In case anyone picked up on my post, I found this over the w/e which looks quite useful. Couple of interesting references cited at the end of the paper.
I want to set my box up with a projector so I can use the same screen to browse the Internet, email and watch films/TV. Saves space, looks cool, impresses the girls. Figured I'd use a wireless keyboard and mouse but then also thought maybe I could do better than a wireless mouse.
First thought was a light gun. ACT do one which works as a mouse with a CRT but they don't work on projectors. So that's out. But I have a cunning plan....
I'm intending to set up a small camera on top of the top of the projector, pointing at the projected image. I'll use 4 lasers to pick out the corners of the projected desktop image, which can then be used as reference points relative to the desktop. My mouse will be a modified laser pointer connected by USB to the wireless keyboard to give the mouse button information and power.
I'll need software to locate the spots, fix the 4 reference spots relative to each other and then use their locations to triangulate the projected spot from my pointer. It'll then need to use this information so that the pointer on screen moves wherever the pointer spot goes (ideally I'll put the on screen pointer down to a pixel so the laser spot *is* the pointer).
Anyone done this already? If so is there code available to save me some time? Any thoughts on improvements to the plan or problems I may not have thought of?
you from switching between two cards - one on pay as you go, one on your monthly travelcard? There are still a few stations without the readers and you can sometimes get through barriers without swiping but when they close those loopholes they'll have to figure you're still underground somewhere.
Also.... did you know you get unlimited credit on these cards if you put them in the microwave. No really - try it.
As handwriting recognition improves, I can see what you're suggesting being a useful and unobtrusive input device but I wouldn't want much data stored on it except maybe in the very short term. Too easy to lose, too difficult to access.
So great, I've got everything stored on my matchbox-sized widget and the low power light is blinking. How is that helpful?
My mobile is a dinky little thing but its charger doubles the form factor and creates hassle. If it doesn't get a charge for more than a few days it dies - maybe faster if I'm using it a lot. If I'm meant to be accessing this personal server constantly, I doubt it'll last long with a tiny battery - so I'll be constantly plugging it in anyway.
It sounds cool in theory but until there's a way to power it and still keep it small, I can't see it being useful in practice.
Why not go further than batteries? Have a garbage system at home that chews up and retains your waste in a tank. You might use a range of bacteria to do things such as e.g. break down cellulose. Separate out what's worth keeping, filtering and using membranes to purify it. Use the sugars to power your home electrics and the garbageman can pick up compacted solids (or you can simply flush them through the sewers or burn them or dump them on the garden or whatever).
Semms to me that slow release is not such an issue when there's a constant throughput.
1. They worked backwards. ("What is the maximum performance of a laptop battery?", "How small can we make the cell and still beat that?")
2. They looked ahead. ("Do we really want to make this the same size as a standard battery if laptops are going to be slimming down?")
3. They are thinking beyond laptops. ("Hey - why not make it a handy size and then we can standardise it in all sorts of electronics?", "What's a handy size?", "Cell sized!")
4. They wanted it to strike you as fairly ordinary. ("This thing has fuel in it - people will worry", "So does a Bic lighter - people are familiar with them")
What about large corporations which provide their workers with laptops and for whom there might be a reason to pay a premium for extended life and reduced weight, not to mention pose factor. It'd be quite easy to refuel cells centrally so that you can just drop off your dead cells and pick a few more up each time you call into the office. It seems to me that that is where these laptops are going to find their first niche.
I'm surprised to hear anyone say they are this heavily addicted to SWG. So far as I can see it is bland, disappointing mush rather than highly addictive electro-heroine. Witness the scramble to add gambling to the mix to up the addictive quality of the game. The game has been so heavily slated by so many people that it is in danger of imploding as better alternatives hit the market. In a sense this is a shame because if there is one thing to be said in its favour, it is that SWG has the pedigree to kick all others into touch. On the other hand, I'm secretly glad to see the zombies spared a little while longer. It is only a matter of time before these games take over from TV as the opiate of choice. If you're selling your kids to fund your habit now, you're going to be in real trouble when they finally get the formula right.
It's easier to write of $10 dollars as a waste than $50. If you have just shelled out $50 for a game that sucks you will make damn sure you play it a lot in the first month or so just to a) make sure it really does suck and it's not just you being impatient, and b) make yourself feel that you at least tried to get "your money's worth". That period gives you more time to get into the rhythm of the game and makes you more likely to get hooked.
eunuch n. 1. A castrated man employed as a harem attendant or as a functionary in certain Asian courts. 2. A man or boy whose testes are nonfunctioning or have been removed. 3. Informal. An ineffectual, powerless, or unmasculine man.
Seems to me that there is not enough information in the CNN report to say how good a discovery this is. One of the side effects with certain antibiotics is that they kill too much, kill off little hair cells in the guts of your ear and make you go deaf. Nothing is said about the effects of this new drug on the patient.
And anyway, there's already an antibiotic effective against MRSA - I think it's called vancomycin.
The experiment mentions two conserts on the same day and infrasound being switched on and off at intervals during the concert. It's a while since I had to do any stats but that'd provide data for within groups and between groups measures wouldn't it?
There's a problem for fighter pilots called photopic sneeze which affects them when they are suddenly hit in the eyes with bright sunlight and can cause loss of control at high speeds.
Interesting that some guy here mentions a drinking buddy who used to both sneeze and hiccough when out drinking. Wonder how closely these two spasmodic reflexes are linked.
If it looks like dogshit, smells like dogshit, has the texture of dogshit on the plate then I'm not going to put it in my mouth no matter how good you say it tastes.
Things tend to taste good because they are good for you - nature's way of encouraging you to look after yourself. By refining foods, shoving in MSG, salt, sugar and God knows what else you short circuit a system which has evolved to keep you healthy. Cue obesity, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, malnutrition, colonic cancer.
If you shovel junk into your body it will make you ill.
How big are these things, how expensive? Could a smaller, cheaper version (say a one shot, 100m radius pulse) be feasibly mounted in a missile? If so you can use the anti-missile missile to intercept the incoming (a la Patriot) but instead of having to catch the incoming missile with a shrapnel burst, all it needs to do is get within 100m and pulse.
Actually, come to think of it, pack a parachute in your anti-missile missile and it can jettison the 'chute and pulse at the same time. That way you have a potentially reusable weapon that can get incoming equipment way further out than 300m.
A while ago I set up two Hotmail accounts at the same time. One was a long letter string based on my name, the other a much shorter letter/number string. The intention was to use the shorter for junk, the longer for serious emails. Within a week (and before I had even publicised the address) the short one was getting spam. Two years on it was regularly being flooded while the other address got hardly any. It wasn't until I was dumb enough to use the long string address as a contact email for online forms that I started receiving spam on a regular basis and even now it is still a fraction of the short address.
Short addresses are being cracked, longer addresses captured, but much as I love to hate MS I don't believe Hotmail is selling them.
When things develop through evolution it tends to be by a series of small changes, each representing no improvement or a small improvement. This means that although evolution over a long time tends towards a working solution, it doesn't always tend to the best (most efficient) solution. The structure of your eye is a case in point - the blood supply lies in front of the light sensitive cells of the retina.
What may be useful is that the process can find non-intuitive solutions to problems and there is a built in robustness to what emerges. Random variation has to have a wider tightrope to walk or any deviation from the norm would be fatal. Complex evolved systems also tend to have a built in redundancy as they grow out of similar and simpler systems which become interrelated.
Slashdotters may remember a report a year or so old about an evolving robot which developed dragonfly-like flight. Why take a pattern found in nature (photographic the butterfly) and try to work out how it works when you can evolve it directly with a learning system? If you're going to ape evolved systems it seems much more sensible (and easier) to me to ape the process rather than the result.
Slashdot Mirror
In case anyone picked up on my post, I found this over the w/e which looks quite useful. Couple of interesting references cited at the end of the paper.
A planned hack rather than a completed project:
I want to set my box up with a projector so I can use the same screen to browse the Internet, email and watch films/TV. Saves space, looks cool, impresses the girls. Figured I'd use a wireless keyboard and mouse but then also thought maybe I could do better than a wireless mouse.
First thought was a light gun. ACT do one which works as a mouse with a CRT but they don't work on projectors. So that's out. But I have a cunning plan....
I'm intending to set up a small camera on top of the top of the projector, pointing at the projected image. I'll use 4 lasers to pick out the corners of the projected desktop image, which can then be used as reference points relative to the desktop. My mouse will be a modified laser pointer connected by USB to the wireless keyboard to give the mouse button information and power.
I'll need software to locate the spots, fix the 4 reference spots relative to each other and then use their locations to triangulate the projected spot from my pointer. It'll then need to use this information so that the pointer on screen moves wherever the pointer spot goes (ideally I'll put the on screen pointer down to a pixel so the laser spot *is* the pointer).
Anyone done this already? If so is there code available to save me some time? Any thoughts on improvements to the plan or problems I may not have thought of?
(Unsurprisingly I'm running Linux!)
Damn. Beaten to it.
you from switching between two cards - one on pay as you go, one on your monthly travelcard? There are still a few stations without the readers and you can sometimes get through barriers without swiping but when they close those loopholes they'll have to figure you're still underground somewhere. Also.... did you know you get unlimited credit on these cards if you put them in the microwave. No really - try it.
"optionally type in your password"
Why not "click open the pen and sign your name"?
As handwriting recognition improves, I can see what you're suggesting being a useful and unobtrusive input device but I wouldn't want much data stored on it except maybe in the very short term. Too easy to lose, too difficult to access.
Nokia has a Bluetooth pen already I think?
So great, I've got everything stored on my matchbox-sized widget and the low power light is blinking. How is that helpful?
My mobile is a dinky little thing but its charger doubles the form factor and creates hassle. If it doesn't get a charge for more than a few days it dies - maybe faster if I'm using it a lot. If I'm meant to be accessing this personal server constantly, I doubt it'll last long with a tiny battery - so I'll be constantly plugging it in anyway.
It sounds cool in theory but until there's a way to power it and still keep it small, I can't see it being useful in practice.
Why not go further than batteries? Have a garbage system at home that chews up and retains your waste in a tank. You might use a range of bacteria to do things such as e.g. break down cellulose. Separate out what's worth keeping, filtering and using membranes to purify it. Use the sugars to power your home electrics and the garbageman can pick up compacted solids (or you can simply flush them through the sewers or burn them or dump them on the garden or whatever).
Semms to me that slow release is not such an issue when there's a constant throughput.
Possible reasons that occur to me:
1. They worked backwards. ("What is the maximum performance of a laptop battery?", "How small can we make the cell and still beat that?")
2. They looked ahead. ("Do we really want to make this the same size as a standard battery if laptops are going to be slimming down?")
3. They are thinking beyond laptops. ("Hey - why not make it a handy size and then we can standardise it in all sorts of electronics?", "What's a handy size?", "Cell sized!")
4. They wanted it to strike you as fairly ordinary. ("This thing has fuel in it - people will worry", "So does a Bic lighter - people are familiar with them")
5. Headlines
What about large corporations which provide their workers with laptops and for whom there might be a reason to pay a premium for extended life and reduced weight, not to mention pose factor. It'd be quite easy to refuel cells centrally so that you can just drop off your dead cells and pick a few more up each time you call into the office. It seems to me that that is where these laptops are going to find their first niche.
I'm surprised to hear anyone say they are this heavily addicted to SWG. So far as I can see it is bland, disappointing mush rather than highly addictive electro-heroine. Witness the scramble to add gambling to the mix to up the addictive quality of the game. The game has been so heavily slated by so many people that it is in danger of imploding as better alternatives hit the market. In a sense this is a shame because if there is one thing to be said in its favour, it is that SWG has the pedigree to kick all others into touch. On the other hand, I'm secretly glad to see the zombies spared a little while longer. It is only a matter of time before these games take over from TV as the opiate of choice. If you're selling your kids to fund your habit now, you're going to be in real trouble when they finally get the formula right.
"I would love to see a sci-fi-esque ATITD game."
Dune?
It's easier to write of $10 dollars as a waste than $50. If you have just shelled out $50 for a game that sucks you will make damn sure you play it a lot in the first month or so just to a) make sure it really does suck and it's not just you being impatient, and b) make yourself feel that you at least tried to get "your money's worth". That period gives you more time to get into the rhythm of the game and makes you more likely to get hooked.
eunuch n.
1. A castrated man employed as a harem attendant or as a functionary in certain Asian courts.
2. A man or boy whose testes are nonfunctioning or have been removed.
3. Informal. An ineffectual, powerless, or unmasculine man.
Goddam hippies.
VRSA - Vancomycin Resistant S. aureus
h 1/ diseases/activities/activity5_vrsa-database.htm
http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/ni
Seems to me that there is not enough information in the CNN report to say how good a discovery this is. One of the side effects with certain antibiotics is that they kill too much, kill off little hair cells in the guts of your ear and make you go deaf. Nothing is said about the effects of this new drug on the patient.
And anyway, there's already an antibiotic effective against MRSA - I think it's called vancomycin.
The experiment mentions two conserts on the same day and infrasound being switched on and off at intervals during the concert. It's a while since I had to do any stats but that'd provide data for within groups and between groups measures wouldn't it?
YAAAAAAAAAWN!
There's a problem for fighter pilots called photopic sneeze which affects them when they are suddenly hit in the eyes with bright sunlight and can cause loss of control at high speeds. Interesting that some guy here mentions a drinking buddy who used to both sneeze and hiccough when out drinking. Wonder how closely these two spasmodic reflexes are linked.
Try a teaspoon of white sugar with lemon juice poured on top to soak in. Eat it. No more hiccoughs.
Works every time.
What about look, smell, mouthfeel?
If it looks like dogshit, smells like dogshit, has the texture of dogshit on the plate then I'm not going to put it in my mouth no matter how good you say it tastes.
Things tend to taste good because they are good for you - nature's way of encouraging you to look after yourself. By refining foods, shoving in MSG, salt, sugar and God knows what else you short circuit a system which has evolved to keep you healthy. Cue obesity, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, malnutrition, colonic cancer.
If you shovel junk into your body it will make you ill.
Still want sprinkles on that?
How big are these things, how expensive? Could a smaller, cheaper version (say a one shot, 100m radius pulse) be feasibly mounted in a missile? If so you can use the anti-missile missile to intercept the incoming (a la Patriot) but instead of having to catch the incoming missile with a shrapnel burst, all it needs to do is get within 100m and pulse.
Actually, come to think of it, pack a parachute in your anti-missile missile and it can jettison the 'chute and pulse at the same time. That way you have a potentially reusable weapon that can get incoming equipment way further out than 300m.
A while ago I set up two Hotmail accounts at the same time. One was a long letter string based on my name, the other a much shorter letter/number string. The intention was to use the shorter for junk, the longer for serious emails. Within a week (and before I had even publicised the address) the short one was getting spam. Two years on it was regularly being flooded while the other address got hardly any. It wasn't until I was dumb enough to use the long string address as a contact email for online forms that I started receiving spam on a regular basis and even now it is still a fraction of the short address.
Short addresses are being cracked, longer addresses captured, but much as I love to hate MS I don't believe Hotmail is selling them.
>> The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun -- Atticus Finch
Maybe then. Nowadays all you have to do is live in LA.
Sounds cool! Presumably the longer a swarm stays in one place, the better your resolution is likely to get....
F lockin g/FlockingIndex.htm
t ml
Links to AI flocking behaviour resources which might be of interest....
Oxford Uni:
http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/~sumpter/
Craig Reynolds (early boid work):
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
Manchester Uni:
http://www.eng.man.ac.uk/Aero/wjc/Research/
US Airforce:
http://www.vs.afrl.af.mil/News/99-23.h
When things develop through evolution it tends to be by a series of small changes, each representing no improvement or a small improvement. This means that although evolution over a long time tends towards a working solution, it doesn't always tend to the best (most efficient) solution. The structure of your eye is a case in point - the blood supply lies in front of the light sensitive cells of the retina.
What may be useful is that the process can find non-intuitive solutions to problems and there is a built in robustness to what emerges. Random variation has to have a wider tightrope to walk or any deviation from the norm would be fatal. Complex evolved systems also tend to have a built in redundancy as they grow out of similar and simpler systems which become interrelated.
Slashdotters may remember a report a year or so old about an evolving robot which developed dragonfly-like flight. Why take a pattern found in nature (photographic the butterfly) and try to work out how it works when you can evolve it directly with a learning system? If you're going to ape evolved systems it seems much more sensible (and easier) to me to ape the process rather than the result.