psyche

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

Happily, Wikipedia had already picked up on it, but I heard some Warren Zevon in the mix of Kid Rock’s new commercial sound recording.

The song has almost no value apart from the catchiness of the three chord trick embellishments stolen from Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd. I think it’s pretty bad when you can’t even think of your own variation of the three chord trick. Hmm.

Pax

It looks like graphics is well and truly useless now. I’ve been reading through the Mozilla Developer Center’s Canvas Tutorial and it’s clear that it’s quite powerful (e.g. automatic bezier and quadratic curves and all that). It’s quite a cool new element and I’ll have to check it out at some point.

Unrelatedly, Vivan suggested that I make a last minute application for the Imperial College IC125 Future Computing Taster Course, which I did and - surprisingly - got a place at. So we’ll be there, wrecking Art and Evolution, Enigma - the cryptographer’s battle, Lunch will be provided*, Gestures and artificial intelligence and Image manipulation in Java. Sounds good. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing, ha ha! Ha ha ha! And I actually know where the Huxley Building is now. We’ll have some stuff to talk about at university interviews. Lulz.

Also, I’m going to take back Ealing Broadway. I’m going to make it more fun! Preparing for Arizona by buying lots of reflective clothing (yes). Trying to make main site more coherent. Failing.

Trying to get Wikipedia SEL people to accept that the Knights guy was running HotSauce, and that lambda calculus is quite important.

Trying to think of massive hack for Lain’s tenth anniversary. Have a few ideas.

*may not be a lecture, not sure

Pax

m35 of jpsxdec and #lain just found out why my site hadn’t been rendering in IE or Firefox: you can’t end script tags with “/>”, even though it’s valid XHTML. Oh well.

What a hero!

Also, this renders graphics obsolete… although I knew about the canvas element when I was writing it.

I finished lain.

Pax

This blog post will grow as I remember more details.

Imperial College (or Imperial Lollege, as it was when my dad was there, reading Mechanical Engineering and putting the lulz in Lulz…ondon) was pretty awesome. Four year course with industry placement looked awesome.

They coincidentally brought up Richard Hayden, whose CV I had read online previously. I lulzed up the talk with some banter about stochastic fluid flow. Hot female Japanese CS applicants were in awe of me, or at least noticed me in order to be contemptuous. Halls of residence full of lulz: Southside and Eastside. Talked to Dr Jeremy Bradley (DoC admissions tutor) about quantum computing and mathematical preparation; he suggested that if I have “any maths ability whatsoever” I should do JMC (Joint maths and computing) - he essentially said “don’t believe the prospectus; it’s actually the entire maths and computing undergrad in one”.

Met guy applying for physics. He plays Command & Conquer. Was from Wales; friendly. Also met Yen-Ming and his father. His father was doing his PhD - all research, no teaching - at Imperial while my dad was undergrad. How interconnected of him.

Saw some projects. Fantastic. Eye tracking, torso modelling, game playing lulz ensued. Dad saw that one of his professors from 198x was still a member of the mech eng faculty (lulz).

Ray Hammond and James Bellini were shockingly down-to-earth and non-speculative. Predictable themes included delocalisation of working environment, epic lulz, “conscious internet”, ubiquitous computing etc.. Hammond talked about what was essentially The Wired. Reminded me of Masami Eiri when he said, and I quote, “The next step in human evolution is merging with our creations”.

Audience was mostly pretentious pseudo-intellectuals like me. No-one else under 18 had entered (or made an entry decent enough to get an invitation). I guess young people don’t care about future. Short-sighted info addiction stuff. Lulz. Highlights included tipsy Tesla fanboy rambling about something no-one cares about, man whose life goal is to make jokes about Microsoft and Drunk Freelance Philosopher (one of the runners-up, in fact). I thought the winning entries were okay - not as great as Hammond and Bellini, though.

May remember other stuff. Cambridge had better be good, after that.

I like quantum computing. I like internet. I like artificial intelligence. I plan to lulz stuff up. Throw off crushing weight of friends with superior mathematical ability with attitudes ranging from condescending to hostile. Now irrelevant. Before I cried! NOW I LAUGH IN THE FACE OF ANTI-LULZ!

Ha ha; lulz!

Pax

P.S. News from Cambridge:

Dear Farhan,

Thanks for your query. Although it will depend on the College to which
you’re applying, the Faculty expects that you will be interviewed as a
computer scientist and will have one extra interview by the
mathematicians to check your mathematical ability. The Faculty also
expects that, should you be made an offer and then fail just the STEP
requirement, you would still be able to come to read Computer Science
with one of the other six options.

I hope this helps,
Fiona Billingsley

======================================
Mrs Fiona Billingsley
Student Administrator
University of Cambridge
Computer Laboratory
William Gates Building
JJ Thomson Ave
Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK

Tel: +44 (0)1223 763505
Fax: +44 (0)1223 334678
Email: fmb37@cl.cam.ac.uk
======================================

—–Original Message—–
From: Farhan Mannan [mailto:farhanmannan@mac.com]
Sent: 25 June 2008 21:48
To: undergraduate.admissions@cl.cam.ac.uk
Subject: Computer science with mathematics

I was planning to apply for computer science in 2009 but recently
decided that I may apply for the 50% maths option in the first year.
Does this mean my interview will essentially be a maths interview and
devalue the books I’ve read, or will it still be a computer science
interview with the proviso that I do well in STEP?

Lulz,

Farhan Mannan

Now:

• Made it to final of Aerospace Challenge - team meant to be called “The Pauli Effect”, listed as “Pauli”
• Doing terrible, terrible physics competition
• Used distribution of points in a square and circle to approximate pi
• Watched 2001: A Space Odyssey - totally awesome. Combination of pacing and philosophy reminded me of SEL - wonder whether Rokison liked 2001?
• Had fencing epiphany (remembered how to fence)
• Working on iSAMS MySQL JavaScript plugin thing

Over the summer:

• Fabric stuff
• University of Arizona stuff
• Science essay (applied computer science)
• Philosophy essay (Baudrillard)
• Revision for TSA and (horror!) STEP…
• Become a good fencer

Pax

Exams were OK. Made binary and quadratics for lulz. Not useful, really.

Doing S2 and C4 in maths. Interesting. Fred and I continue to brutally annihilate Dr Eves’ extension questions. Kishore pays no attention (and sometimes falls asleep) but easily completes all of Mr Motion’s work very quickly. We’re a good set. Dr Eves has to write references. Joy. Sentences becoming fragments now…

Doing physics competition thing with Will, Fred and Elliot. Must make mechanical or simple electrical clock to time 2 minutes with well-defined start- and endpoints. Then make a machine to raise an egg 1 metre (I think) as slowly as possible while still being continuous. Wonderful. Perhaps if I get Elliot and Fred working on proof that space is well and truly quantised making the task impossible (all distances discrete) then we’ll win for ingenuity.

Have to use BMAT to revise for TSA over summer. Also, 2000-word “science prize essay”. Will do on LHC and CERN grid computing systems and such. Also, 2 minute challenge.

Haven’t heard back from Aerospace Challenge people. Got sick today (dehydration). Good to be happy. Forgotten how good!

Pax

Those other things are still up (plotter, graphics, recursion) and this is an Excel spreadsheet which I used to do a bunch of simultaneous equations to determine that the sum from r=1 to n of r⁴ is n⁵/5 + n⁴/2 + n³/3 - n/30. I’ll simplify that later I suppose.

The idea was that the sum of r^p can be expressed as a polynomial of order p + 1, so I just got 5 simultaneous equations involving the 5 coefficients of the quintic expression and got Excel to solve them in an “algorithmic” way similar to the triangular form thing we have to do.

I was revising FP1 and the sections on triangular form and summations of r^p “inspired” me to do this.

Pax

I’ve begun wondering if there’s anything special I can find with recursion, or if it’s just a fun way of expressing things. Is there anything new in there?

Pax