Programmers Anonymous notes, 1001

Awseome protogeek photo.


Recursion Weekly, with recursive QR code.


Nice in depth article about the development of the SX-70, Edwin Land's vision for instant photography. Compares how Land and Steve Jobs viewed development and marketing of technology:

Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible A man, a company, and the most wildly ambitious consumer-electronics device of its era. By Harry McCracken

Quad core tablets for gaming will also be useful for image processing.

Nvidia touts quad-core Kal-El chip in Android tablet

 
Bill Griggs post about Minibloq, describing the graphical programming interface for Arduino.


"They're Made out of Meat", a thought provoking and hilarious movie short. Sean Michael Regan comments:

Bre Pettis showed me this video, which dates from at least four years ago and is derived from a short story by Terry Bisson, at Bay Area Maker Faire 2011 last weekend, and I can’t stop giggling over it. The video shows more than a smidge of Twin Peaks styling, plus a nod to aliens Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons (“We are merely exchanging long protein strings…”) at the end.

The good bad and ugly sides of computer science as a passion and college major; commentary from the NY Times' "Computer Science's 'Sputnik Moment'?":

Cyberspace is the anytime, anywhere laboratory where you can design and run your own experiments by writing just a little software. It’s affordable by anyone with access to the Internet. And each piece of software is an individual’s expression of creativity, much like poetry or music. Computer science can be fun and empowering.
...
Computational thinking facilitates the invention and manipulation of abstractions (e.g., algorithms), which is central to managing complexity and building scalable systems. Students know that by majoring in computer science, they will have an edge over those without those skills. They will be in high demand by all sectors, not just by information technology companies. (Jeannette M. Wing, head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University)

Katy Snyder again: "You should not use introductory computer science courses as filters (to wash out students) but as launching pads." For sure, serious intellectual demands and "concentrating on the practical applications of computer science" can help a lot. But from the starting point of a practical application course focus, I would like to hear about some creative teaching practices aimed at helping undergraduates find the courage to dig deep. Hard work and play can co-exist.(John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., was editor in chief of Technology and Culture from 1995 to 2010. He is assistant to the president for mission and identity at the University of Detroit Mercy)

I have firsthand experience in the individualistic, “let’s see who can code the shortest, most obscure-program to do x” cowboy culture of programming. That culture is unappealing to many women -- as well as many men. I can only wonder how much of the repeated, massive failure of large software development systems is related to such bad practices and the weeding out of the very kind of people who could help counterbalance them. (Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

I don't see a downside to unironic Bronydom. From Wired: 

"My Little Pony Corrals Unlikely Fanboys Known as ‘Bronies’"

Rhinestone meme toaster.

Boring magazine

For Boing-Boing design contest:

Programmers Anonymous notes, 1000

 "While other visitors gazed at the workings of the beautiful instrument with the sort of expression, and I dare say the sort of feeling, that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking-glass or hearing a gun - if indeed, they had a strong an idea of its marvelousness - Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention."  Augustus De Morgan commenting on Ada Lovelace (then Miss Byron) on the occasion of Ada's first introduction to Charles Babbage's difference engine, on June 5, 1833. (from Lovelace met Babbage on this day 1833)

Tiny blinking lights:

We wrote, installed and tested a program that controls an embedded processor (an Arduino Mega 2560), a general purpose computer on a chip. The program caused the device to signal "Hello world!" in a way I understand; tiny blinking lights. A brilliant twinkling, because if you can blink some lights any way you want, just about anything can be controlled.

Far more sophisticated computers are now common -- for example any cell phone. But this one is designed to be inexpensive, easy to program, open source with open hardware design, and has flexible I/O with external digital or analog electronic devices. This particular microcontoller is also hooked up to a physical interface (hardware parts) and firmware designed for serial communication with Android controlled devices. It is suitable for use as the executive control system of a robot brain. The whole package is a beta version of the Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) (also see Why Google Choosing Arduino Matters and is This the End of “Made for iPod” (TM)?).

An ADK Arduino device might be called an "Android accessory", because it can be controlled by an Android device (like a smart-phone running an Android operating system). Here is a short video of the DemoKit Android application showing bi-directional communication between a handheld Android device and an ADK device. 

But because the ADK device is configured as a USB host controller, it is the Arduino that controls the Android device. So an Android device is actually an accessory to the ADK device.

This example doesn't communicate with Android at all, running alone on the ADK Arduino device.

Here's the ADK device's top side (left), the device with a red and blue light blinking, and the device swept across the camera frame to show that the lights are on for brief periods and with changing relative color (each circle is illuminated by two LEDs, red and blue):

Blinking lights are a central element of physics (a photon is the smallest and briefest blinking light) and a wide range of technologies (for example telecommunication and video monitors). They happen to be close to my heart and work. I've spent a lot of time in the last decade blinking lights in front of people and seeing how their brains blink back. Conceptually everything from motors, to packets, to robots, to the nervous system of animals is composed of, among other things, tiny blinking lights.

Anyone is welcome to borrow this kit for tinkering. The Arduino part is cheap, available, and all that is required, except for extra LEDs, motors, etc.. If you make a robot for me I'll buy you an extra microcontroller and board in exchange.

Did I mention that the hardware and firmware is open source? While this kit, designed and commissioned by Google, is expensive and not currently available, anyone is free to make compatible devices. And they already have. For example, Seeeduino ADK Provides Inexpensive Android Open Accessory Kit Alternative for $80.


Collatz conjecture proven?:

A while back (see Collatz conjecture and binary palindromes) we looked at patterns in the 3n + 1 problem. A while back Paul Erdős famously said of the Collatz conjecture that "Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems". Now Gerhard Opfer, a (former) student of Lothar Collatz, has submitted a paper purporting to prove the conjecture. I don't understand the methods or the proof, and it hasn't been peer reviewed yet. Here's a brief news item about the result, "Deceptive puzzle may be solved after 74 years". 



Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure


Spherical cat in space (or Lady's lunar emulation):

Programmer Anonymous notes, 111

"Marry Skype's software with the Xbox Kinect and an HD television set, and Microsoft can make a powerful argument for getting into millions of living rooms." Tim Webber commenting on Microsoft's acquisition of Skype.

A lattice on a tesseract with a dimension of 4x4x4x4 has 256 points. If each point is associate with a data value (1 bit), 256 bits are accomodated. Tesseracts have 24 cubic faces, in this case with a dimension of 4x4x4. If a parity bit is assigned to every 4-tuple  in the tesseract (12 cubes of parity bits, one cube for each pair of faces), there will be 6*4^3 = 768 parity bits. So 1024 bits can encode 256 data bits with the ability to detect and correct many transmission errors. How many? This is not as efficient as some Hamming codes, but its structure is beautiful.

Programmer Anonymous notes, 110

ilearnedtoprogram.com - Share the Story of Why and How You Learned to Program

...

"in college, when I realized I could have a big impact on the world by building software with a focus on humanity." - Vanessa Hurst
"because I believed (and still do) that it's one of the best skills to have in order to change people's lives for the better." Alyssa Daw
"when I wanted a piano and got an Atari -- programmed the keys to make sounds." Katie A. Siek
"because I wanted to make interactive electronic literature." - Zuzana Husarova
"because I wanted to build cool things. Now that's my job." - Alex Gaynor
...

Multiplayer High, by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

Listen to anyone talk about schools today: classical education just can't keep up. In the digital generation's world of constant change, most schooling is profoundly boring. But what else is possible?

About this essay,  jdparadise comments:

So, in a word, give or take: Montessori.

Shannon's Law, by Cory Doctorow
A recent short story for anthology. Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electronic engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory".^[1]

The title is a reference to the Shannon–Hartley theorem:

...a bound on the maximum amount of error-free digital data (that is, information) that can be transmitted with a specified bandwidth in the presence of the noise interference ...

The story includes a short cryptogram, and a shorter cryptic numerical puzzle (not the same thing). I have reason to believe (aesthetic reason) both wouldn't be hard to crack.

Doctorow has also written about metacrap.


Alan Turing Statue Passes Dog's Turing Test:
Border collie is baffled by stubborn old man who refuses to play. Said old man is actually a statue of Alan Turing, which has seemingly passed the dog's own meager Turing test.



Robots learning to share

Robot Evolution: EPFL and the University of Lausanne team up to explore Hamilton's law of kin selection. Published in PLoS on May 3rd, 2011, biology and robotics come together to help understand how altruistic genes get passed on from one generation to the next. To learn more about the labs: http://lis.epfl.ch and http://www.unil.ch/dee/page6763.html

Once the team was comfortable with the virtual evolution environment it had set up, it added a new twist: It allowed the robots to share food disks with each other. If Hamilton's hypothesis was correct, "successful" virtual robots were likely to be those that were closely related and shared food with each other; that would help to ensure that at least one of them -- and some of the genes of both--would make it to the next round. (Two robots with a modest amount of food disks would both be more likely to be cut from the simulation, but if one robot gave all of its food to a second robot, that second robot would likely make the next round.) And indeed, altruism quickly evolved in the simulation, with greater food-sharing in groups where robots were more related, the researchers report online today in PLoS Biology. The more closely related the robots, the quicker they cooperated. "It shows how general the [theory] is, whether you are an insect, a human or a robot," says Floreano.

Programmers Anonymous notes, 101

On the obliqueness of scientific inquiry:

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve" Max Planck

Class oblique clownage:
veggieman's no sdfjklsdiocjioji comics: 

besht shtory evar
this is the cool 
ohm ygo d

Griffin's c=c+1:

Math Limericks Revisited

     - Klein bottle
     - Seven Bridges of Königsberg

We talked about the development of ARPANET, and Paul Baran's 30 extraodinarily accurate 1971 prophecies. We just missed the opening of a historic site in internet history:

Join me April 9th at UCLA for Obscura Day! I'll be hosting an event with Brad Fidler and Leonard Kleinrock in the room where the first Internet message was sent in 1969!

Come be one of the very first to rediscover the room where the Internet was born. Almost forgotten in history and used for years as an unremarkable classroom at UCLA, it will reopen as a museum this July. Get there first and stand in the very spot that the first modem sent the first message ever, and see photos and documents from those first days of the Internet that have been lost to obscurity for decades.

CS 226: Statistical Techniques in Robotics (Stanford) has good list of project reports/notebooks on robot navigation and mapping, primarily using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques and tools. 

The course should be of interest to anyone seeking to develop robust robot software, and anyone who is interested in real-world applications of statistical theory. Students participating in this course will acquire the skill of developing robust software for robots operating in real-world environments, and understanding the mathematical underpinnings of their software. Even though this course focuses on mobile robotics, the techniques covered in this course apply to a much brooder range of embedded computer systems, equipped with sensor and actuators.

Jacob is irked by the poor website design, in particular the dynamic menu that must be chased like one is playing whack-a-mole. This is only a problem if the font size is increased from the default size, which old people like me tend to do. I would suggest he contact the professor (Sebastian Thrun) directly, and politely, but his FAQ notes that:

I sent you information by Email - Didn't you read my mail? This has become a problem. At present, I receive between 150 and 400 personal Email messages per day. Even if I quit my job and stop sleeping, I wouldn't be able to answer all of them. I am willing to spend up to two hours a day on Email. This means that I am not even able to read the majority of my Email. I realize yours might be one of those that I am unable to read, and I hope you accept my sincere apologies. On the flip side, if I only did Email all day and nothing else, would you really want to talk to me?

He was probably using some Stanford boilerplate course page material. A more recent Thrun course page, CS221 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, appears to have the same deficiency.

Thrun is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). He led the development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which is exhibited in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.  Stanley is relatively low budget autonomous vehicle created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). The DARPA  win came with 2 million dollar prize, the largest prize money in robotic history.

The PBS' NOVA show on the DARPA Grand Challenge is spine-tinglingly geeky and entertaining. The meek (drive-by-wire VW Passat vs. tricked out Hummer) shall inherit the earth.

Progammers Anonymous notes, 100

From Register Guard, "Physics Slam gives public inside look at science":

The country’s first-ever Physics Slam will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Room 150 of Columbia Hall on the University of Oregon campus.

It is free and open to the public.

Six physicists from throughout the country will compete in the event. Each will get 12 minutes to describe a topic in particle physics in a way that the audience can understand.

...

The Physics Slam winner will be chosen by popular acclaim, as determined by applause.

And because these are scientists, they’re not taking anyone’s word for who gets the most.

The judge will be a scientific instrument, a decibel meter, that will determine whose presentation is the biggest hit.

The event is being held in conjunction with the 2011 Linear Collider Workshop of the Americas, which is being hosted by UO physics professor Jim Brau and the UO’s Center for High Energy Physics. It will bring more than 200 scientists to Eugene to discuss the design and experiments for a future linear particle collider.

[Post mortem: Huge crowd, overflow room was overflowing. More than the usual problems plugging in video. I found the talks much less than inspiring. Pie charts? Stock stereotypes of scientists? Sexist metaphors along side old and tired metaphors? Really? There's some great stuff in modern physics, but I didn't see anyone show it off.]


We talked a bit about Fermat's principle and quantum electrodynamics (QED) related to the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Sec Narf mentioned a story in which dreams changed reality, "The Lathe of Heaven" (1971), by Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin, one of the most influential science fiction and fantasy authors, has lived in Portland OR since 1958, and The Lathe of Heaven takes place in Portland:

George Orr, a draftsman, has long been abusing drugs to prevent himself from having "effective" dreams, which retroactively change reality. After having one of these dreams, the new reality is the only reality for everyone else, but George retains memory of the previous reality. Under threat of being placed in an asylum, Orr is forced to undergo "voluntary" psychiatric care for his drug abuse.

George begins attending therapy sessions with an ambitious psychiatrist and sleep researcher named William Haber. Orr claims that he has the power to dream "effectively" and Haber, gradually coming to believe it, seeks to use George's power to change the world. His experiments with a biofeedback/EEG machine, nicknamed the Augmentor, enhance Orr's abilities and produce a series of increasingly intolerable alternate worlds, based on an assortment of utopian (and dystopian) premises familiar from other science fiction works.

The notion of using EEG for biofeedback (neurofeedback), and even for direct control of physical objects (brain-computer interface), has recently seen a resurgence of interest.




Noam Chomsky will speak at the University of Oregon:

“Global Hegemony: The Facts, The Images.”, Wednesday, April 20, 7 p.m. in Columbia 150, free and open to the public.

Chomsky is an interesting speaker on a wide range of topics, from philosophy to the nitty-gritty of foreign policy. While recently his focus is usually on politics from a libertarian socialist viewpoint, his linguistic work has had a direct effect on psychology, computing, computer languages, and the notion of computability.

In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as universal grammar, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms."^[9]

For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; and genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

Computer languages are now understood as parts of the Chomsky hierarchy, which partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before.

Computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "…I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 … Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".

Jacob's no sdfjklsdiocjiojc "these was them days" (comic).

"If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics." Galileo Galilei

Abstruse Goose, "The Frontier" (comic). Every one of Abstruse Goose is worth a read.

Happy Half Tau Day!

The π is a lie… Happy Half Tau Day!

Large earthquakes happen in the Pacific Northwest

They aren't frequent, only about once every 300-900 years, but it's been a while since the last megathrust earthquake. Smaller earthquakes near population centers also can cause devastation. It takes decades of attention, building, planning and practice to mitigate risks for large unusual events.

Pacific Northwest Faces Nearly Identical Risks to Japanese Quake

"This is an earthquake of the same type, with about the same magnitude and proximity that we face here in the Pacific Northwest from the Cascadia Subduction Zone. What you are seeing in Japan today is what you will also see in our future. Except they are better prepared than we are." Robert Yeats, Oregon State University

Programmers Anonymous notes, 11

The future, for a little while anyway is a list of state of the art computer graphics animations from 1988 through the present. Every one pushed the boundaries of what could be done at the time. Game developer Crashproof posted a thoughtful comment on Boing Boing speculating about the future of  computer graphics (emphasis mine):

1. Mobile devices will catch up to a large extent with consoles and gaming PCs -- though speed is limited by wattage, heat, and the need to keep parts tiny and cheap.
2. Technology revolutions in graphics will focus more on content creation than on pure rendering power. It's the art rather than the tech that really makes a game look good now, and that will become increasingly more true -- but authoring is expensive, slow, and a giant pain in the ass. Some clever folks will solve these problems and make boatloads of money.
3. Hardware companies are going to keep trying to push the envelope but the hardware will become more commodity-like anyway. If a $800 video card that requires its own power supply performs 8% better than a $50 video card and has a couple of features that no games will ever actually use... yeah.
4. The current 3D/stereoscopy fad will mostly fizzle out again. Occasional movies and games will use it to good effect, and others will use it as a stupid gimmick, pretty much like always. The Nintendo 3DS isn't going to change the world any more than the Virtual Boy did.
X. Minecraft and the Bit.Trip games and many others show that graphics fidelity/quality/complexity/etc. are not synonymous with game quality or even how *good* the game can look. (Arguably, WoW has always been the same, with an intentionally chosen lo-fi cartoony art style that eases the burden on their graphics engine.) Technology takes the back seat.

Fantastic Dover Computability Book Cover, "Computability and Unsolvability" by Martin Davis. From the big box computing days "when two columns of data could crush a programmer’s head."

The most widely-studied models of computability are the Turing-computable and μ-recursive functions, and the lambda calculus, all which have computationally equivalent power. Other forms of computability are studied as well: computability notions weaker than Turing machines are studied in automata theory, while computability notions stronger than Turing machines are studied in the field of hypercomputation.


WebGL is a Web-based Graphics Library that uses the same ideas as OpenGL, and is maintained by the same company (the non-profit Khronos Group). It extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser.
WebGL is a context of the canvas HTML element that provides a 3D computer graphics API without the use of plug-ins. Google Body is a good example of using WebGL, a website which allows user to navigate through 3D anatomical model of human body.

We talked a while back about the surprising complexity of rock-paper-scissor strategy. Here's a web interface to an intelligent machine player. Don't be discouraged if you don't do well, as the machine has more experience (and uses accurate statistics).

For those with a geometric bent, magnetic ball porn.



Sec Narf sent me several pages of interest:

A link on this Interactive Mathematics page points to a small set of Math in computer games descriptions. Most are examples we've used or touched on, and not difficult. They use standard geometric diagrams, so there are not good hints on what the math looks like translated into code.

The mathematics of rotation is something we've used, but only implemented as code in 2-D. Generally rotation functions are already available, and are called as functions. But the math techniques are worth knowing, and most everyone gets a taste for the 2-D versions in trigonometry. The 3-D versions are very important, used in every physical science. Rotations / translations are represented by matrices, and matrix operations are used to implement rotations / translations  (special cases of linear transforms). This is a large part of the field of linear algebra. We've already done a lot of linear algebra, just not in the formal way it is taught and not using the formal notation and syntax of written math.

The Pac-Man Dossier, by Jamey Pittman, is a small on-line book with more than I thought was known about the history, complex behavior, quirks, and general knowledge of Pac-Man. More here than I thought was known about the game, including more mysteries.

What design and AI lessons can we learn from Namco's seminal Pac-Man? From history through behavior, Gamasutra presents a comprehensive Jamey Pittman-authored guide to the classic game.

Someone made a Minecraft server largely dedicated to classic game characters -- monolithic memorials to 8-bit animatrons. The link minecraft-pixel-art-sculptures is currently broken, but maybe it will get fixed.