psyche

I saw this a while ago but I saw it again yesterday in order to force one of my cousins to see it. She picked up political themes that I missed. I still think it was good. It had a socio/philos/psych edge that insulted the cliché implementation of such embellishments (e.g. the Joker derisively recounts two conflicting popular psychology versions of his own mini-origin). I still like it. Also, game theory - Mr Smith’s comment below links to a totally awesome piece on it.

Doing some structure function stuff. Also lasers. It’s good.

Pax

Finished work experience at Fabric; was good overall, despite some exposure to terrible retardation of some bits of IT. Fabric’s Raymond Serville [sic] was shockingly intelligent and knowledgeable (a good combination) and has set me up to rip apart some computers and then eventually build my own.

Packing for Arizona tomorrow. Taking books to blitz (Dewdney and Körner for the nine-hour flight) and computer for lulz.

Pax

Doing work experience at Fabric. Sometimes boring, but learning lots about disk images… used to be called Psychosis, founder was a hacker. Fun. Discovering joys of Norton Ghost, Windows Deployment Services and other assorted retardations.

Going to Arizona on Saturday to hang out with cousins and get some work done. Should be good.

Going to build budget Linux box soon.

Using VMWare Fusion to install Arch Linux. Hit a snag - right arrow key broken, so some command line tasks are actually impossible.

It’s like Gödel’s incompleteness all over again (my favourite analogy, yes).

Pax

I tried to teach myself some Java from a book I’ve had for years (I remember buying it at Waterstone’s in Ealing Broadway back when I didn’t exclusively use the internet to accumulate stuff). I’ve done some simple things like porting binary (which wasn’t too hard), making a program for finding the arithmetic, geometric or harmonic mean of an indefinitely long list of numbers (will adjust that to perform a quick iteration to find the arithmetic-geometric mean) and an iterative factorial thing.

What I want to do eventually is write some routines to a) solve a system of linear equations in 3 variables via matrices b) absorb plotter and c) do splines.

I’ve made headway with the algorithmic techniques already. I made a spreadsheet to solve the equations in a way similar to my sum of r⁴ thing so when you enter two points (x co-ord, y co-ord, gradient at that point), it tells you the coefficents of the cubic required to draw smoothly through those points.

I tested it with Grapher (a superb application). For people unfamiliar with cubic splines, a different function is plotted between each pair of points that joins up with the next one at the same gradient, so as to create the appearance of a smooth curve. For this, the gradient at each point, as explained in the picture, was just the gradient between that point and the next. Probably not the best way to do it, but it seemed to work, kind of… I believe you can do some magic with the second derivative too. I’ll look into it. Have a look.

If the gradient at the point (x_n, y_n) is m_n, maybe I should’ve said:

m_n = ((y_n - y_n-1)/(x_n - x_n-1) + (y_n+1 - y_n)/((x_n+1 - x_n))/2

That is, the mean of the gradient between the previous point and this one, and the gradient between this one and the next.

I played around a little with Swing but have so far only made an infinite number of replicating, unclosable windows.

I’m also finding Coda even more useful than before. I can just work from a split-screen of its inbuilt terminal and the .java file I’m working on (it highlights Java syntax - how nice!).

Pax

On the train, I read the most recent Wired. It was particularly interesting. They’re focussing in on the important consequences of our vast storage capacity and the global network becoming what it ought to be. It hasn’t directly affected everyone yet, but the cloud is looming on the horizon. Grid/cloud computing should be very interesting indeed.

I was amused, however, when I read this:

Moreover, the number of hyperlinks in the World Wide Web is approaching that of synapses in the human brain.

I think something similar was in Serial Experiments Lain. As Mr Smith has my copy, maybe he should WATCH LAIN to confirm it (hint, hWATCH LAIN!!int)…

This guy doesn’t seem to like the idea of emergent properties, but he seems balanced.

The Cambridge thing yesterday was good. The course looks good. The colleges look good. The people were good. The research was good.

I talked to one guy - soon-to-be-Dr Jean Martina (blog, CL site) - who seemed to have an up-and-running automated theorem prover (+ until yesterday I didn’t know that the sum of consecutive odd numbers was always a perfect square…). My dad asked him if it had implications for machine intelligence and he smiled and said no. I thought that could be a cop-out so asked if he could use automatic genetic programming to make a computer come up with theorems and tests them and maybe come up with new mathematical resutls. Again, he smiled and said no… Later he mentioned his wife, also doing a PhD, was using software to model the human brain at the cellular level and then look for emergent properties. Like intelligence. He seemed like a cool guy and I was pretty happy that there was SOME theory being explored!

I nearly met someone I’d spoken to from the Computer Lab’s IRC channel (Malte Schwarzkopf). I didn’t realise it was him until later, but he was busy explaining his state diagram tool to an American girl anyway so I didn’t get a chance to see what it was all about. I would have, actually - I was seeking out theoretical core research, which is why seeing that theorem prover was so good.

The talk by Neil Dodgson was entertaining and informative (and for bonus points he repeatedly mocked Mirosoft - brave, as we were in the William Gates Building and M$FT seemed to fund lots of research etc.). I felt a little uncomfortable when he called computers “stupid” - I hope he never has to deal with HAL 9000.

At the end, there were questions (”I have a Scottish accent, will I be okay?”, “Is IB okay?”, “Can you interview me by phone bcause I’m overseas?” etc.). I asked what kind of theoretical research went on (apart from proving programming languages correct, which he’d mentioned). He smirked a little so I thought he was going to incite nerd-mocking and mentioned concurrency (from one of his slides). He then said “good question” and said something I can’t remember and then transferred it to his assistant guy (I’m not doing assistant guy any favours, he was helpful and smart but I just don’t know his name or position), who mentioned compilers. Later I asked if there were any College quirks we should know about. He said no.

His assistant guy finally mentioned the 2minutechallenge and then we were free.

We saw a bunch of colleges and I decided I wanted to be in the town centre because otherwise I’d be (more) disturbed by the potential peace and quiet [also consider Churchill's EXTREME DISTANCE (15 MINS BUS OH MY GOD) from town centre... although it was close to CL].

I met up with Elliot there and we ran into Will who knew lots about Queens’ so took us around there and explained everything. As a result of that and later bus issues (…) I didn’t manage to see Trinity Hall but I think as long as I go central, it’ll be fine.

BTW in this issue of New Scientist, there’s an article about Abdus Salam by Jim Al-Khalili. My grandparents hung out with Salam in that dingy house *shudder* and I’m reading Al-Khalili’s Quantum. It’s good. Connected!

Pax

I think we’ve all seen the original seam carving video, but I hadn’t seen the following. It deals with problems in the original algorithm stemming from removing low-energy seams causing there to be more edges in the retargeted image - this roughly means that you can potentially make an image more jagged despite only altering the least edgy parts. Their solution was to consider “forward energy” and remove seams which, when removed, would insert the least amount of energy/edginess/contrast, which means generally the retargeted images are now even better quality.

They also treated 2D video as 3D objects, with the third dimension as time. Have a look:

I still find their work strikingly elegant. Not only is it effective, with many potential applications, but it’s also clear enough for us to get the gist of without reading their paper or doing any deep thought. It’s fantastic! If it’s proliferated, it’ll be even harder to tell what’s real and what’s not (e.g. is that field really that big, or are those inserted seams? Is that street really that narrow, or…?) unless it’s carefully managed. Right now we only have to contend with Photoshop (I say only but that’s only because people don’t abuse it as much as it could be abused, or with as much skill [generally] as possible)…

Pax

Watching Federer. They like his footwork. Jim (Philbin, fencing coach) likes footwork. He draws parallels with boxing. Personal trainer (Patrick Sago - awesome guy) is an amateur boxer. Lulz.

The Imperial taster was cool. We had lectures - some cool AI. Unfortunately they missed out the crypto talk but it was pretty good nonetheless. Did some programming. Once Vivan had plugged in my monitor (Dr Zetie’s report was right, I realised in shock: I do give up easily) the exercises were okay. They were more an exercise in figuring out the convoluted documentation and Linux keyboard shortcuts (Mac OS X has taught me some faux-Linux bad habits, I think).

I don’t really know why it was called the future of computing, but both the talks were essentially on AI (face tracking and emotion recognition, and then computational creativity - the Painting Fool). They linked the painting to the emotion thing - I’d already seen that in New Scientist or something similar, I think. I’d also seen the augmented reality thing they showed in the intro talk. The guy spoke very quietly but the videos he showed us were definitely ones I’d seen on YouTube - tracking the environment and then putting virtual items in. Lain. Lulz.

Pretty good. Vivan reckoned people there were smarter than the ones at the Royal Holloway one, although one of them who’d been to the RH one denied that he’d been when asked, so perhaps he wasn’t so smart after all (???). Java seems cool. Linux isn’t as bad as I thought.

Lulz.

Pax