Friday, July 30, 2004

I was born at 10 am today, in this very city. twenty three years ago.

and the world shall never be the same. Thank you everyone for your kind notes. I'll try to get back to you.

Thursday, July 29, 2004

ah, to whom it may concern, lovely news. my trip schedule this month has been finalized. I'll be traveling to the city by the desert, Salt Lake City, on august 8th, until the 13th. That was the best time to visit, when I'll be seeing friends and helping crystal to celebrate her birthday, and mine as well, in a belated fashion.

tomorrow I turn 23. which is something of an accomplishment, I suppose. I missed celebrating my birthday last year, so I hope to have a nice time.

also, concerning Noel's wedding. I have not yet purchased the tickets, but am planning on visiting from friday to monday, for a trip august 27th-august 30th.

all in all that adds up to 7 whole days , which is a bit more than I would like. I suppose it's about the same as the number of weekend days in a month. But I would prefer to spread my trips out a bit more.

happy birthday, everyone out there aging. I'm looking forward to getting older, as it's just been better as time goes on.

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Monday, July 26, 2004

what a strange year it has been.
You were the one,
You were my everything
Never apart,
No one in-between
Then one day,
When you went your own way
You felt justified,
And I was mortified
But today...
You are just a picture
And a thousand memories
Is all I take with me
'Cuz your smile
Is just too much to see
You're just a thousand memories
Fantasies, broken dreams
Reveries, sordid histories
Following my heart,
Laden with reaction,
Without calibration or design
Committed to a trial,
A life of understanding
Can't somebody show a sign to you
For me to see if you only knew
That you were the one
You were my everything
Never apart,
No one in-between
Then one day,
When you went your own way
You felt justified,
And I was mortified
But today...
You are just a picture
And a thousand memories
Is all I take with me
'Cuz a picture is worth
one thousand memories

--- Bad Religion

Sunday, July 25, 2004

[ ANBU ] An Online Anime Fansubbing Group - Index

A lot of people I know are admirers of Akira Kurasowa's films. There is a very interesting anime being released right now called Samurai7, which is an interesting remake/homage to Kurasowa's "Seven Samurai".

This fansubbing group(which produces many other high quality subs, btw) is doing them in collaboration with Anime One, as they come out.

A lot of things like this are very frivolous, and sometimes I have to ask myself whether or not to spend time on them, but I am not yet a single project person, and I have too many interests to ignore. My AI work is the biggest part of my life. And it will continue to be. I work almost every day, all day, on it. I wish I could work more.

But.. I am still exploring. I had aspirations of being a mechanical engineer and a sculpter, less than four years ago. I still love art. I still want to build things with my hands. It's not what I'm doing right now. I'll get to it. I have a few things I have to take care of first.
NationMaster

You know, I don't think very much of nations. I think jingoism is a disease, I think that borders and other discontinuities of law are needlessly artificial. And I wonder at people's belief. I understand acceptance, and not fighting. I'm not out throwing molotov cocktails at National Guard tanks, but support? Believing in your country as some kind of moral force? incomprehensible.

but nations are here, and here to stay, for a while at least. And in the meantime, it's important to realize what kinds of effects these regional legal/political/military occupiers have on their local populations.

This guidebook shows very clearly how different populations rank in various categories. Some of the statistics are cultural, some are political, others geographic or organic. There isn't any real discussion on where these statistics come from, which would be the next step, but just the raw, well presented statistics, is useful enough. I don't make any promises as to the accuracy or recentness of the statistics. You can look around on your own.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Slashdot | FAA Approves Sport Pilot License
About the Sport Pilot Certificate

Some of you may know about this from slashdot coverage, or local newspapers.

There is a new classification available to make recreational piloting more accessible. It's called the Sport Pilot Certificate, and I think it's a step forward. Amongst the interesting bits is the creation of another class of aircraft, the Sport Plane. Which is a relatively slow, relatively simple aircraft.

A very interesting point is that the Sport Planes include airships, gyrocopters, and experimental aircraft(so long as the sport-plane pilot has participated in 51% of construction) as well as Primary And Standard category aircraft, if they fall within the limitations of sport planes.

yeah.

rock.

Saturday, July 17, 2004

Pad2Pad - Online custom PCB's with components

so yeah. The prices on both of these are pretty unpleasant to think about, but... this is about what you need to build arbitrary things over the internet. Now all we need is a one off chipfabber, and we'll be completely vulnerable to any decent machine intelligence with apirations of replication.

heh. This reminds me of my old attempts to design a macroscale self-replicating robot. It required enouch exotic initial design that I think it's not possible yet, but getting close.

all I need is one and some desert, sand, dirt, sunlight... it's a magic moment indeed.
eMachineShop - Online Machine Shop - with FREE CAD Software

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

arXiv.org e-Print archive

just in case you forgot, these guys are still here, too. ^_^
Physics Finder

excellent.

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Wearable computers are an interest of mine. I think it's the obvious next step, and I'm just waiting for always-on mobile internet connections before trying to make the switch myself.

Wearables aren't mainstream yet, but a certain kind of mobile computing is, cellphones. Cellphones are general computers and getting more and more powerful every day. Some people think that they are leading the way towards localization of computer and internet access. I must admit, the more powerful smartphones look a great deal like general personal computers. I could use a Treo 610 for.. almost everything except development for my job.

We'll see.

Here is a captured message from a mailing list. Thanks to Eugen Leitl for forwarding it.

==============================================================
From: "Thad E. Starner"
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:40:59 -0400 (EDT)
To: wearables@cc.gatech.edu
Subject: [wearables] On-body computing outsells desktops + laptops 3:1 (sales stats)

Folks-

Popular Science magazine asked me to write a "future headline"
blurb for them. What we gave them was

2015 Intel Abandons Desktop Market
(Thad Starner and James Fusia III)

In a surprise move today, Intel announced it will no longer support its
processors for the legacy desktop market. Simultaneously, the chip
giant announced five new low power processor lines for the wearable and
embedded markets. Since 2003, processors for on-body computers have
outsold desktop and laptop processors combined. Intel was best known
during that period for its relatively power hungry x86 desktop processors.

This 3:1 figure for 2003 has become part of my regular talks now. Popular
Science didn't believe the stats, so I had to point to some standard
industry sources to back it up. I thought y'all might find these
stats and pointers useful.

Summary:
164M total PCs sold in 2003 (Gartner)
128M desktops+servers sold in 2003 (IDC + Gartner)
36M laptops (IDC)
-------
510M-533M mobile phone handsets (Gartner Dataquest)
24M portable compressed (i.e. computerized) music players (InStat)
------
10.4M PDA sales (IDC)
--------
600k Tablet PC sales (IDC estimate mid-2003)
[DETAILS and URLs BELOW]

Tablet PCs are not doing very well (no surprise, given that the
same idea did not do well in the early 1990s). More interesting to
me, however, is that PDA sales are declining from 12.6M in 2002 to
10.4M in 2003!! Basically, as Brad Rhodes predicted, the road to
wearables seems to be through the mobile phone.

Even more interesting, by my calculations, Nokia is now the #1
consumer computer manufacturer in the world (55M handsets vs 28M
desktop+laptop computers by HP-17% of the market). Before y'all get
on my case about that one, remember that most of Nokia's phones are
more powerful than the highest end desktop in 1990!

Here is an interesting question: How many handsets run the Symbian OS?
Or, for shock value, when will Symbian overtake Microsoft Windows as
the dominant OS platform on the planet given current growth rates? No
wonder Microsoft is fighting so hard to get into the phone market!
Not only is it the only way to continue its growth, but it may be the
only way for it to survive as we know it! (Shhh, don't tell them - do
you really want to rely on Windows for your phone calls? Think about
it.)

My prediction?: We will see the phone take over more and more of
the usual PC tasks until the PC becomes as irrelevant to the dominant
computing culture as the minicomputer or mainframe.

Thad
=========================================

Details:

According to IDC desktop+notebook+ultra portable + x86 servers = 38.373M
third quarter 2003 (no handhelds).

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=pr2003_10_14_151735

Elsewhere, Information Week claims the PC market is expect to improve
13.6% in 2004 to 186.4M units sold using data by Gartner.

http://www.informationweek.desktoppipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=22101539

Simple algebra implies that there were actualy 164M PCs sold in 2003.
This jives with a 38M * 4 quarters estimate of 152M PCs according
to the data directly from IDC.

Elsewhere, a secondary source reports IDC expected 35M laptops to be
sold in 2003.

http://www.itfacts.biz/comments.php?id=213_0_1_0_C

USA Today refines this to say IDC's number was 36M laptops

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-11-17-gates_x.htm

Compound Semiconducter and CNN report IDC and Gartner Dataquest
estimate 510M and 533M mobile handsets sold in 2003.

http://www.compoundsemiconductor.net/articles/news/8/2/8/1
http://www.cnn.com/2004/BUSINESS/02/03/mobile.sales.reut/

6.8M portable MP3 players shipped 2002
24M portable MP3 players 2003
http://www.instat.com/press.asp?ID=606
http://www.twice.com/article/CA412032.html?display=Breaking+News

PDA sales fall from 12.6M in 2003 to 10.4M in 2003
http://www.twice.com/article/CA380408.html?verticalid=820&industry=By+The+Numbers&industryid=23106&pubdate=02/09/2004

Tablet PC sales estimated at < 600k for 2003
http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2003/03/10/story2.html
Newswise: Moths Not Entirely Ruled by Instinct

in developing animal level cognition, I'm constantly surprised at the hidden adaptability and frankly astonishing performance that such humble creatures have.

DNA rocks your sox.

coming up on my birthday. not sure what to do about that. I'll be visiting SLC in august for a late celebration. probably in the area of the ninth for a few days.

unfortunately, I also have to be in cincinnati at the end of august for Noel's wedding, so the confluence of those two visits means each will be shorter than I might prefer.

Saturday, July 10, 2004

absolutely fabulous.

the wondrous crystal, to whom all things are owed, sent me a giant inflatable ball to sit upon at my desk. I already quite enjoy it, and am looking forward to increased dynamism and core strength in addition to comfort and such, because I sit at the desk for hours at a time.

talk about a lovely gift. The kind of thing that I'll use all the time, every day, and wouldn't have thought to get by myself.

happy.

Thursday, July 08, 2004

Some interesting discussion of Farenheit 9/11 on Quicktopic

I rather enjoyed Farenheit 9/11. It was interesting to watch the audience, largely hard-core democrats from the LA area, hoot and clap and root for their boy.

It was shameless propaganda, which I think most people got. But some haven't, and are laboring under the assumption that either the democrats or republicans are actually reporting anything like facts.

Here is a forum discussion started out with a liberal journalist collecting all the deceit in the film. It's actually surprisingly, more than I caught, which bodes badly for more credulous viewers.

Please dont' trust people whose job it is to convince you of something. that's just not a good idea.

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Feature Article

vernor vinge is a badass. This is a great story.
Adaptive Artificial Intelligence Inc. - Home

I just uploaded the latest and greatest news post on our company website, and upgraded our opportunities page. We're looking for brilliant minds, know anyone?

My time here has been very happy, and quite productive. In analysis, while my activity in most other areas is severely depressed by my isolation and focus, I am getting more concrete things accomplished than by working on my own. With a the serious plus that I'm contributing to a still greater pool of collective accomplishment, of course.

Also pluses that I know do interesting work full time. Which is actually more stressful than I would have thought. While I found part time work in unrelated fields stressful, I think I may have used it as a way to rest the less developed parts of my brain. Working here has re-introduced me to the pain of inadequate mental performance, having to self-limit work for quality, and etc. It's a good thing, though. I think my performance will ultimately rise permanently as a result of some of the mistakes I've made and learned from here.

The longer I work here, the more I think that A2I2 is really in front of anyone else in this game, and I'm glad I'm here. I do worry, occasionally, that I'm working the best I can, and being the most productive in the right places. It's not clear exactly what challenges and problems lie ahead, and I occasionally fear that I'll top out, and be unable to contribute usefully past a certain point. What would I do then? I've become very accustomed to following the edge of development, even if I lag behind in the implementation or details, in most everything I research. If I ever found anything to be honestly beyond me.. I can't really say what I would do.

And then the question would arise, what precisely can I do, in order to continue contributing towards my goals, which are currently predicated on the assumption that nothing in my path is beyond me personally. I can't very well expect others to carry me to my own goals. As much as I respect and like Peter, I can't measure by his capability and understanding, it's not mine.

Sometimes it seems like my future shrinks with each year. I can't say that I really even look much past a year from now anymore. When I was 18 I had my whole life planned out. It seems like that was a long long time ago.

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

Dub Exorcist

listen to this music. Crystal found it for me, it is very beautiful.