randform

update 22.02.2011: the above image is a still from the below referenced film.

From the SDSS homepage:

SDSS is systematically mapping a quarter of the entire sky, producing a detailed image of it and determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects. It is also measuring the distances to a million of the nearest galaxies, giving us a three-dimensional picture of the universe through a volume one hundred times larger than that explored to date. SDSS is also recording the distances to 100,000 quasars — the most distant objects known — giving us unprecedented knowledge of the distribution of matter to the edge of the visible universe.

youtube link

Modern microprocessors have facilities to gather statistical information about how branches in a program are taken. (more…)

Today just another interesting scientific link this time about common sense:

The MIT Media Lab has embarked on an effort to give computers and other modern devices “common sense”, the capacity to understand and reason about the world as intimately as people do. By giving machines common sense, they will finally be able to understand people, our goals and typical problems, and they will be able to better assist us in solving them or coming to terms with them–thus simplifying and humanizing the technology and tools of the digital age.

For those unfamiliar with the problem of giving computers common sense:
->the Newcomer’s Guide to Commonsense Computing will help
Also
->visit the Open Mind Common Sense web site to get a first hand sense of the problem!

Way back in the beginning nineties the math department had a graphics supercomputer: (more…)

LiVES is an open source (of course) video editing and vj-ing tool. It allows for a way more playfull approach to video manipulation than say cinelerra which probably comes closest to apples final cut pro or Premiere pro on Linux systems. Have a look at the demos for lives (the image above is taken from the first demo by salsaman).

I finally managed to translate my article for the conference proceedings of the NMI2006 conference from german into english. There are a few additions, which are not included in the german version.

The article is a description of our installation seidesein. It gives an account on our motivations for creating seidesein but it explains a bit also our motivation for other daytar works.

The article is for download >>here or directly via the seidesein page.

I am very grateful for any feedback on this article.

The interested randform reader knows that we are always on the look for fancy
input devices.

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Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is computer software designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner or a digitizer) into machine processable text. OCR is e.g. commercially used in PDA’s However “handwritten” characters do not need to be constrained to letters or simple symbols but could also be more complex shapes, if necessary also in 3D. The recognition of such shapes can also be interpreted as gesture recognition.

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water again: water simulations are cool. However the big question is: WHAT IS A SIMULATION? I.e. at what point do we accept a thing to look physically realistic? Do we want it to look realistic?

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I am thread safe – i.e. I am still keeping water as a subject after the last post. However I have to say that I find this rollerskating robot from Hirose robotics lab actually cooler as the above swimming snake robot. yes – its almost as cool as the famous boston mule.

strongly recommended: Hirose lab movie gallery
this is not really a follow up post to this old dainty walker randform post :).