I think I posted this on FB sometime in July, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7osNm5raw
-------
28 Mar, 2015: So, I've been slowly working toward this talk I'm supposed to do for Papers We Love Saint Louis on basis functions / Wavelets. I've scanned through a bunch of scholarly articles linked by Google Scholar and have downloaded a bunch of them. I've noticed that when I research a subject, I get a ton of browser tabs open, end up with a lot of disparate files, and don't have very effective ways to keep things organized. What I end up with is a lot of folders with files in them, and I end up losing track / forgetting about half of them. I think what I need is a mindmapper (type of software) that will allow you to quickly link a file locally, as well as allow links to URLs that will open in a browser. -- dad commented "go for it, you can do it"
-------
7 Mar, 2015:
Ouch, still scanning papers. Stressful. Not sure exactly on layout of the talk either, only have a vague idea at this point, and I have to keep studying because it's over my level.
http://www.meetup.com/Papers-We-Love-in-saint-louis/events/220109658/ (update Jul 3, 2016: I was trying to get ready for an advanced talk for Papers We Love on Apr 20th - it was over my head and I was struggling - I ended up not being ready by that first date, but gave the talk in June, if I remember correctly on the date - it went very well that time - I ended up talking about Wavelet functions).
I've been reading about basis functions, and one of the things I've noticed is how they are kind of thrown over a data set, falling like a web around the data points (well, getting adjusted around it I guess, need to keep reading).
Comments:
(me): One of the cool parts about the project I've been working on for my job lately is that it's forced me to learn about CSS. So now I'm actually proficient in making a bit nicer looking web pages. Probably will put a page back up, maybe link it with an FTP server, and share a folder with groups of papers, along with links to another github directory (will probably put one up myself - the Papers We Love github directory is too sparse).
(me): Working on configuring the ftp server (vsftpd process) - this page is useful for finding things on LInux: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-find-a-directory-linux-command/
(me): I've been having one problem at work in which in my CSS configuration, trying to do div show and hides from javascript (using several different methods to do so) keeps completely failing. Not sure what the issue is, but after spending 3-4 hours on it, I talked to a coworker who mentioned using CTRL-F5 to refresh the browser cache...also saw some comments on forums of people having the issue that indicated the CSS config might be the problem. Not sure at this point.
(me): http://www.staroceans.org/documents/Wavelets%20for%20computer%20graphics%20%20A%20primer.pdf
(me): I found this very relevent MIT lecture set that I've been watching, and I'm going to use the above paper as a placeholder. I'm not going to constrain myself to the paper by any means, but intend to give an overview of how basis functions are used, as well as the process of throwing them against an image / going back and forth between the input image and output matrix. I'm going to try to have working code and bring a webcam. The video will be thrown up on Youtube of me giving the talk.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/video-lectures/lecture-28-similar-matrices-and-jordan-form/
---------
19 Feb, 2015:
Update:
I've found out that I can get access to a very large amount of research papers for free via Google Scholar. If you type in a search term, any link without a PDF to the right is behind a paywall. If you were to buy papers at the rate they are being sold by these middlemen, you would be out of money faster than you'd even have enough material to do anything with. However, about three per page of results have a PDF download link to the right. I've found that multiple resources often have the same papers, with some being available for download for free, and the majority charging a high price for access. This is because the academics themselves are not getting paid by the paywalls for their papers, but they are uploading to a lot of locations - the great many of them which turn around and charge outrageous fees for work they are getting for free.
Machine Learning / Computer Vision
2 July, 2016:
So I've spent a bit over 1K hours reading about and watching video lectures on neural nets. I was able to code the core algorithm for feed forward / back propagation in javascript. Here's the code I wrote: https://github.com/DiginessForever/randomCode/tree/master/machineLearning
I still need to gather more data to train it - haven't been able to use it yet because I don't have it hooked up with a dataset yet. Some possibilities would be making it learn to walk a robot (staying upright, being given a desired direction and status of whether it is standing/walking or has fallen down), or I could do the "hello world" project and have it recognize characters (letters and numbers).
Other updates: Elon Musk and co has come out with OpenAI Gym.
I've been following along with Adrian Rosenbrock (spelling?) PyImageSearch blog site (bought his book and virtual image of Ubuntu as well).
I also found this recently:
http://www.computervisionblog.com/2015/01/from-feature-descriptors-to-deep.html
To watch later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lp9eN5JE2A "Evolving AI Lab: Deep Learning Overview & Visualizing What Deep Neural Networks Learn"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szHRv4MwCBY "Microsoft Resarch: Recent Advances in Deep Learning at Microsoft: A Selected Overview"
Soft Robotics, a youtube video channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9Bl8hjGqGOUaRjANlTqGmPWtYmM99lfM
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Post from May 6th, 2016:
Next step for my neural net project - learn to use the Raspberry Pi deep belief SDK (gives access to the on board GPU's 20 GFLOPs - a lot faster than it would be if you only used the CPU, which also has to run the operating system). Yay - I don't have to hack a solution using assembler on the GPU anymore (that was the worst headache - I spent quite a good bit of time reading the open sourced documentation for the GPU, and it wasn't going to be pretty, then would only be good for one device). I am just about done with the primary code for my javascript neural net. I definitely recommend coding a solution out if you do not understand a subject completely - it forces you to wrap your mind around it, and if you think you understand it but do not, you'll find out very quickly when it doesn't work.
Last weekend, Elon Musk and a bunch of other researchers and companies interested in AI released a tool, OpenAI Gym. It's what I thought I was going to have to code myself - environments that give visual feedback / let your neural net control a model/actor and solve a problem. The cool thing about this tool is that (at least according to the documentation) it is framework agnostic, meaning you can use multiple deep learning libraries to train the neural nets, then give the trained net to the tool, where it works to solve the problem.
One cool thing I've found out - the feedforward/backprop neural net is the foundation for all the deep learning research that's been going on. I am still at a pretty severe disadvantage when compared to real researchers though - they have top of the line GPUs so can run much larger networks much faster.
However, having programmed a neural net, I can at least now understand a lot of what they're talking about. For instance, I found a new set of researchers to read up on - there's a Swiss AI lab that's won 5 past international machine learning competitions. There are two things I want to learn about that they are doing.
1. Long term / Short term Memory with recurring neural nets. They link the layers a bit differently to make a sort of logic gate which remembers or forgets based on relevance.
2. Hierarchical neural nets. I didn't see any links to this as I scanned through the research links on their page, but I did see references to it in articles. Somehow, they stack trained neural nets to have a more comprehensive net that understands more.
Here Yann Lecun's MNIST data set: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/
And here's another C implementation - this one also uses for loops instead of matrices: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/NN/nn.html I'm working on the last piece of the backprop right now. The final questions I have are on step size and learning rate. Apparently, it's best if you adjust them smaller as the net starts to settle on a solution.
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Post from 1 May, 2016:
https://gym.openai.com/docs
Interesting. Facebook lets me post some links, but not others. For instance, Friday I gave up trying to post about that morning's announcement by Movidius about the new USB stick deep learning accelerator they had developed. The FB form wouldn't accept the link as far as copy/pasting it.
In any case, OpenAI is Elon Musk's company, supposedly open sourcing AI. They have indeed made tools available, but they are also still open to patenting anything they get their hands on. So beware giving them too much or getting too invested in that toolset.
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26 April, 2016:
Machine learning on the RPi: https://scientistnobee.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/machine-learning-with-raspberry-pi/
Found a link which explains a few questions I had on backprop. https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
Combine that with this for a straight forward / simple C implementation in code of what the guy is talking about in that blog post (it'll answer any remaining questions): http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/NN/nn.html
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23 April, 2016:
This is a blog post from Adobe back in 2011. I saw a link to it on the comments for a CSI related article. Basically, if you take a lot of pictures of a static scene, you can get more resolution. If anything is moving, it won't work for that thing. I'll have to dig further to see what algorithms are used.
https://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/2011/10/behind-all-the-buzz-deblur-sneak-peek.html
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20 April, 2016:
This is kind of neat. Leaves out integrals, which is a whole different beast:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-correct-algorithm-to-perform-differentiation-using-a-computer-program-for-any-function-entered-by-the-user/answer/Prashant-Sharma-12?srid=uOUuv&share=5c81d9a3
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16 April, 2016:
Wow, I've never been so close to completing this neural net that's been stuck in my caw for so long. https://github.com/DiginessForever/randomCode
Still working on backprop, but luckily, there's this really smart high schooler on Youtube who actually uses legible notation and has coded a passable implementation (most professors don't seem to code, so I end up seeing a lot of really hard to understand C code wrote by random people / doesn't go with whatever lecture it is I'm looking at): https://github.com/SullyCh…/FFANN/blob/master/cpps/FFANN.cpp
That, combined with a ton of other Youtube tutorials, makes it look like I'll push my brain over the ledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl3lfL-g5mA
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16 April 2016:
Just got back from the physics department at WashU in Saint Louis. They have talks every Saturday in Oct, April, and sometimes into May. Today's talk was about Vision arising from Neurons. I am pretty sure Rupert Murdock was sitting on the other side.
-- The professor didn't talk about computer science neural net models, only the experiments and models they've been doing since 2013 when the BRAIN Iniative started. Apparently, they cut brains and eyes out of turtles and have it watch movies while they record the signals running down the nerves from the eye to the brain.
-- I did learn one thing new. There are weights in both the neurons themselves and in the axons - the area between the connections of one neuron to another. Also, again about compression from the retina to the signal going down the nerves from eye to the brain. It's apparently only about a million bits of information in pulses moving down that nerve, while there is much more info getting taken in by the three cone types (wavelengths) and rods (low light amplitude).
-- So definitely doesn't help me with backprop, and it feels like that community is around 60-70 years behind on models. I'm sure they'll catch up fast.
------------
12 April, 2016:
I checked out 123D Catch the other day. It's pretty smooth. You take about 15 pictures around an object and it turns them into a single 3d model of the object. It uses the phone gyro and compass to give you a map of which areas you've already taken and which you still need. I did one of my boots and got a very high quality fully textured model with no extraneous floating points. It's kind of like VisualSFM, only closed source black box solution. The models turn out better and the app is free, but if you wanted to use the models for a product, it's $10/month.
I really would like to have a completely non-cloud-based software solution that's pipelined so that I can move my phone around an object, have it grab a bunch of pictures, then crunch those later to automatically create a 3d model (perhaps when cell phones are even faster, it will be possible to do the data crunching/picture comparisons on-the-fly).
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3 April 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsEdu6Xq6KU
Been doing more reading. Getting a little further, slowly. This answer on Quora gives a good entry point to each part of the process:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-feature-detector-descriptor-descriptor-extractor-and-matcher-in-computer-vision?share=1
Found this site as well: http://www.vlfeat.org/api/index.html
Another resource - OpenCV page: http://docs.opencv.org/…/feature_d…/feature_description.html
This subject is actually rather huge - I imagine that one day we'll have inverse graphics cards - since computer vision is kind of like doing everything a graphics card currently does, but backwards (with a lot more processing involved).
-- This guy has some great videos - this one explains feature descriptors - I'm not done watching it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVexhcltzE . I got sidetracked onto Kahn Academy to learn about Laplace transforms. Apparently, the math involved in making a feature descriptor scale invariant (can detect if it's the same object regardless of how big or small / near or far away it is) depends on Laplace.
-- The Harris Corner detector is rotation invariant, and then Laplace is somehow used to make it scale invariant (found this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPcMS49V5hg ). The two are combined to fully match two features between images from different cameras of the same scene. Once features are matched, you can do trig to find the distance (z-coord), giving you a point cloud.
-- Apparently, if you use SIFT, you have to pay royalties (University of British Columbia owns it). The professor did an awesome job. Now, however, there is another algorithm which outperforms it and has an open license: Kaze. I'm going to have to compare the two algorithms to see if Kaze does everything I need.
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29 March, 2016:
Saw something interesting recently. Apparently, my difficulty in progressing from edge detectors to marking more general features in images had to do with terminology in the field.
A feature detector is an algorithm that makes things stand out more, like edges or corners.
A feature extractor goes more in depth.
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21 March, 2016:
Thoughts on using shaders, OpenCL, or CUDA: if you consider that the typical 2.5GHz single core processor has 10 GFLOPS (floating point operations per second), in relation to a graphics card, the graphics card usually has more. For instance, the Raspberry Pi has a low powered / low-end graphics card in it. That GPU (graphics card) has 25 GFLOPS. If you can use both the processor and the GPU at the same time, then you can obviously add the two together. That would mean even really low end computer like the RPi could be blazingly fast.
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(political, non-technical): 5 Mar, 2016:
The comments on this ArsTechnica article are great: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/dod-officials-say-autonomous-killing-machines-deserve-a-look/?comments=1&start=40
There's a comment with a link to a story about a war between two chimpanzee communities studied by Jane Goodall (basically saying that violence is part of our nature): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
One thing that most strikes me is this idea of a "moral compass" in software. I think what people don't realize is that in order to do that, because computers are just math devices, any technique of giving a program/algorithm morals will actually just be assigning a set value to human life using some equation.
The reasons why I have not volunteered to help these DoD officials are:
1. The open letter regarding autonomous killing machines.
2. The issues of trust regarding all the lies around 9/11 (foundation for "The War on Terror") and the kind of decisions they've been making with their current program (the absolutely abysmal rate of innocents/not-innocents killed + deliberate killing of underaged US citizen).
3. Their complete lack of any desire to use said technology for good (I was denied on submittal of idea concerning research project for using machine learning for USDA/DoD agricultural partnership).
-------- 25 Feb, 2016:
Saw a post on FB on the Backyard Brains page about a book:
https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Dummies-Frank-Amthor/dp/1118086864/181-6136217-7332508?ie=UTF8&SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1118086864
Some other material I picked up off the Backyard Brain's FB page: 1. http://www.brainfacts.org/about-neuroscience/brain-facts-book/
2. https://backyardbrains.com/experiments/EOG
3. From Kevin Crosby's comment: "Here's a history of brain implant technology I compiled. An early draft was credited in 2005 as the basis for the Wikipedia article on the subject, and back in 1997 the Department of Defense ordered me to stand down when I tried to discuss it". http://skewsme.com/tinfoilhat/chapter/brain-implants/
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17 Feb, 2016:
I don't remember how I came acros this, but combined with software defined radio and a little hacking, I might be able to do something like this myself...I still have that parallella with the onboard FPGA and 2 ARM CPUs. The biggest challenge is dealing with the extremely high frequency (2.4Ghz is 2.4 billion cycles per second). I really liked what he said about having arrays of transmitters (phased arrays) to very quickly aim the radar in an arbitrary direction. I'd much rather have that than an antennae cone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztR9mdJ1YWU
One of the reasons that Google has been so succesful with their self driving cars is that they don't only rely on computer vision, they also have onboard LIDAR. It'd be really neat to get a point cloud from a very cheap set of hardware and overlay images from a cheap webcam on top of that for further object classification.
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Using machine learning to evolve muscles / bone (making the foundations for a robotic walker):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ptOeByLA4&feature=youtu.be
keywords: soft robotics, morphology, paper: "Flexible Muscle-Based Locomation for Bipedal Creatures"
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1 Feb, 2016:
I was doing a search on Google and Bing for "sort point cloud rotation invariant", and I found this site: http://www.openperception.org/ - the point cloud API is here: http://www.pointclouds.org/ Still learning about computer vision, but slowly converging on an overall understanding of the process. The more I understand, the more APIs and communities I find, which is cool.
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29 Jan, 2016: Microsoft just open sourced their neural net toolkit. Seems better documented / more familiar than Facebook's or Google's. https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK/wiki/Examples
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12 Jan, 2016: This is a pretty good post explaining the need for robotics. In the past, I've thought that robots, on the whole, will take away needed jobs, but in fact, there are too many jobs which cannot pay enough, but which we need filled:
https://medium.com/@gerkey/looking-forward-to-the-robot-economy-1ba4ee1647e3#.jt5mfngv0
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29 Dec, 2015: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
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24 November 2015:
Best video I've ever seen on neural net construction (Dave Miller):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkwX7FkLfug
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7 Oct, 2015:
All,
I need some help. I'm submitting an idea for the upcoming Airmen Powered by Innovation summit in December. However, I don't know anyone in the DoD or directly working for government who is a computer vision researcher. I know of people working for DARPA who do this, and there are a lot working for universities. I can put together a team for the presentation, provided they work for DoD / government.
Here's my Innovation Summit submission.
I don't think I want to do it alone - while I have a lot of strengths, this area definitely stretches quite a bit past my current skill level. I would say that it would represent possibly max potential.
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16 Sep, 2015: I just bought a copy of Practical Python and OpenCV! https://www.pyimagesearch.com/practical-python-opencv/ @pyimagesearch
It was $70, but worth it, as in the quickstart bundle, Adrian Rosebrock created a Ubuntu image for VirtualBox virtual machine. That makes it unnecessary to spend all the time configuring an extra OS, installing Python 3 (new version) and OpenCV 3. It also has a 270 page book with code + case studies and a bunch of videos. I'm sure the image will save me more time in the future, as I always wreck my OSs.
I've installed OpenCV in the past, and it's a pain getting everything set up initially. However, python and OpenCV are probably the best way to study computer vision. I think having an image of a pre-configured OS all set up and ready to go is an excellent idea.
3 Sep, 2015:
www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA092604
This is an early project in computer vision, the report was published in 1980. The project was done at Stanford. They programmed it in BASIC. Pages 21 and 22 demonstrate some serious math fu. This project has everything I'm interested in - structure from motion, estimating a 3D world model, and pathing.
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13 Aug, 2015:
Not directly computer vision related, but video codecs are related to how much compression you get and how much overhead it takes to transfer the video files. https://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/08/11/2327221/cisco-developing-royalty-free-video-codec-thor
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22 Jul, 2015:
My filter bubble has apparently started to include a lot more to do with computer vision. I've come across references to Halide now three times in various places, related videos on Youtube, and now a mention from a recent presentation by the Khronos Group about OpenCL. Halide apparently is a computer language specifically for computer vision. I might have to check it out.
On another note, apparently the Parallella's Epiphany FPGA processor will soon have an OpenCL API release.
An API (Application Program Interface) is basically just a group of functions/methods you can run from a program you make. You include/import at the top of the program, and then can run them at any point in your code. OpenCL is a standard that allows you to do computation on both CPUs and GPUs (graphics card processors).
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20 Jul, 2015: A sub/sub bot combo found a Napoleonic era shipwreck by accident (weren't specifically looking for that wreck): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/18/shipwreck_discovery_sonar_auv_north_carolina/
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19 July, 2015: Got OpenCV 3.0.0 installed on Slax finally. This is a good set of instructions, the only difference for Slax was that there's no ld.so.conf.d directory, only a ld.so.conf file, so that one line "/usr/local/lib" goes at the end of that file instead:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2vOqPlUYfNoJ:www.samontab.com/web/2014/06/installing-opencv-2-4-9-in-ubuntu-14-04-lts/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
That version of OpenCV just came out last month. Apparently they have a lot of the processes automatically using both the GPU and CPU, speeding them up. Also, for accessing video streaming/video files, you don't need the separate dependencies.
Comments: So, I've gotten basic wavelets down. New goals - learn about homogenous coordinates and basis functions in matrices. Learn OpenGL, become a lot more familiar with SIFT and SURF computer vision algorithms. -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVexhcltzE
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19 Jul, 2015:
This is awesome - automatic machine vision correction of video when you're on a videochat - makes it always look like you're looking the person on the other side in the eye.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5QlDfBpNxw
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19 Jul, 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9K2yeBZS9I
Found this video on Youtube - has exactly how to do a 2D Haar wavelet transform step by step.
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17 Jul, 2015:
Some more pictures and the transformed version.
Now to do some more color conversions, then apply a DFT.
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17 Jul, 2015:
Coming along - been playing with code that takes in images and then graphs them in 3 dimensions. Finally have some that works decently after making every mistake in the book.
Comment: (me) That picture is a girl with a world map painted on her face in many different colors. I've copied a piece of code (stack exchange) that maps the colors from RGB onto a jet color space. I still haven't gotten a good install for OpenCV on Slax yet, so I'm using just numpy and matplotlib.
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14 Jul, 2015: Software that does this is so neat. My favorite so far is Visual SFM. You take a bunch of pictures around an object / scene and put them in a folder (they need to be in JPG format), run the software, and it takes awhile to construct a 3D point cloud. You then use something like Meshlab and a modelling program like Blender to get a 3D object. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7705377/how-to-create-3d-model-from-2d-image
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19 Mar, 2015:
Cool - Adapteva has their 16 core computer on Amazon now for pretty cheap. http://www.amazon.com/Adapteva-Parallella-16-…/…/ref=sr_1_1… This was a Kickstarter project a short while back (months? can't remember exactly when). It's about $150 and pretty dang small. It looks about RPI size, though I can't tell exactly.
I still need to gather more data to train it - haven't been able to use it yet because I don't have it hooked up with a dataset yet. Some possibilities would be making it learn to walk a robot (staying upright, being given a desired direction and status of whether it is standing/walking or has fallen down), or I could do the "hello world" project and have it recognize characters (letters and numbers).
Other updates: Elon Musk and co has come out with OpenAI Gym.
I've been following along with Adrian Rosenbrock (spelling?) PyImageSearch blog site (bought his book and virtual image of Ubuntu as well).
I also found this recently:
http://www.computervisionblog.com/2015/01/from-feature-descriptors-to-deep.html
To watch later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lp9eN5JE2A "Evolving AI Lab: Deep Learning Overview & Visualizing What Deep Neural Networks Learn"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szHRv4MwCBY "Microsoft Resarch: Recent Advances in Deep Learning at Microsoft: A Selected Overview"
Soft Robotics, a youtube video channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9Bl8hjGqGOUaRjANlTqGmPWtYmM99lfM
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Post from May 6th, 2016:
Next step for my neural net project - learn to use the Raspberry Pi deep belief SDK (gives access to the on board GPU's 20 GFLOPs - a lot faster than it would be if you only used the CPU, which also has to run the operating system). Yay - I don't have to hack a solution using assembler on the GPU anymore (that was the worst headache - I spent quite a good bit of time reading the open sourced documentation for the GPU, and it wasn't going to be pretty, then would only be good for one device). I am just about done with the primary code for my javascript neural net. I definitely recommend coding a solution out if you do not understand a subject completely - it forces you to wrap your mind around it, and if you think you understand it but do not, you'll find out very quickly when it doesn't work.
Last weekend, Elon Musk and a bunch of other researchers and companies interested in AI released a tool, OpenAI Gym. It's what I thought I was going to have to code myself - environments that give visual feedback / let your neural net control a model/actor and solve a problem. The cool thing about this tool is that (at least according to the documentation) it is framework agnostic, meaning you can use multiple deep learning libraries to train the neural nets, then give the trained net to the tool, where it works to solve the problem.
One cool thing I've found out - the feedforward/backprop neural net is the foundation for all the deep learning research that's been going on. I am still at a pretty severe disadvantage when compared to real researchers though - they have top of the line GPUs so can run much larger networks much faster.
However, having programmed a neural net, I can at least now understand a lot of what they're talking about. For instance, I found a new set of researchers to read up on - there's a Swiss AI lab that's won 5 past international machine learning competitions. There are two things I want to learn about that they are doing.
1. Long term / Short term Memory with recurring neural nets. They link the layers a bit differently to make a sort of logic gate which remembers or forgets based on relevance.
2. Hierarchical neural nets. I didn't see any links to this as I scanned through the research links on their page, but I did see references to it in articles. Somehow, they stack trained neural nets to have a more comprehensive net that understands more.
Here Yann Lecun's MNIST data set: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/
And here's another C implementation - this one also uses for loops instead of matrices: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/NN/nn.html I'm working on the last piece of the backprop right now. The final questions I have are on step size and learning rate. Apparently, it's best if you adjust them smaller as the net starts to settle on a solution.
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Post from 1 May, 2016:
https://gym.openai.com/docs
Interesting. Facebook lets me post some links, but not others. For instance, Friday I gave up trying to post about that morning's announcement by Movidius about the new USB stick deep learning accelerator they had developed. The FB form wouldn't accept the link as far as copy/pasting it.
In any case, OpenAI is Elon Musk's company, supposedly open sourcing AI. They have indeed made tools available, but they are also still open to patenting anything they get their hands on. So beware giving them too much or getting too invested in that toolset.
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26 April, 2016:
Machine learning on the RPi: https://scientistnobee.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/machine-learning-with-raspberry-pi/
Found a link which explains a few questions I had on backprop. https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/https://mattmazur.com/2015/03/17/a-step-by-step-backpropagation-example/
Combine that with this for a straight forward / simple C implementation in code of what the guy is talking about in that blog post (it'll answer any remaining questions): http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/NN/nn.html
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23 April, 2016:
This is a blog post from Adobe back in 2011. I saw a link to it on the comments for a CSI related article. Basically, if you take a lot of pictures of a static scene, you can get more resolution. If anything is moving, it won't work for that thing. I'll have to dig further to see what algorithms are used.
https://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/2011/10/behind-all-the-buzz-deblur-sneak-peek.html
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20 April, 2016:
This is kind of neat. Leaves out integrals, which is a whole different beast:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-correct-algorithm-to-perform-differentiation-using-a-computer-program-for-any-function-entered-by-the-user/answer/Prashant-Sharma-12?srid=uOUuv&share=5c81d9a3
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16 April, 2016:
Wow, I've never been so close to completing this neural net that's been stuck in my caw for so long. https://github.com/DiginessForever/randomCode
Still working on backprop, but luckily, there's this really smart high schooler on Youtube who actually uses legible notation and has coded a passable implementation (most professors don't seem to code, so I end up seeing a lot of really hard to understand C code wrote by random people / doesn't go with whatever lecture it is I'm looking at): https://github.com/SullyCh…/FFANN/blob/master/cpps/FFANN.cpp
That, combined with a ton of other Youtube tutorials, makes it look like I'll push my brain over the ledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl3lfL-g5mA
--------------
16 April 2016:
Just got back from the physics department at WashU in Saint Louis. They have talks every Saturday in Oct, April, and sometimes into May. Today's talk was about Vision arising from Neurons. I am pretty sure Rupert Murdock was sitting on the other side.
-- The professor didn't talk about computer science neural net models, only the experiments and models they've been doing since 2013 when the BRAIN Iniative started. Apparently, they cut brains and eyes out of turtles and have it watch movies while they record the signals running down the nerves from the eye to the brain.
-- I did learn one thing new. There are weights in both the neurons themselves and in the axons - the area between the connections of one neuron to another. Also, again about compression from the retina to the signal going down the nerves from eye to the brain. It's apparently only about a million bits of information in pulses moving down that nerve, while there is much more info getting taken in by the three cone types (wavelengths) and rods (low light amplitude).
-- So definitely doesn't help me with backprop, and it feels like that community is around 60-70 years behind on models. I'm sure they'll catch up fast.
------------
12 April, 2016:
I checked out 123D Catch the other day. It's pretty smooth. You take about 15 pictures around an object and it turns them into a single 3d model of the object. It uses the phone gyro and compass to give you a map of which areas you've already taken and which you still need. I did one of my boots and got a very high quality fully textured model with no extraneous floating points. It's kind of like VisualSFM, only closed source black box solution. The models turn out better and the app is free, but if you wanted to use the models for a product, it's $10/month.
I really would like to have a completely non-cloud-based software solution that's pipelined so that I can move my phone around an object, have it grab a bunch of pictures, then crunch those later to automatically create a 3d model (perhaps when cell phones are even faster, it will be possible to do the data crunching/picture comparisons on-the-fly).
------------
3 April 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsEdu6Xq6KU
Been doing more reading. Getting a little further, slowly. This answer on Quora gives a good entry point to each part of the process:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-feature-detector-descriptor-descriptor-extractor-and-matcher-in-computer-vision?share=1
Found this site as well: http://www.vlfeat.org/api/index.html
Another resource - OpenCV page: http://docs.opencv.org/…/feature_d…/feature_description.html
This subject is actually rather huge - I imagine that one day we'll have inverse graphics cards - since computer vision is kind of like doing everything a graphics card currently does, but backwards (with a lot more processing involved).
-- This guy has some great videos - this one explains feature descriptors - I'm not done watching it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVexhcltzE . I got sidetracked onto Kahn Academy to learn about Laplace transforms. Apparently, the math involved in making a feature descriptor scale invariant (can detect if it's the same object regardless of how big or small / near or far away it is) depends on Laplace.
-- The Harris Corner detector is rotation invariant, and then Laplace is somehow used to make it scale invariant (found this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPcMS49V5hg ). The two are combined to fully match two features between images from different cameras of the same scene. Once features are matched, you can do trig to find the distance (z-coord), giving you a point cloud.
-- Apparently, if you use SIFT, you have to pay royalties (University of British Columbia owns it). The professor did an awesome job. Now, however, there is another algorithm which outperforms it and has an open license: Kaze. I'm going to have to compare the two algorithms to see if Kaze does everything I need.
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29 March, 2016:
Saw something interesting recently. Apparently, my difficulty in progressing from edge detectors to marking more general features in images had to do with terminology in the field.
A feature detector is an algorithm that makes things stand out more, like edges or corners.
A feature extractor goes more in depth.
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21 March, 2016:
Thoughts on using shaders, OpenCL, or CUDA: if you consider that the typical 2.5GHz single core processor has 10 GFLOPS (floating point operations per second), in relation to a graphics card, the graphics card usually has more. For instance, the Raspberry Pi has a low powered / low-end graphics card in it. That GPU (graphics card) has 25 GFLOPS. If you can use both the processor and the GPU at the same time, then you can obviously add the two together. That would mean even really low end computer like the RPi could be blazingly fast.
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(political, non-technical): 5 Mar, 2016:
The comments on this ArsTechnica article are great: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/dod-officials-say-autonomous-killing-machines-deserve-a-look/?comments=1&start=40
There's a comment with a link to a story about a war between two chimpanzee communities studied by Jane Goodall (basically saying that violence is part of our nature): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
One thing that most strikes me is this idea of a "moral compass" in software. I think what people don't realize is that in order to do that, because computers are just math devices, any technique of giving a program/algorithm morals will actually just be assigning a set value to human life using some equation.
The reasons why I have not volunteered to help these DoD officials are:
1. The open letter regarding autonomous killing machines.
2. The issues of trust regarding all the lies around 9/11 (foundation for "The War on Terror") and the kind of decisions they've been making with their current program (the absolutely abysmal rate of innocents/not-innocents killed + deliberate killing of underaged US citizen).
3. Their complete lack of any desire to use said technology for good (I was denied on submittal of idea concerning research project for using machine learning for USDA/DoD agricultural partnership).
-------- 25 Feb, 2016:
Saw a post on FB on the Backyard Brains page about a book:
https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Dummies-Frank-Amthor/dp/1118086864/181-6136217-7332508?ie=UTF8&SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1118086864
Some other material I picked up off the Backyard Brain's FB page: 1. http://www.brainfacts.org/about-neuroscience/brain-facts-book/
2. https://backyardbrains.com/experiments/EOG
3. From Kevin Crosby's comment: "Here's a history of brain implant technology I compiled. An early draft was credited in 2005 as the basis for the Wikipedia article on the subject, and back in 1997 the Department of Defense ordered me to stand down when I tried to discuss it". http://skewsme.com/tinfoilhat/chapter/brain-implants/
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17 Feb, 2016:
I don't remember how I came acros this, but combined with software defined radio and a little hacking, I might be able to do something like this myself...I still have that parallella with the onboard FPGA and 2 ARM CPUs. The biggest challenge is dealing with the extremely high frequency (2.4Ghz is 2.4 billion cycles per second). I really liked what he said about having arrays of transmitters (phased arrays) to very quickly aim the radar in an arbitrary direction. I'd much rather have that than an antennae cone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztR9mdJ1YWU
One of the reasons that Google has been so succesful with their self driving cars is that they don't only rely on computer vision, they also have onboard LIDAR. It'd be really neat to get a point cloud from a very cheap set of hardware and overlay images from a cheap webcam on top of that for further object classification.
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Using machine learning to evolve muscles / bone (making the foundations for a robotic walker):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ptOeByLA4&feature=youtu.be
keywords: soft robotics, morphology, paper: "Flexible Muscle-Based Locomation for Bipedal Creatures"
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1 Feb, 2016:
I was doing a search on Google and Bing for "sort point cloud rotation invariant", and I found this site: http://www.openperception.org/ - the point cloud API is here: http://www.pointclouds.org/ Still learning about computer vision, but slowly converging on an overall understanding of the process. The more I understand, the more APIs and communities I find, which is cool.
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29 Jan, 2016: Microsoft just open sourced their neural net toolkit. Seems better documented / more familiar than Facebook's or Google's. https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK/wiki/Examples
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12 Jan, 2016: This is a pretty good post explaining the need for robotics. In the past, I've thought that robots, on the whole, will take away needed jobs, but in fact, there are too many jobs which cannot pay enough, but which we need filled:
https://medium.com/@gerkey/looking-forward-to-the-robot-economy-1ba4ee1647e3#.jt5mfngv0
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29 Dec, 2015: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
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24 November 2015:
Best video I've ever seen on neural net construction (Dave Miller):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkwX7FkLfug
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7 Oct, 2015:
All,
I need some help. I'm submitting an idea for the upcoming Airmen Powered by Innovation summit in December. However, I don't know anyone in the DoD or directly working for government who is a computer vision researcher. I know of people working for DARPA who do this, and there are a lot working for universities. I can put together a team for the presentation, provided they work for DoD / government.
Here's my Innovation Summit submission.
I don't think I want to do it alone - while I have a lot of strengths, this area definitely stretches quite a bit past my current skill level. I would say that it would represent possibly max potential.
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16 Sep, 2015: I just bought a copy of Practical Python and OpenCV! https://www.pyimagesearch.com/practical-python-opencv/ @pyimagesearch
It was $70, but worth it, as in the quickstart bundle, Adrian Rosebrock created a Ubuntu image for VirtualBox virtual machine. That makes it unnecessary to spend all the time configuring an extra OS, installing Python 3 (new version) and OpenCV 3. It also has a 270 page book with code + case studies and a bunch of videos. I'm sure the image will save me more time in the future, as I always wreck my OSs.
I've installed OpenCV in the past, and it's a pain getting everything set up initially. However, python and OpenCV are probably the best way to study computer vision. I think having an image of a pre-configured OS all set up and ready to go is an excellent idea.
3 Sep, 2015:
www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA092604
This is an early project in computer vision, the report was published in 1980. The project was done at Stanford. They programmed it in BASIC. Pages 21 and 22 demonstrate some serious math fu. This project has everything I'm interested in - structure from motion, estimating a 3D world model, and pathing.
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13 Aug, 2015:
Not directly computer vision related, but video codecs are related to how much compression you get and how much overhead it takes to transfer the video files. https://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/08/11/2327221/cisco-developing-royalty-free-video-codec-thor
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22 Jul, 2015:
My filter bubble has apparently started to include a lot more to do with computer vision. I've come across references to Halide now three times in various places, related videos on Youtube, and now a mention from a recent presentation by the Khronos Group about OpenCL. Halide apparently is a computer language specifically for computer vision. I might have to check it out.
On another note, apparently the Parallella's Epiphany FPGA processor will soon have an OpenCL API release.
An API (Application Program Interface) is basically just a group of functions/methods you can run from a program you make. You include/import at the top of the program, and then can run them at any point in your code. OpenCL is a standard that allows you to do computation on both CPUs and GPUs (graphics card processors).
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20 Jul, 2015: A sub/sub bot combo found a Napoleonic era shipwreck by accident (weren't specifically looking for that wreck): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/18/shipwreck_discovery_sonar_auv_north_carolina/
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19 July, 2015: Got OpenCV 3.0.0 installed on Slax finally. This is a good set of instructions, the only difference for Slax was that there's no ld.so.conf.d directory, only a ld.so.conf file, so that one line "/usr/local/lib" goes at the end of that file instead:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2vOqPlUYfNoJ:www.samontab.com/web/2014/06/installing-opencv-2-4-9-in-ubuntu-14-04-lts/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
That version of OpenCV just came out last month. Apparently they have a lot of the processes automatically using both the GPU and CPU, speeding them up. Also, for accessing video streaming/video files, you don't need the separate dependencies.
Comments: So, I've gotten basic wavelets down. New goals - learn about homogenous coordinates and basis functions in matrices. Learn OpenGL, become a lot more familiar with SIFT and SURF computer vision algorithms. -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVexhcltzE
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19 Jul, 2015:
This is awesome - automatic machine vision correction of video when you're on a videochat - makes it always look like you're looking the person on the other side in the eye.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5QlDfBpNxw
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19 Jul, 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9K2yeBZS9I
Found this video on Youtube - has exactly how to do a 2D Haar wavelet transform step by step.
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17 Jul, 2015:
Some more pictures and the transformed version.
Now to do some more color conversions, then apply a DFT.
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17 Jul, 2015:
Coming along - been playing with code that takes in images and then graphs them in 3 dimensions. Finally have some that works decently after making every mistake in the book.
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14 Jul, 2015: Software that does this is so neat. My favorite so far is Visual SFM. You take a bunch of pictures around an object / scene and put them in a folder (they need to be in JPG format), run the software, and it takes awhile to construct a 3D point cloud. You then use something like Meshlab and a modelling program like Blender to get a 3D object. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7705377/how-to-create-3d-model-from-2d-image
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19 Mar, 2015:
Cool - Adapteva has their 16 core computer on Amazon now for pretty cheap. http://www.amazon.com/Adapteva-Parallella-16-…/…/ref=sr_1_1… This was a Kickstarter project a short while back (months? can't remember exactly when). It's about $150 and pretty dang small. It looks about RPI size, though I can't tell exactly.
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