G-Fav's Meanderings in Science, Business, and Art

Last-minute gift ideas for clever 4-6 yr olds

2011-12-18T15:42:00.003-05:00

Hi!

I'll spare you the one-sentence descriptions. Ideas for holiday gifts for the just-past-little ones:

Toysmith 4M Tin Can Robot [amazon]

Quirkle [amazon]

Hardy Boys

Rory's Story Cubes [amazon]

Howtoons [amazon]

Alex My Art Spinner [amazon]

a bracelet-making kit

Milan art kits [Milan - click "products" etc]

a visit to Parts and Crafts [Somerville]

Praxinoscope kit [amazon]

Strobotop Lightphase Animator [amazon]

box of assorted, instruction-less Legos

chess board

a visit to a planetarium

Lincoln Logs [amazon]

Playmobil Large pirate ship [$! amazon]

...any other ideas?

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Google Street View Car up-close

2011-12-08T13:08:00.005-05:00

Hey map-or-optics-lovers,

What's got 15 cameras, three laser scanners, and a very friendly driver? The Google Street View car, which took a little rest this afternoon near the offices of Optics for Hire (Arlington, MA).

This is Almina, who is in the midst of driving west from Boston in towards Arlington and beyond. Her co-worker's car's cameras bumped into something, so Almina is covering any missed areas. There are black non-slip treads on the car's roof because, every morning, Almina walks up onto the car and sets the system up. At night, she covers the optics and has to be careful about the weather. Sometimes, she is asked to drive under underpasses that are too low for the vehicle. Just to be safe, she drives certain routes in her own car before carefully re-driving the route in the Street View car. She said the overpass at the Esplanade is too too low for the car.

The car is sporting 15 or so cameras and what I think are three Class 1 laser-based depth scanners. Peering inside the window, I could see a few computers, a router, and other stuff. A wide bank of cables enters the passenger-side rear window through a couple of big connectors.

Her next mission? Wait for the snow, because Google wants her to drive around to show people "snowy New England."

Here's a neat behind-the-scenes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_lTKDu0IY&feature=player_embedded

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How to fix " Windows Update cannot currently check for updates because... "

2011-11-08T09:16:00.002-05:00

Note to self (and anyone else searching for help) -

DISCLAIMER: THIS WORKED FOR ME BUT MIGHT NOT WORK FOR YOU. BACK UP YOUR DATA.

I run a Lenovo T400 ThinkPad with Windows 7 Professional. I have been using Acronis to perform image and file backups. Following a hard drive crash (of a 500 MB Western Digital drive), I put in a brand new 500 MB Western Digital drive and managed to do an image restore and file restore.

After slogging through various bugs (which I am too bleary-eyed to recall), I kept hitting two vexing problems:

1. Windows wouldn't update. I'd get an error message saying that "Windows Update cannot currently check for updates because the update service is not running," and

2. From time to time, Windows was convinced that somehow I wasn't running an authentic version of windows, even though the "it's authentic!" seal appeared in My Computer: Properties.

What worked?

I followed the advice on this Microsoft forum http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_update/error-code-0xc8000247-cant-install-updates/198166df-9549-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5?page=2

which suggested I go to this particular-language HP driver site to download something called "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" to fix an issue with users of Western Digital Drives: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c02219204&lc=en&cc=uk&destPage=document&dlc=en&product=

What didn't work (or, rather, what didn't seem to help)?

Rebooting
Installing a ton of Lenovo ThinkVantage updates (actually this seemed only to cause a new problem related to an ATI video driver)
Turning off the update service, deleting the contents of a particular Windows folder, and restarting the update service
Generally freaking out at 11 pm

Anyway, I hope Google finds this post so that more Western Digital / Acronis customers find the solution.

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See Gregg's Bookmarks

2011-08-19T21:19:00.004-04:00

I have a "Read Later" folder in my browser. You know: you're at work, you notice something interesting, you swipe it to a "read later" folder which only gets visited at 12.30am in obscure hotels in the wrong time zone on some business trip.

Scott Kirsner has a "read Scott's email" blog. In the spirit of that, here's a "See Gregg's Bookmarks" post.

BUILDING NEAT STUFF / PRODUCT DESIGN

Hack a Day
Cool light-oriented product designer: Right Brain Electronics LLC
Weather balloon space probes [Make]
Electronic circuit design for beginners
Cool animated LED art (though lately NSFW)
A cat-cam "CatEye"

STARTUPS (or, "young companies lacking vowels")

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Boston Tech Community 2011
Steve Blank's startup tools and blogs - massive list
"How I raised $24k on kickstarter"
(literally) Killer Elevator Pitches [MIT YouTube]
How VCs value startups differently than entrepreneurs (Tricks)
"The story of General Computer" (my former landlord was the MIT student who co-invented Ms. Pac Man)

FUN & GAMES

Alternate Reality Games (Sean Stewart)
Modern Interactive Fiction
Dr Toy's best kid's toys (2009)

PATENTS / PATENT LAW

New type of patent auction: "covenant not to sue" [PatentNews]

SELF-HELP / LIFE OPTIMIZATION / LIFESTYLE ENGINEERING

Michael Nagle on dichotomy: indulging passions vs. detaching
Inside David Foster Wallace's private self-help library [theawl.org]
Fooled by Randomness: "Why I Walk" (from The Black Swan)
Why kids get sicker at night [CNN]
"Not being here now"

MATH / ENGINEERING / SCIENCE

LANL paper, "Life Cycle of a Minimal Protocell - A Dissipative Particle Dynamics Study"
Gigantic PDF of the complete blueprints of the Clock of the Long Now
Web help for Mathematica 3 (!! 3 !!)
Fundamentals of holographic data storage [Madrid]
Prakash: Lighting-aware motion capture [MIT Media Lab]
MITRE "modified light field architecture for reconfigurable multimode imaging"
[EDGE] A short course on synthetic genomics
Perception: see lots of colors despite there being very few... [Land]
How plants grow rings of branches: New Kind of Science pg 410
Beal / Bachrach "infrastructure for engineered emergence on sensor / actuator networks" [PDF / CSAIL]

CRAVE - STUFF TO BUY

Boston Acoustics - budget audiophile speaker

WEB TOOLS / TIPS

How to jump ship from GoDaddy to a better host
Screencap: Camtasia
Building a quick website, RISD (2010) tips
Transvideo studios
The anatomy of a perfect landing page

POP CULTURE / MISANTHROPY

[CNN.com] Why on earth are the Kardashians famous?
Yes - live performance of "Changes" [YouTube]
Remember these stickers from the 1970s? WACKY PACKAGES!
In defense of the "Jump the shark" episode
A big trend in sunglasses
TV appearance of Lincoln assassination witness (!?) a 96 yr-old in 1956

FOOD

Boston Globe: Great Donuts
Chasing the perfect cup of coffee with science

BOOKS N STUFF

ART / MUSIC

And, a really cool "evolution timechart," from the Economist, h/t Maximizing Progress.

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Some good nonfiction

2011-07-11T22:07:00.004-04:00

Hello -

From time to time, friends ask me to recommend good nonfiction. No problem! Here are a few books that have survived the "still glad I read 'em" test a few years later. The focus here is on science and art. (The foci?)

You are not a gadget: a manifesto (J. Lanier). Staying human in a world of Web 2.0-accelerated info-surfing and ambient friend-hood. And octopi.

Consilience: the unity of knowledge (E. O. Wilson). Scientists and humanitarians, unite! Learned lots about the history of science, and I loved the book despite the core message's inability to really hit home.

This is Modern Art (M. Collings) If you even just-sort-of like contemporary art, this book is an awesome, friendly introduction to its many flavors and personalities. Don't know why it averages only 3 stars.

The visual display of quantitative information (E. Tufte) The standard book of good and bad information depiction.

Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion (R. Cialdini) How to know when you're being manipulated, or, a handbook on how to manipulate others.

Learn to Play Go (J. Kim) 'nuff said.

Optics (E. Hecht) "Hey Gregg, what's a good book on optics for someone who's taken calculus?" This one!

Godel, Escher, Bach (D. Hofstader) You seriously haven't read this yet? Go learn some links between patterns, music, DNA, and predicate calculus (or whatever it's called). I only made it 50% through, but when I walked into a cafe with it under my arm, I met a nice woman, and we got married! So, there's that.

Prometheus Rising (R. A. Wilson) Forgive its trippy LSD tone. A book about the various stages of mind, which helps you understand everything from why we swear, to how brainwashing and military indoctrination works, to various forms of enlightenment.

Sync: how order emerges from chaos... (S. H. Strogatz) Complex systems and synchrony, from fireflies to lasers. (See also his textbook on nonlinear dynamic systems.)

Games People Play (E Berne) Try to get your hands on this 1965 paperback that diagrams typical conversational patterns and the child/parent levels from which they originate. Neat stuff!

The Discoveries (A Lightman) Get this! The stories of a handful of awesome 20th century discoveries - and - for real - the journal articles in which they were announced. So cool!

A course in mathematics for students of physics (Bamberg) A Harvard textbook from linear algebra and calculus to differential forms and some really minimal-looking expression of Maxwell's equations. I kid you not, I got this in 1995 and am still reading it.

Dark hero of the information age: in search of Norbert Wiener the father of cybernetics (F Conway) Kids these days. They just don't know that uncle Norbert invented essentially everything.

A People's History of the United States (H Zinn). I am the only person around here who hasn't read this book. Well, I read one chapter. Now I know that the people who came and took North America were really quite mean.

Benton's SPIE milestone series on selected fundamental papers in three-dimensional display (SPIE Press) is just incredible. If you like 3-D display technology. And if you are into that sort of thing, Barry Blundell has a great collection of books which dive deep into the history of display technologies. And I'm not just saying that because I wrote the Forward to one of them.

Two books I read recently and enjoyed were:

The 4-Hour Workweek and Just Listen: the secret to getting through to absolutely anyone.

Finally, I am in the middle of What Technology Wants, which suggests that our technologies have been evolving in ways similar to organisms. An enjoyable read (for its various historical and trendline anecdotes) so far.

What are some of your favorites?

G-Fav

New tools for entrepreneurs who make (real, tangible) things (out of atoms)

2011-06-27T22:15:00.002-04:00

Hello -

Websites. Mobile. Deal-aggregators. Game layers on life. Blah, blah, blah. What if you want to create and sell a product made of stuff or light?

Entrepreneurs getting into the hardware game have a few tools in 2011 that make it easier than it was, say, in 2005:

GrabCAD turns mechanical concepts from napkin sketches (or better) into professionally designed-and-reviewed mechanical drawings for prototype. [note: I haven’t tried ‘em]
Optics for Hire turns your optical wish into a prototyped reality. LED light-shaping? Medical device? Zoom lens? Done. They do the optical design, and if you want, the mechanical design. And the electronics. [note: I work for Optics for Hire, but I wouldn’t if I didn’t believe in it]
KiCAD is open-source schematic capture.
Many firms offer rapid protoyping “personal factories” – AlphaPrototypes, Ponoko, QuickParts, just Google it.

How do you market-test your idea, make a logo, and launch a website? 4-Hour Workweek has some ideas:

Goodle AdWords, which is wildly useful
Shopify – instant e-commerce websites
99designs.com – logos, websites, and other designed-stuff from a crowd of artists hoping to get your dollars
Elance.com – outsource artwork, copywriting, and coding
ODesk – even more outsourcing: code, writing, engineering, design

What would you add?

G-Fav

Projection Summit 2011: Green lasers, “green” projectors, and etendue

2011-06-14T20:53:00.001-04:00

Hello from the Orlando office -

This week’s Projection Summit 2011, an Insight Media event, offered a good view of topics of current interest to the A/V professional. (And by “A/V professional,” I mean: people who design digital projectors, buy digital projectors, make the guts of digital projectors, or love the Earth sufficiently to only buy digital projectors that don’t, you know, screw up our little planet.)

Normally I attend conferences like SPIE-IS&T SD&A, or SID, for their 3-D technical content. I was invited to speak at PS2011, and this was my first time attending.

The conference’s Agenda provides abstracts of each talk, so I won’t repeat that. Instead, here’s an overview, and an informal bullet point list of some key take-aways.

(Those take-aways are conveniently provided after this photograph of the impressively chocolatey brownies served at PS2011:)

So, what was covered at PS2011?

Autostereo 3D, emphasizing “light field displays:” OFH’s and Zecotek’s time-domain view-scanning systems, and Holografika’s advances in multi-projector 3-D display.
Tiled displays and stereoscopic projection (ROAM, Scalable, XpanD, Lightspeed Design, Brawn)
Projector components, emphasizing microdisplays, geometry-correction silicon, MEMS, and LEDs
Low-power Green Laser (Panel discussion). I learned too late that “green” here meant… the color green: #00FF00, 520 nm, you know.
Projectors in Education
Green AV (in which “green” meant earth-friendly)
Laser-based digital cinema

What were some key takeaways?

Gregg Favalora is a brilliant public speaker, and I understand he might be available for paid engagements on topics as diverse as: autostereoscopic display. With the deftness of an Olympic gymnast and the slight-of-hand of… oh, who am I kidding.
According to one speaker, JVC seems to be the gold standard of home 3D projection. (I have not heard this comment elsewhere.)
According David Chechelashvili of XpanD, the US stereo market is dominated by passive eyewear, Europe and Asia use active. So far.
Chris Ward of Lightspeed Design announced a new modulator with very fast rise- / fall-times for passive stereo projection.
Jonathan Brawn, who is well-known as an educator in A/V circles, is a really compelling speaker. Here, he explored the difficulties in designing projection systems optimized both for 2-D and 3-D, one of which requires different gain than the other.
Syndiant’s CTO, Karl Guttag, voiced a popular sentiment of Projection Summit – green (as in the color) lasers are a critical need in the world of projector components because of their etendue. (I knew I’d get that word in there somehow.)
I could listen to Luminus Devices’ Andrei Kazmierski talk for hours about LEDs (honest). Excited to see continued advances from this MASSACHUSETTS-BASED LED fabricator.
Ten lashes with a wet noodle for not knowing beforehand who William “Bo” Coggshall was, an eloquent industry analyst in the world of large-screen display. Also, props to a guy who synchronizes his wardrobe with his corporate logo. He discussed the market saturation of educational “interactive whiteboards and interactive projectors” (e.g. SMART Technology); UK & US is nearing saturation, and there’s a big opportunity in developing markets. Evidently there is a not-quite-closed tender in Turkey for 600k units…
Len Scrogan gave a fascinating talk about his efforts to guide Boulder, CO’s schools in testing the efficacy of stereoscopic projection. (Test scores have improved, behavior has improved, and kids with vision problems have gone to eye doctors and improved.) See: http://edtechfuture-talk.blogspot.com/ and www.3deyehealth.org .
Educators (who genuinely care about helping the earth) and large corporations (who might, but who also care about avoiding bad PR) want their new digital projectors to be eco-friendly. Does that mean the bulbs are recyclable? That the projectors lack Hg? Much discussion about this. Some claims that EnergyStar 2.0 is “useless” for defining requirements of A/V equipment; that Christie Digital is making incredible strides towards eco-friendliness; that TCO Development has a certification process for “…driving IT towards sustainable use…”. Particularly compelling talk from Chris Maione Associates. (It might have helped that his NYC intonation reminded me of my mother country of New Jersey.)

Until next time,

G-Fav

Summertime Inspirational Reading and Viewing

2011-06-07T21:42:00.006-04:00

Hi -

As these months provide us with some time to read more than Tweets and bullet-points, here are a few books, websites, and videos that you might find inspirational or at least thought provoking:

I've long found the accomplishments, creativity, and speaking style of inventor Danny Hillis inspirational. (1) Danny shares two anecdotes about Richard Feynman in this brief video [YouTube]. (2) For you computer geeks, here's a promotional video about the first Connection Machine supercomputer [YouTube].
Science fiction author Neal Stephenson's very brief PSA to get out there and make stuff with atoms instead of bits [YouTube].
Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget is not your average "Web 2.0 is bad for you" book. It's also a book about the brilliance of cephalopods, self-expression, and how to stay human in a world of broad but fleeting interconnectedness. [Amazon]
Have you ever heard of the Jasons, a real-life cluster of top scientists that advise the government? The Jasons: the Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite. [Amazon]
Staying positive, following the beat of your own drummer: some of Seth Godin's brief blog postings still get it right. [Seth's Blog]
In early 2010 I did some self-help / happiness / be-a-better-leader reading. My favorite: Zander and Zander's The Art of Possibility. My least favorite: The Happiness Project, from which I only learned that you really will feel a lot better if you get a good night's sleep. Otherwise, a pass.
Alan Lightman's The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science, Including the Original Papers, is awesome. For each of 25 breakthroughs, Lightman tells the story-behind-the-story, and then, yes, really does provide the original journal article in which the discovery was announced. That is so cool.
My kids are 2 and 5, and evidently they like making stuff. Isn't is wonderful that there's also a reawakening of hobbyist / "maker" culture? An example of this around Boston is Parts and Crafts. Or, Make magazine. Etc. Here are some ideas on easy projects to do with your kids.
Are you an entrepreneur? Consider actually attending a networking event. My pre-event reluctance to get my butt out to a meet-and-greet is 100% of the time rewarded with reinvigoration about entrepreneurship. Around Cambridge, MA, the best resource is Greenhorn Connect.
Got a Kindle? Try Science News and PhysOrg.com. Totally worth it.
Go check out the annual Edge question. This year, 159 intellectuals indicate useful modes of thought gathered from doing science, which everyone ought to add to their "mental toolkit." [Edge.org]
Stop reading this stuff, buy a decent notebook, and go create something.

Also two blog posts from Joost Bonsen that have stuck with me:

Have a wonderful and productive June!

g-fav

Seeing Saturn with a $25 telescope

2011-06-02T22:05:00.002-04:00

Hi -

Ever seen Saturn in a telescope?

Aw, heck. This was supposed to be a blog post about the beauty and "real-ness" of seeing an actual planet in your own backyard with a cheap-o telescope from a flea market, but I'm no poet. I'm not good enough with words. My point was going to be, "We spend hundreds of hours in the Internet, reading words about reality instead of experiencing it. We've seen thousands of images of Saturn in our lives, but it's easy to forget it's a real giant encircled ball millions of miles away. We all ought to buy a telescope, just a tube with a few glass lenses inside, plant it in our driveway, and crouch on our knees late at night to see Saturn for ourselves."

If you're reading this in June, 2011, Saturn is the only planet reasonable to see at night; everything else is sort of clustered near the sun, early in the morning.

TRY THIS: a cool applet will open up on your computer and you can see what Saturn looks like now, along with its moons. (go here, and click "...includes a JavaScript utility...").

Anyhow, in our little 2" or 3" scope, Saturn looked like a tiny yellow O with a line through it, like a letter of some Scandinavian novel held out at arm's-length. Using our imaginations it looked like this:

from http://173.226.48.71/asycs/forums/t/31567.aspx

Anyhow, if you have the chance to grab a decent 3" refractor on a tripod, pick one up!

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Gregg's List, or Shibboleths: Sound Like an Expert in Any Field!

2011-05-27T15:33:00.004-04:00

Howdy -

Does your field have a phrase or two which folks use in the hopes that they'll be perceived as an expert? Or, put less snobbishly, what words help you determine if someone's an expert?

Wonder no more! Don't tell anyone - here's a super-secret list of shibboleths for every field. Well, maybe 10 fields. With your help we can round this out.

Autostereoscopic Display Engineering

they're getting so much view-aliasing outside the sweet-spot
[+5 points] I can't believe they're still spatially-multiplexing, how 1908!

Chef, fancy-dancy

coulis

Computer Scientist

order log N
obviously NP-complete

Entrepreneur, ca. 1998

sticky portal with p13n

Entrepreneur, ca. 2011

obviously fail fast, and then pivot

Executives who were Once Engineers

not really impedance-matched to the customer

Investment Banker

they didn't get the optics right on the investment thesis

Optical Engineer

That NA will be tough with that fiber
...can squeeze all the etendue out

Physicist, applied

Hexagonal close-pack
condensate

Sociologist

it's normative

Stereoscopic Cinema: engineer

obviously too much crosstalk
too much vertical disparity
(evidently, too much [anything])

Got more? Share your secrets in the comments below.

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Display tech conferences: SID 2011, LA

2011-05-20T01:06:00.000-04:00

A return to our blog-roots in display -

I came to SID in search of new stuff in autostereo, chance encounters with colleagues, and a week-long forced “immersion program” back in my native skillset. Hello, 3-D without glasses, I have returned.

What did I find noteworthy? I mean, besides realizing that the volume level on the SID show floor was conducive to actual, rational, lengthy conversation? What a welcome change from CES.

CE Companies Pushing Autostereo Too Soon

Well, that’s what I think, at least.

Toshiba, LG, NEC, and Samsung are displaying various spatially-multiplexed autostereo panels, e.g. parallax barriers and lenticulars. Fraunhofer HHI showed several which used head-tracking to improve the imagery.

Still, universally, observers must position their heads carefully within a sweet spot, so that left- and right- eye zones straddle their nose. I saw many people walk up, try to use a display, and wander away in confusion.

In my opinion, couldn’t more companies try an alternate approach – time-multiplexed displays – that will give you 100 instead of 8 views, with very realistic imagery and freedom in head placement? All it takes is a fast image source, like a DMD… Perhaps that’s just my bias. 3-D that actually works.

A tiny sampling of the autostereo on display:

NEC: 7.2” SVGA, 400 cd/m², demo of dog swatting at butterfly, perhaps 2” of depth, unusual curved “fringing” at upper corners
Samsung:
- 55” 9-view autostereo 1920 x 1080 “LC lenticular,” switchable on/off
- 15.6” notebook with “moving parallax barrier” 1366 x 768 – looked pretty good to me
Hitachi: 4.2” WSVGA, parallax barrier, 600 x 1024, 0.03 x 0.09 mm pitch

I wonder, my fellow researchers, if the key to breaking free from “hold your head still,” might be breaking away from spatial multiplexing?

Here’s what I mean about this. [YouTube playlist]

Some papers

The SID 2011 program lives (lived?) here.

Mike Klug gave very impressive talk about Zebra Imaging’s dynamic 3-D display, as part of a co-located conference on the future of touch technology. Photos!
Wavien is developing their dual-paraboloid bulbs for digital cinema, and provided analyses trading off arc-length, drive power, and on-screen lumens. Some Barco disagreement from audience. Hilarity ensues.
Wavien also spoke of their LED arrays with light-recycling for low-power apps.
Kodak: 12-laser digital cinema projector, 11k on-screen lumens. f/6 instead of f/2.6, allowing less expensive lenses.
Viewzone tripling. (34.3) National Chiao Tung University / Coretronic Corp (Taiwan) – tripled the number of viewzones on directional sequential backlight systems (like 3M’s) by adding a filter with a sort of repeating trapezoidal cross-section. One could call it the Toblerone Display.
Holographic “Retinal” Display. Though I don’t understand the cases in which researchers insist that they are projecting “right into the retina!” (I mean, doesn’t perceived light always enter your eye?) the folks of paper 41.1 managed to create a multi-planar near-eye display ostensibly to help with focus / vergence mismatch pain. Oh, the pain of focus / vergence mismatch.
Unfortunate no-show. I was looking forward to V V Petrov’s talk regarding his acousto-optical holographic displays, but he was not present.
360-degree panoramic imaging – in stereo! D Montgomery (Sharp Labs Europe) shocked and amazed in paper 41.4 with their three-truncated-hyperboloidal mirror camera system. Here on Google patents. Plus, if you replace the camera with a projector, it’s a stereoscopic panoramic projector.
Physically-accessible 3-D above a tabletop. X Xia et al from Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China) demonstrated several 3-D displays using various horizontal directional diffusers. These looked very promising. They did remind me of this Actuality invention [YouTube].

Something literally cool

Did you see Samsung’s collection of large transparent displays? One covered the face of a see-through fridge. This video doesn’t quite convey the awesomeness.

Time to Return to the East Coast

I don’t have a tinted-window Mercedes, and I’ve never purchased wrap-around sunglasses, so that’s my signal that this East Coaster needs to return to Beantown.

Oh: this life-sized advertisement struck me as just a wee bit odd. “Oh, come on over, I’m just watching my show. The one about OLED, LCD, and PDP.”

Fix incorrect album art on iPod Touch / how-to

2011-03-25T09:16:00.006-04:00

There are complaints that a 2010 iPod software update is related to incorrect artwork appearing for some songs on iPod Touch. This solution (from rockmyplimsoul Jul 28 2009) worked for me, which I found after much searching.

How to repair: Wrong artwork showing up for some iPod songs on iPod screen

This appears to be only a temporary solution. For me, the problem crept back in after a few weeks.

[NOTE: This method will lose any assignment you have set of "checked" and "unchecked" songs. At the end of this process, all songs will be "checked."]

Connect iPod to computer & sync
Click Devices > (your iPod)
In OPTIONS, make sure that "Sync only checked songs and videos" is CHECKED
Click Library > Music
Click any song name
Press Ctrl-A to select all songs
Right click & pick "uncheck selection" (all songs will be unchecked)
Sync (this will remove all songs from your iPod)
Click any song name
Press Ctrl-A to select all songs
Right click & pick "check selection" (all songs will become checked)
Sync (this will load all songs back into your iPod - it will take a long time)
Comment here to let the readers know if this method worked or not

DISCLAIMER: Use this at your own risk. I am not responsible for you losing any music. Etc., etc.

G-Fav

Optics career profiled in Boston Globe

2011-01-19T12:11:00.003-05:00

Hi -

Writer Cindy Atoji profiled me for a piece in the Boston Globe as part of her series regarding people with unusual jobs. I work at Optics for Hire, which helps its clients invent and improve optics-based products. What, that's unusual? Doesn't everyone work on secret projects for Fortune 500 companies who need interesting combinations of lenses, transistors, and precision-machined metal?

"Optics inventor has eye for new technology," Boston.com Job Doc (18-Jan-2011).

In the piece, I mention a few things about 3-D (as in, 3-D movies, 3-D television, and holographic video). Technologists interested in that topic ought to check out January's big conference in that space: SPIE-IS&T Stereoscopic Displays & Applications.

G-Fav

A lonely atom, or, The Best Few Paragraphs I've Read in a While

2011-01-10T17:28:00.003-05:00

Hello -

I've been reading and really enjoying Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. (I also recommend Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget.)

This excerpt really stuck with me. (He uses the word "technium" to mean the "self-reinforcing system of creation" that includes all of our "tools, machines, and ideas.")

The root of the technium can be traced back to the life of an atom. An atom's brief journey through an everyday technical artifact, such as a flashlight battery, is a flash of existence unlike anything else in its long life.

Most hydrogen atoms were born at the beginning of time. They are as old as time itself. They were created in the fires of the big bang and dispersed into the universe as a uniform warm mist. Thereafter, each atom has been on a lonely journey. When a hydrogen atom drifts in the unconsciousness of deep space, hundreds of kilometers from another atom, it is hardly much more active than the vacuum surrounding it. Time is meaningless without change, and in the vast reaches of space that fill 99.99 percent of the universe, there is little change.

After billions of years, a hydrogen atom might be swept up by the currents of gravity radiating from a congealing galaxy. With the dimmest hint of time and change it slowly drifts in a steady direction toward other stuff. Another billion years later it bumps into the first bit of matter it has ever encountered. After millions of years it meets the second. In time it meets another of its kind, a hydrogen atom. They drift together in mild attraction until aeons later they meet an oxygen atom. Suddenly something weird happens. In a flash of heat they clump together as one water molecule. Maybe they get sucked into the atmosphere circulation of a planet. Under this marriage, they are caught in great cycles of change. Rapidly the molecule is carried up and then rained down into a crowded pool of other jostling atoms. In the company of uncountable numbers of other water molecules it travels this circuit around and around for millions of years, from crammed pools to expansive clouds and back. One day, in a stroke of luck, the water molecule is captured by a chain of unusually active carbons in one pool. Its path is once again accelerated. It spins around in a simple loop, assisting the travel of carbon chains. It enjoys speed, movement, and change such as would not be possible in the comatose recesses of space. The carbon chain is stolen by another chain and reassembled many times until the hydrogen finds itself in a cell constantly rearranging its relations and bonds with other molecules. Now it hardly ever stops changing, never stops interacting.

The hydrogen atoms in a human body completely refresh every seven years. As we age we are really a river of cosmically old atoms. The carbons in our bodies were created in the dust of a star. The bulk of matter in our hands, skin, eyes, and hearts was made near the beginning of time, billions of years ago. We are much older than we look.

(pp. 57-58)

G-Fav

The D-Cup -ification of optics, or "C'mon, Edmund Optics, really?"

2011-01-03T23:04:00.008-05:00

Hi -

I work in the field of optics, meaning that my clients ask our company to design systems ranging from complex lenses to DNA analyzers to various video game technologies. Just as we all get catalogs from, say, Crate & Barrel at home, engineers in optics get catalogs like Edmund Optics or Thor (or whatever) at work. Flip through the pages, and you'll see hundreds of lenses, filters, cameras, lasers, ... :

An obviously very sexy page of lenses

Around 2005, I started to notice that the catalog cover for Edmund Optics was somehow becoming increasingly... how shall we say... sexualized. What used to be a bunch of lenses and a fiber optic would next be a few lenses and an attractive model. A few years later, and (maybe it's just my eagle eye) the model definitely became the emphasis of the cover.

Okay, fine. Attractive models to sell stuff to any customer base, including techies, isn't new. It certainly doesn't help the ongoing mission of Bring More Women Into Science, but I suppose it is in line with common practice, even if you find it objectionable.

Now - Call me prude, but in my opinion Edmund took a bit of a bigger step into Objectification Land with this season's catalog:

C'mon, Edmund, really? Did we have to bring out cartoon superhero D-cup woman?

As my friends will attest, I might be just as blind as the next typical guy when it comes to spotting and complaining about gender stereotypes. But doesn't this seem to cross the line for you? I wonder how the many women who work in optics will react to this, as it's a field as yet uncontaminated by sales tactics like these. Not like it would have excused the artwork, but optics is certainly not an all-men's club.

Sigh.

I will at least accept the flattery that Edmund's catalog is now using a cartoon-bubble motif of "Project deadline looming - what to do now???"-type art, especially as Optics for Hire used it at last year's Photonics West. And we did it without the inflatable model. (Though I must say my CEO and I look dapper in suits.)

Then again, if their marketing department's goal was to get people talking, well, I guess it worked.

Next time, how about choosing any of 100 motivational things - maybe even non misogynistic things - to get people talking?

Gregg

Our favorite "kidstuff" that remained interesting for several years

2010-11-30T20:30:00.000-05:00

Hi -

[** Alert! Totally off-topic! Well, unless you have kids. **]

Are you a new parent looking for some ideas? Searching for holiday presents for your some little-ones?

For fun, I'll break with this blog's science tradition to share a random collection of stuff that I would recommend to new parents or folks buying gifts for young kids.

Sure, there are plenty of books, toys, and parenting-supplies. But which are good? Which don't break after two years? At the moment, our two boys are 2 and 4, so let's look at the stuff that's had some staying-power around our house.

Regarding age-ranking: Kids are different so I'll leave that up to you. I'll try "Around 2" and "Around 4." (Sorry that I don't have any Dr. Seuss, Berenstain Bears, or "The Magic Schoolbus" stuff here - for some reason I just don't enjoy reading those aloud. I must have some weird parental deficiency!)

Also, I'll hold off on the more widely popular books which we love, simply because you probably already have them. For example: the Francis books, Frog & Toad, ...

Books

- Around 2 -

Go, Dog. Go! - There are actually a few versions of this. In any case, this surreal book employs a minimum of words to teach a maximum of prepositions. And when else could you read about three dogs, on a boat, at night?
Byron Barton: Trucks, Boats
Big Red Barn - I am in love with this little farm-story that winds down to a quiet, nighttime close
Baby Touch and Feel - Quack Quack (for 1 yr olds)
Caps for Sale - yep, fifty cents a cap... Ah, yes. Ms. Slobodkina's book might've taken ten readings to grow on me, but now we are stuck.
Good Night, Gorilla - Peggy Rathmann
Hug - Jez Alborough
** The Cookie-store Cat - Cynthia Rylant (we really love this cozy book)
Charlie Parker Played Bebop - Christopher Raschka
Snow - Cynthia Rylant
Trashy Town - There's a general fascination with the garbage industry in our household, spanning the onomatopoeia-rich I Stink! to obsessive YouTube taxonomies of frankly quite innovative garbage truck designs, cataloged by whoever "georgewuzheer" is.
Flying - Donald Crews
Katy No-Pocket - I don't really like this book, but our 2-yr old does
Abiyoyo - you sort of need the Pete Seeger song, too. This was popular in our house for a year.

-- Around 3-4 --

How a House is Built - Gail Gibbons
*** Roxaboxen - maybe I'm just a softie but this is wonderful story that brings back memories of inventing secret places on the playground
How to Behave and Why - Munro Leaf (it's so very 1946)
Any Curious George or Martha Speaks stuff is fine by me
People - Peter Spier - an almost encyclopedic book that explores the similarities and differences of how 7 (7?) billion of us dress, eat, worship, and play.
The Jenny Linsky series - like Jenny Goes to Sea
Bread and Jam for Francis - though you probably have all the Francis books already
Elisha Cooper's charming watercolor storybooks of country life, e.g. Country Fair
Brian Floca's Moonshot, one of the few children's books that make me all goosebumpy
Jumanji - Chris Van Allsburg (it's amazing that anyone can draw this well)
I Spy (books of picture riddles which are actually really hard)
Henry and Ribsy - Beverly Cleary
The Day-Glo Brothers - is the true story of two brothers who actually did invent the Day-Glo colors. It's a little overly-detailed, but it sure caused Toby to realize that he could invent stuff one day, too
Paul Revere-related stuff

...and J-Fav listed all of our children's books here (617 of them at the moment! Yes, I married a former preschool teacher). I feel like a fraud listing these books as if they're "my" suggestions, since Jenn does 99% of the book-researching and -buying. Hooray for Jenn!

Toys, and implements of covert education

Big organizers stocked with white and color paper, crayons, markers, stickers, ...
Wooden train set. IKEA's Lillabo trains are affordable and durable. Costs much less than the stuff in toy stores but totally tough.
Plastic or glass magnifying glasses. (Don't look at the sun!)
Prism-like things for casting rainbows on walls and bellies.
The Toy Story dolls have been surprisingly enduring in our house, e.g. Woody
Playskool Basic Ball Popper (this captivates grown-ups too, or maybe just our peer group is child-hearted)
Fisher-Price Swan Palace dollhouse. Our 2 yr-old spends nearly every morning with it.
Fisher-Price Little People stuff, especially the, ah, "boat" of animals-in-twosies, and Busy Day Home. With flushing toilet of course.
Party Time Kitchen - I have been served many a hotdog, pepper, and chicken soup!
A giant box for dress-up clothes
D+L Company Stomp Rocket Ultra (be the most popular parent in the park)
Toysmith Optic Wonder (compass, magnifying glass, binoculars - like a Swiss Army knife of optics)
Long outdated: I wish the Radio Shack 1977 150-in-1 electronic kit were available for when they turn 7!

CDs / DVDs

I bet most folks with kids under 5 already have "Cars," "Little Mermaid," "Toy Story," and "Cinderella." But have you checked out the amazing Scholastic DVD series of great children's books that have been animated and narrated? There is a whole series worth checking out.

They Might Be Giants has several infectious CDs that teach you how to count or about science which we must've heard over... what, Jenn... 100+ breakfasts? The benefit is that your four year old will regale you with theories about the "bloodmobile" and its voyages throughout your body, or questions about why no one seems to like Pluto anymore.

Stuff to Do

Ah, that topic is just too broad. If you live in Boston and your kids are into tinkering, consider browsing the monthly Flea at MIT, an affordable flea market - in an MIT parking garage - of hackable stuff, from TVs to computers to blinking lights.

Have fun! Please, feel free to contribute your ideas in the comments.

-g

Learn about autostereoscopic 3-D displays

2010-09-08T09:54:00.003-04:00

Hello -

If 3-D displays are up your alley - particularly "3-D without glasses" - then you might be interested in these three short mini-courses at YouTube that I recorded. This is the entirety of what I mentioned in a previous g-fav blog post. It's done!

This is an introduction to autostereoscopic 3-D displays (autostereoscopy).

The playlist URL is: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F76545E34CD99DEB

I don't think my presentation is as careful or complete as to deserve a "syllabus," so here is a list of topics covered. Note: YouTube restricts movie-clips to 10 minutes, so each class has a few segments:

The fundamentals of "seeing in 3-D," including monoscopic and stereoscopic depth cues. Regarding advertisements for 3-D displays, how can you build some intuition to judge the reality of their claims? How much electro-optical bandwidth is required for 3-D?
Definitions of autostereoscopic. Broad overview of several autostereo displays: parallax barrier (e.g. the Nintendo 3DS), lenticular, volumetric, electro-holographic, integral photography.
Light field displays, with an emphasis on a few prototype displays built at Actuality Systems - such as a 198-view, XGA-resolution autostereoscopic display.

The presentations employ materials from a variety of top 3D display researchers around the world, who I do my best to cite.

Enjoy! Share with your science friends!

One last note: Since these were produced at Optics for Hire, each class has a couple of slides about the company at the very beginning. Other than that it's all engineering.

Best,

Gregg

ps Have you considered attending the primary technical conference for 3-D displays? SPIE-IS&T Stereoscopic Displays & Applications: www.stereoscopic.org

(kids, science, space) Easy way to make scale model of solar system for your hallway

2010-08-02T21:24:00.008-04:00

Hi -

(Using a one-click website to make a customized guide for planet-distances on your wall.)

Do you want to make a simple scale model of the solar system with your kids? If the children's books and science-placemats in your house are like those in ours, you probably noticed that the scale of orbital diameters (and planetary diameters) are way off. I suppose that's an artistic necessity.

Ever come home to find that your budding scientist has taped little planet-cutouts to the wall, along a hallway?

Wouldn't it be neat to have kinda'-correct spacings away from the Sun? WolframAlpha to the rescue! Here's how:

1. Find a decent tape measure in cm (or mm), and a long stretch of walls or hallway. Say it's 3000 mm (3 m) long.

2. The sun will be at 0 mm, and Neptune will be at 3000 mm. (Don't even get me started on Pluto. Poor Pluto.)

3. Click here on this URL and wait several seconds:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(3000+mm/(Neptune+semimajor+axis))+*+(Mercury+semimajor+axis,+Venus+semimajor+axis,+Earth+semimajor+axis,+Mars+semimajor+axis,+Jupiter+semimajor+axis,+Saturn+semimajor+axis)

5. As you can see, it lists the distances to each planet from the sun. In this case Earth is at 10 mm from the Sun. Yes, the planets seem pretty squooshed together at the beginning, don't they?

6. What about Uranus? (For some reason the pattern breaks down when I add Uranus.) Here's the input for your scale, and Uranus:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(3000+mm/(Neptune+semimajor+axis))+*+(Uranus+semimajor+axis)

How do I scale this up or down?

Easy! Just change the "3000" to the length of your wall.

Why isn't Pluto here, and why is Neptune missing?

I actually had problems with WolframAlpha accepting a long list of planets. Neptune's at the end, of course. And... Pluto. Poor, poor Pluto.

Why did you use the semimajor axis instead of the current distance to the Sun?

Lack of sleep, I guess.

Have fun!

g-fav

ps It will also draw pictures and show you star charts! Check this out - what does Saturn look like right now, and where is it, from your ZIP code?:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=saturn+from+02476

pps Or this, the whole solar system from "above:" (hint: let it think a while)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=planets

3-D without glasses: Class 1 of 3 on autostereoscopic displays (free, YouTube)

2010-07-27T16:50:00.003-04:00

Hi -

Stereoscopic cinema looks wonderful, in my opinion, and it was built on about 150 years of technology to bring it to where it is today. Regardless, some folks ask "when will we have 3-D without glasses?" Picky, picky!

Autostereoscopic 3-D displays allow you to perceive 3-D images without additional eyewear, a topic I've studied since 1988 (shudder!). Want to learn more about that? I worked with my employer, Optics for Hire (OFH, Arlington, Mass.) to create a three-course series on YouTube (in 10-minute segments) and authorSTREAM (in their entirety):

(available now) The fundamentals of "seeing in 3-D," including monoscopic and stereoscopic depth cues. What's physically possible today, and what's definite trickery? How much underlying electro-optical oomph is needed for 3-D?
Definitions of autostereoscopic. Broad overview of many autostereoscopic displays, from parallax barrier systems (like the Nintendo 3DS) to volumetric and holographic displays.
Lightfield displays using whole-view scanning and piecemeal lightfield reconstruction.

OFH is releasing the classes over a period of several months to our friends (we like to educate our customers and prospects rather than inundate them with junk mailers).

Class 1 is available whole (authorSTREAM), or Class 1a, 1b, and 1c (YouTube).

I'm looking forward to announcing classes 2 and 3 because they have a lot more meat, but some of the stuff in class 1 might strike you as new and surprising.

Enjoy!

g-fav

ps Like optics? Check out these other free instructional videos about designing LED optics...

Short science projects for inquisitive young kids

2010-07-06T21:45:00.007-04:00

Hi -

A friend asked me if I have ideas for science "experiments" or book suggestions for 2.5 and 5 year-olds. What a compliment to be asked that! I am actually short on ideas, but here is a start.

Please, readers, chime in!

General note: I like stuff that has almost no set-up (so they don't have to wait), is open-ended (because the project usually veers quickly in the direction of their interest), and whose elements are inexpensive or instantly gifted (e.g., yep, it's your magnifying glass now).

Science ideas: 2.5 yr-olds and 5 yr-olds (it's up to you what you think is a good fit for your kid)

OPTICS

Get several inexpensive magnifying glasses of different kinds from the 5-and-10. Get the ones that are actual convex lenses, not the flat-circle-ridgey "Fresnel lenses," since for some reason a lot of people don't realize that the Fresnel lenses are just as dangerously capable of focusing sunlight.
Make things look bigger! (newspaper, bugs, a veiny leaf)
Help your child make a picture of the room-light on a tabletop by finding just the right height for the lens, between the two
....or try it with your glasses, if you're farsighted
I'd avoid the "burn stuff with a lens" trick at this age. Make sure they don't look at the sun, either. It's up to you if you TELL them this or not, because it might plant the ideas in their head.
Advanced: camera obscura! Go to a room with a window, during the day. Turn the lights out. Hold the lens near a wall - can you focus an upside-down image of the window onto the wall? Can you move the lens a little and make a picture of the house across the street?
Make rainbows on the wall by helping them to aim a prism (or the edge of something sharp and transparent) with a shaft of sunlight
Let them play with a CD and look at the rainbows (diffraction bends red light more than blue light)
Shadows
The OSA's Optics for Kids

STATES OF MATTER / PLAYING WITH WATER (thanks Jenn!)

Fill little containers - little clear cups, tiny Tupperware, ice-cube trays - with water, and drop Cheerios (or whatever) inside. Put in the freezer. How long will it take to freeze?
Drop food coloring droplets into water-cups
Supervise them as they play with cups and measuring-devices at a sink

PLANTS

There's actually an Elmo-branded seedling kit that comes with little cups and seeds in a thin plastic greenhouse. The tomato ones worked pretty well for us.

HOW STUFF WORKS

Depending on your comfort level, and your willingness to judge electrical or mechanical safety, we've gotten a lot of learning out of disassembling stuff around the house. A broken cordless phone, with the power-adapter UNPLUGGED, is a great source of stuff. You can point out "computer chips" and electronic components and red LEDs (ell-ee-dees). We took it a step farther and got a battery connector from Radio Shack (this) and put an AA battery in it and made the LEDs light up and the speaker make crackly noises.
Explain how the speaker makes crackly noises. (Most speakers have a magnet inside, and nearby, a coil of wire taped to a paper cone. If the cone moves, it moves the air, and your eardrum moves, and you hear sounds! But how does the cone move? If you pass electricity along the wire, it will become a magnet, and it will move towards or away from the permanent magnet... Why does electricity through a wire make a magnet? No one really knows, I don't think. They have fancy words for it, but I don't think anyone has the true answer.)
Take apart an old VCR, if you're confident it's been unplugged for several days. On second thought, don't do that unless you know how to safely discharge the power capacitor for a big spark. Never mind.
Watch bulldozers.
Make a paper airplane.
Buy them a good kid's camera. We liked this, but the reviewers didn't. [amazon]

MAKE THINGS! I.E., OBJECTS DON'T COME OUT OF THE SKY, ACTUAL PEOPLE DESIGN THEM

Record episodes of DESIGN SQUAD
Make a simple catapult (for a 2 year-old, just the act of bending something back and flinging it forward is a surprise, like a tongue depressor or a popsicle stick)
Make your own play-dough (Jenn always has a fresh batch on hand... Jenn what's the recipe?)
Do some research and find decent kits for making motors or radios or windup-airplanes
With them, measure and draw a to-scale floorplan of their room... or the house
Make a paper cutout model - in 3-D - of a floor of your house

OTHER SCIENCE THOUGHTS, FOR DISCOVERY AND FUN

Stomp Rocket Ultra (Best. Toy. Ever.)
Anything made by Rufus Seder, like this window-pendant that shows a 6-frame galloping horse. (It's a little hard for me to explain this in a brief bullet point.)
Get / borrow a stroboscope and use it to look at a spinning top, or the faucet on slooooow drip.
Find something that glows - charge it up in the bathroom light, then shut the light and the door.
Triboluminescence: chomp down on a Wintergreen Life Saver while looking in the bathroom mirror with the lights off
Lots of projects in Howtoons! Also, a book.
Lots of projects on Instructables!
Polarizers are fun, but maybe more fun with the help of a science-friend. (A demo we do for kids is: put a big polarizer on a light table. Put: clear gelatin cubes, or a clear Scotch Tape reel on top. Put a little polarizer near your eye. Squeeze the cubes and reel. Cool zebra patterns!)
Seek out a holography museum.
Ask someone handy to show you how to mix cement.

I am excited to continue this list, but please, other people, chime in. Here are some science areas that I have not provided ideas on:

Plant-life
Animals (drop of river-water under a decent microscope)
A catalog of neat science toys / kits: Edmund Scientific -- order a catalog today!
Programming computers in some simple language
Math (arithmetic, geometry, how far is it from one corner of a square to the other)
Chemicals (volcano experiment)
Geology
Cool mechanical mechanisms (like near the elevators at the Boston Museum of Science)
Space (esp this beautiful book: Moonshot)
Various YouTube clips (my 4 yr-old was captivated by this astronaut one)
Basic physics-stuff, i.e. diffusion (milk droplets into your coffee), why-is-sky-blue (okay, that's trickier unless you understand it already), inertia (Matchbox car goes around loop-de-loop upside-down)
MAGNETS! (But it is critical that they NOT SWALLOW A MAGNET)

[Added Jul 7] A PHILOSOPHICAL ASIDE

I realized soon after I posted these ideas that this is only a portion of the "science culture deliverable-for-kids." For me, at least, the other portion of getting your kids comfortable with science is your narrative. What are your opinions of scientists? Do grown-ups know all the answers? What's still mysterious? Are we "allowed" to figure things out?

I think this is what I am broadcasting at home:

Regarding science... The facts you learn in school, in books, and from experts, are (at its best) our understanding of the way things work at that moment in time. It'll change. Not only that, but people like you came up with these observations and predictions and explanations. You can add to this knowledge, if you'd like. And if it's not your thing, that's cool too. No pressure to spend your life with beakers and soldering irons.
Regarding math, though... Math is unusual because it is a game - played with very precise rules - designed by people. As long as people agree on the rules (e.g. "in this game, multiplying a number by zero equals zero") and the rules of logic, you should reach the same conclusions. The inventiveness is of a different sort, such as discussing interesting assertions and figuring out if they can be proven within the framework of the rules. Plus, if you're a parent who has some math-phobia, maybe this viewpoint can put you at ease. The answer to "but WHY does this math-symbol act this way?" is either "because someone asked us to accept it as a rule since it seems to be helpful to do so" or "in this particular flavor of algebra, those are just the rules." If you're having a good day, the answer is "good question, maybe Newton was wrong about that, and perhaps you are going to win a cool prize."
As Feynman liked to say, there is a difference between knowing things and just knowing the names of things. What's more helpful: telling your kid that the reason your sneakers help you cling to the ground when you walk, and not slip, is "due to friction," or "the little jaggies in the ground fit into the squooshy jaggies in the sneaker, and this is related to something called 'friction'" ?
Regarding engineering, it is almost completely true to say that if you can imagine a fanciful invention in great detail, it can be built.
After a series of "why?" questions of increasing depth, grown-ups usually have to admit, "I don't know."
There are plenty of science-things that no one really understands yet. These include: consciousness ("who" is seeing?), why do things fall when you drop them?, aren't we lucky that the game of mathematics lets us calculate things in the real world?, where did all this stuff come from? I guess the answer to some of these things hinges on one's religious beliefs, but the point is that there will always be new things to learn or figure out or invent. And, furthermore, you are encouraged to figure things out.
You can totally do this.
You can totally understand this.
Hey, a cardboard box! Let's be robots!

Any other ideas?

g-fav

Soccer on 3-D TV: looks good!

2010-06-25T15:31:00.002-04:00

Did you catch Gizmodo's piece, "Watching the World Cup in 3D: The (More) Beautiful Game"?

g-fav

Make stuff!

2010-06-09T21:39:00.000-04:00

Make-mag Mark on Colbert:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/09/mark-on-the-colbert.html

startup / corporate techies: NE Innovation Month

2010-06-05T16:20:00.002-04:00

You're probably asleep under a log if you didn't hear about this by now, but June is Innovation Month 'round here in New England. This is a good excuse for all of us to go down Mass Ave and attend some of these cool events. And hooray to Scott Kirsner for helping make a lot of noise about this!

EVENT LISTING: June is Innovation Month in New England

g-fav

Getting back the powers of concentration we once had; maybe the product marketing was too good?

2010-06-05T15:32:00.003-04:00

Hi -

Hey! You! Stop clicking around for a second, okay?

Maybe websites need admonitions like that, to slow us down and put us into a gear in which we're primed to be a bit more contemplative. Why? I used to pride myself on having regularly-scheduled time for thinking - i.e., sitting-quietly-with-a-notebook-and-pen-thinking - and something about the Internet has oozed into that time.

Do you feel that way, too? Here is an article and a book:

NPR re: The Shallows - This is Your Brain Online: "...Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," [The Shallows's author Nicholas] Carr explains. "They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."" Link. (h/t my Uncle Ron)

Thinkertoys: A Hanbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2e) (Amazon) - Impressed me with its abundance of creativity-enhancing methodologies. Try taking it out of your library (WorldCat).

g-fav

ps Oh, about the "...product marketing..." in the Title. Maybe the product-definition experts figured it out all-to-well at the firms that make our mobile devices and Web 2.0 websites. Are we addicted? Does it take too much of an effort to "just stop clicking on Facebook / poking at one's handheld / browsing the web instead of pushing our kids on the swingset"? I'm a technologist. Heck, I'm a technologist into futuristic trappings like holographic video. Why am I sounding like a luddite?

Off FB (to my friends)

2010-06-02T17:07:00.003-04:00

Hello -

I deactivated my Facebook account again because it was proving too interesting and time-consuming! (Can't you all start leading less interesting lives?) I'm also troubled by various privacy issues, but that's really secondary.

"Deactivated" is really a misnomer; all one needs to do is log back in again. So, if this FB-vacuum is too much for me to take, I'll just return. But in the meantime, you all know where you can find me.

gregg

Cheap, fun drawing tablet

2010-05-19T22:18:00.003-04:00

Hi -

This is just to say that I finally splurged and spent about $60 on a Wacom Bamboo Pen tablet this week, and I like it - it ships with a Corel drawing package with plenty of (software) pens, brushes, and erasers.

I bought it in case I need to whip up a quick engineering sketch, as an alternative to scanning a real pen drawing. I find (so far) that I need to press a little harder on this - my hand hurts - but then again, I haven't searched for or played with the "pen sensitivity" slider, which probably is in there.

Here is what a small collection of built-in tools and colors look like:

I like it so far. If you're really serious, you'll find Amazon links to expensive, more advanced stuff.

Amazon: Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet, with software

G-Fav

Springer's new journal: 3D Research

2010-05-10T11:08:00.002-04:00

According to Springer, it covers materials and methods for the processing and display of 3-D information.

http://www.springer.com/engineering/signals/journal/13319?detailsPage=aboutThis

g-fav

Patents: descriptions

2010-05-04T09:33:00.002-04:00

Note from Bruce Horwitz of TechRoadmap reminding us that a patent's "enabling description" has to include not only the elements of the invention, but WHAT the thing is:

If it walks like a duck... you need a written description

-g

Optics project: soda box no-film "camera" with simple lens

2010-04-18T12:44:00.004-04:00

Hi -

Our intrepid four-year old has been collecting paper towel tubes, refrigerator soda boxes, and magnifying glasses. What to do?

Try making a primitive no-film camera demonstrator with a lens-on-a-tube! You can see really bright, colorful images of the TV screen, stuff in the house, and all sorts of stuff outside.

Project: Soda-box "camera obscura" with lens

View more presentations from favalora.

This is the second optics "Learn it Yourself" project, following the pinhole camera in a teabox:

Fastest Pinhole Camera Obscura Project... Ever?

View more presentations from favalora.

G-Fav

Coin toss fractal in Mathematica [edit]

2010-04-09T23:09:00.001-04:00

Hello -

It's well-known but surprising that you can create beautiful images of fractals with a coin toss (okay, dice) and paper & pencil:

(Drawn by computer)

Label corners of a triangle {1, 2, 3}.
Draw a dot at a corner (or anywhere?)
While not tired:
- Generate random integer N = [1,3].
- Draw a dot halfway between the last dot and corner N.

Click for code

(Click to embiggen. It's pretty!)

[Edit - Thanks, Matthias! It works for squares, too, using the method he describes in the comments.]

(Matthias: Yeah, it works in 3-space, too:)

Gregg

3M's autostereo illumination film

2010-04-07T11:03:00.002-04:00

3M developed technology that should improve certain types of autostereoscopic displays:

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Vikuiti1/BrandProducts/communication/newsletter/?WT.mc_id=ECB_Optical_eNewsApril2010

g-fav

Get Excited and Make Things...

2010-04-02T16:14:00.002-04:00

...the t-shirt:

http://feedstore.muledesign.com/product/get-excited-and-make-things

(h/t the Swipely Blog...)

G-Fav

Highly multiview hologram-like 3-D display - explained on YouTube

2010-03-31T13:50:00.002-04:00

Hi -

If you're interested in 3D-without-glasses ("autostereo"), then you might like this video. It explains the principles of a system that can make 3-D images as small as a mobile device, or as large as a desktop display (or larger).

As researchers have long recognized, it's difficult to make a 3-D display that's inexpensive, has a wide horizontal field of view, has a >XGA per-view resolution, and offers 100 or more views. (Even getting 12 views had been tricky.) The architecture in this video meets all of these requirements.

We built a prototype of this at Actuality Systems. Now Optics for Hire owns the patent application. You can see the application here, and a full list of OFH's 3-D IP here.

Gregg

A Few Simple Steps: comments regarding my own "happiness project"

2010-03-23T12:58:00.008-04:00

For the last month or two, I have been considerably happier. This was due to a few decisions and small behavioral changes that I made, a few environmental things that are mostly out of my control, and perhaps also the natural ebb-and-flow of... what might I call them... biorhythms?

"Turning it up to 11"

Set aside huge changes. What small, achievable micro-steps can we take towards feeling consistently happier, setting the stage for getting all that we can out of life?

This post is inspired by Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project, a blog-book that documents 12 months of little experiments towards improving her happiness. It's also inspired by how... well, happy... a handful of my friends and family seem to consistently be. Is their biochemistry different? Were they raised differently? Do they keep their negativity bottled up? Heck, I don't know, but there is even a class during MIT's IAP, run by the Handel Group, that helps students live extraordinary lives. There's gotta be something here to try.

Motivation? Optimization.

I feel like I owe a little preamble. We all have our ups-and-downs, but I'm a contented dude at home and at work. I love my family, I have a lot of fun professionally, and might be described as equal measures goofy and serious. So what gives? Why am I yapping about this?

Well, I suppose time feels like it is zipping by faster than it ever had for me. Our schedules are different, now, with young children at home - in a way, there are 14 hours of fairly "pre-programmed" schedule every day.

Maybe it's my engineering mindset talking, but this begged the questions: What to do with the remaining 3 hours before continuing the cycle tomorrow? What to modify in my own habitual thinking in order to get the most out of the 14?

Simple Changes

(Sleep) Go to bed at 11.30pm, even if you don't fall asleep right away. Our kids wake up at 6 or 7.00 am, and our parenting-day ends at 9.00pm, so there's great temptation to stay up until 1am, but we always regret it.
(Snacking) No more snacking after 10pm.
(Reading, 1) Read a book about happiness. Rubin's book has flaws, but it does bring the topic of happiness to the foreground in my consciousness. Maybe I'm happier because I think about it more. Who knows.
(Friends) Stay in real touch with your friends. Facebook is fun, but I think it only gives an illusion of staying-in-touch-ness. Have coffee with a buddy!

Slightly harder simple changes

(Productivity) I am busy. Over-committed! I bet you are too. One simple change is that I try not to leave the office for the day unless I've plotted out how I'll spend each hour (or half-hour, if it's one of those weeks...) for the next day in my Outlook calendar. Also, try quitting Outlook or your browser when it's time to get stuff done. Makes it easier to avoid 2-minute interruptions every three minutes.
(Bye, bye, Internet) Tell your cable modem router to shut off Internet access at 11.30pm. Hey, wow, now Jenn and I don't have our noses in our glowing computer screens at midnight! (Look on the back of the thing with blinking lights and type the numbers into your browser, e.g. 192.168.1.1.)
(Dynamic optimism) Act like you control the outcome of the situations you're in. Whine less. Try to not vocalize negative thoughts (this is hard for me! I'm a cynic...).
(Reading, 2) Read books or news-magazines instead of the internet. I think the Web fosters a sort of "attention deficit syndrome," where we're clicking on tidbit after tidbit, never really encouraging the patience to learn anything in depth.
(Thinking skills: memory, strategy / planning, self-control) The ancient board game go is the best tool I'm aware of for sharpening a multitude of mental skills. It is pretty easy to learn (7 year olds play it routinely in Korea) but, goodness, it is hard to master. There's even an iPhone / iPod app with great practice problems. I am trying to do 10 a night, when I remember. (SmartGo Pro.) If you're really into it, there are local clubs and web-servers.
(Listen to your body) If you're an introvert, make the time to recharge your batteries if solitary time makes you feel energized. If you're an extrovert, put group activities on your calendar. If your mood is out of whack before mealtimes, maybe you need to graze on a little snack at 11am and 4pm (I keep a bag of Snickers at my desk).
(Give!) Seek out opportunities to give: e..g, volunteering for a cause, or volunteering for professional societies, or write articles, or give advice, or give talks, or cook a meal for a friend who just became a new parent, or... These things are nice to do, they make you feel good, and they have the added bonus of bringing more friends into your life, which increases your happiness!

Changes of circumstance

Parenting: My children are now 1 1/2 and nearly 4, and they get along really well. The eldest engages himself in a variety of projects (and "experiments, daddy!") with us and my himself, and the youngest continues to be unflappably cheerful even though he's nearing 2.
Career: I very much enjoy my job and have a terrific boss. I always knew, intellectually, that career-satisfaction is a big factor in happiness, but, wow, I underestimated it. There is also great contrast between this and my former job, which, though I was the founder, had lengthy periods of nearly unbearable emotional stress. But why is this a change of circumstance? Well, I would never have guessed that my role (in sales-and-engineering leadership for a consulting company) would make me happy. But it does! I suppose my inability to have made this prediction is in alignment with current thinking in happiness theory, e.g.:

People aren't too good at guessing what will make them happy.

Changes I'd like to make, but haven't

(health) Join a gym and go 3 days/week
(money) Plan out a week of meals that include dinners large enough to provide next-day lunches. I spend too much money every day.
(creative outlet) Identify a new after-hours project that I can noodle on at night. Previous ones included techie forms of self-portraits, or doing software projects in optics.

Related References

Happiness Project (Gretchen Rubin) - A collection of little steps you can take, though I am distracted by the author's undercurrent of digs against her husband and friends.

Dynamic Optimism - I'm not an extropian, but I like the idea of dynamic optimism.

Samantha Sutton's blog - A personal coach from the Handel Group shares her thoughts on these and other topics

Seth Godin's blog - Marketing advice with a get-off-your-butt-and-do-it bent

SmartGo Pro - iPod / iPhone app... and this is a great book to learn the rules.

The Week magazine - My favorite news-magazine, which compiles news clippings from around the world, and explains the big issues in a "for beginners" format. We give subscriptions as holiday gifts. (I.e. as an alternative to visiting your five favorite webpages over and over and over.)

Please, comment away! It's tough to post this note, because it's such a personal topic, and I have some reluctance because the "small changes" are really quite small and obvious. But they're working for me so far!

Gregg

Hackintosh: Dell 10v into Mac OS X 10.6

2010-03-05T22:26:00.000-05:00

Hi -

The Favalora household is trying to keep its purse-strings tight, but would sure enjoy having another Mac around for checking email and messing around on the web. Gizmodo's articles about inexpensive Dell Netbooks - like the Dell 10v for $249 - and their how-to on loading OS X into it - sure caught our eye.

The Dell arrived this week. It has a 10.1" screen, 160 GB HD, and 1 GB RAM. The keyboard is respectable, the screen is bright, but...

Bummer Alert: ...the trackpad is too small to accommodate "pointing with index finger and clicking with thumb," especially since the buttons are under the flexible trackpad surface. It takes some of the fun out of having a tiny PC for couch-web-surfing, but hopefully we'll get used to it.

I bought Mac OS X Snow Leopard at the Apple store for $30 and an 8 GB flash drive for another $30.

Here goes...

Just following Gizmodo's directions, I:

Set up our MacBook and Dell 10v side-by-side
Downloaded and installed Netbook BootMaker
Sigh. Netbook BootMaker does not execute on our MacBook running 10.4.
(give up for the day)

The Apple store employee warned me that if I install 10.6 on my 10.4 machine, it's possible for the iLife apps (e.g. iPhoto) to stop working. Some forum-posts also suggested that our years of photographs, such as our photos of Toby and Gabe growing up, might be deleted, too.

The next night...

I backup up our MacBook using SuperDuper!, which is great for easily backing up hard drives and making them bootable (assuming you have a Mac-friendly backup drive, like LaCie). Repartitioned the LaCie because I forgot that I had upgraded the HD in our MacBook.
I had some trouble "ejecting" the backup drive, so I turned it off. The MacBook hung, so I power cycled it. I hope I won't regret not trying the backup drive again.
At 10.45pm, I started to install OS X 10.6 on the MacBook...
...and wrote this blog post while cursing the Dell 10v's idiotic trackpad button-placement...
...and would really prefer to get some sleep now, but Jenn needs the machine tomorrow for work, and it would suck if 10.6 broke Office 2008 compatibility, so I really need to see this through...
I read David Gelernter's "Time to start taking the Internet seriously" piece on Edge.org, which starts after the usual self-important Edge introduction material. Meanwhile, 10.6 continues to install, telling me it'll be 45 minutes, then 38 minutes, then 40, 30, ...
Took me long enough to figure out that Hulu is the killer app for this netbook. Oh, hey, the 10.6 installation-bell just dinged! Wonder if my MacBook still works! It's 11.30pm now.
Woah, 10.6 has a trippy post-install video. But it works, everything works. Whew! Now I need to learn about the wacky changes in the dock, like, next time I'm awake.

Returning to the Hackintoshing

Installed the mother-of-all 8 GB flash drives, and the 10.6 CD
...see you on the other side..

The Next Day

Used Netbook BootMaker to do some mysterious magic to the USB stick
Told the netbook to boot from USB & followed the other instructions at Gizmodo
Woah! My netbook looks like a Mac installing 10.6. This is one of the freakier things I've seen on a computer.
While I waited, I learned about the Sci-Tech Award Winners for the 2010 Academy Awards. Yes, the creative nerds who invent the things which let actors and studios make billions of dollars are usually hidden away in a different ceremony. Learn about them. Hooray, TI's Scott Dewald! Yay, lighting-master Paul Debevec!

Done!

Hooray, it worked. Everything seems to work fine. I still need to figure out Gizmodo's instructions regarding improving the response of the trackpad, but other than that, we're happy campers. It's pretty freaky. The thing boots and shuts off quickly, and the response is just fine. Also there's a trick for squooshing the vertical aspect of the screen when needed for things like the System Preferences window.

Much ado about nothing,

g-fav

OFH acquires Actuality's assets. Actuality is officially closed.

2009-12-31T12:51:00.004-05:00

Hello -

I'm pleased to announce that the optical and electronic systems development company OFH [www.opticsforhire.com] has acquired the assets of Actuality Systems, the 3-D visualization technology firm I co-founded 12 years ago. With that, Actuality formally dissolves today. Our first press release about this explains it.

Out of professional courtesy, we're not disclosing the terms of the deal.

OFH (Optics for Hire) is a wonderful product development company. 20+ talented optical, electronic, software, and mechanical engineers help our clients go from concept to prototype on a wide range of products. The common element is that almost everything involves optics, and even when it doesn't, the problems people bring us are usually quite challenging. I'm a principal there, so I am a senior accounts manager, salesperson, and engineering liaison.

By the way, no one could have convinced me that our technology development roller coaster would have taken these particular ups-and-downs: I started making 3-D displays in 1988, which was the summer after eighth grade, and certainly didn't expect that my first experiments with lasers in the basement would be end-bracketed by an event way off on New Year's Eve in 2009.

Some of you have suggested that I post a how-to of corporate dissolution, the list of steps that happen between final lay-off and actual formal wind-down, final taxes-paid, etc. If anyone wants my viewpoints on that, I'd be happy to post about it.

Until then, Happy New Year! Here's to new beginnings and innovative ideas.

-g-fav

Cited in Gizmodo display piece re:3-D display

2009-12-29T13:26:00.002-05:00

Hi -

Vanity aside, you might find Kate Greene's piece in Gizmodo interesting: "The Hunt for the Perfect Screen."

It touches on 3-D, LCDs, flexible displays, Pixel Qi, and other display technologies which either have made it... or are still trying.

-g-fav

Apple's Jonathan Ive's wonderfully thoughtful interview segment

2009-11-07T20:30:00.003-05:00

...from the movie Objectified. (h/t gizmodo)

"Watch Jonathan Ive's Segment in Objectified."

A Creative Whack: Exaggerate

2009-11-04T21:14:00.003-05:00

Hi -

Do you like to collect creativity-enhancing techniques?

I've enjoyed books like James Adams's Conceptual Blockbusting, which helps you notice (and thereby eliminate) your own blocks to creativity. You've probably also seen Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies," a deck of pithy thought-provoking sayings intended you to turn your creative problem on its ear.

Another creativity card-deck is Roger von Oech's "Creative Whack Pack." Many of the techniques are well-documented elsewhere, but I like how a deck of cards invites browsing. (I keep it in my briefcase and flip through it now and then.)

Here's a good example. It's a technique used by many successful entrepreneurs and inventors:

EXAGGERATE (#22)

Imagine a joke so funny that you can't stop laughing for a month. Paper stronger than steel. An apple the size of a hotel. A jet engine quieter than a moth beating its wings. A home-cooked meal for 25,000 people. Try exaggerating your idea. Think big: what if it were a thousand times bigger, louder, stronger, faster, or brighter? What if the number of people who could use it were increased a thousandfold? Now think small; what if it were only one-thousandth as powerful, fast, costly, or complicated as before? How can you exaggerate your idea?

-gregg

Sony's 360-degree display

2009-10-22T16:51:00.005-04:00

Sony is demonstrating a 360-degree tabletop display this week. They claim it is a "highly-multiview" autostereoscopic display, rather than a 360-degree 2-D display.

Have any of you seen it? How did it look? Is it a rotating LED paddle, or something different?

Link: http://av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20091019_322773.html?ref=rss

Google-English translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20091019_322773.html%3Fref%3Drss

Recent update, with more images:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20091022_323667.html

I dimly recall coming up with the term "highly-multiview" for an article a while back... but maybe that was just a coincidence of the translation.

g-fav

ps Thanks to Andrew Woods for bringing this to my attention.

Two sub-$5 toys with curious operational mechanisms

2009-10-01T16:24:00.004-04:00

Hi -

Ever wish your 3 year-old had a toy or two which, despite being < $5, triggers a sense of wonder about how on earth it works? Here are two toys that I (finally!) found at Henry Bear's Park. Both are made by Toysmith (Auburn, WA).

Toysmith #9236 "Flashing floating DISCO glide ball"

I first saw this at a friend's house and spent two years tracking it down. This odd little ball is black with colored dots. When you roll it across the floor, it seems to frictionlessly glide along - it's actually floating within a clear sphere. If you smack it just right, the dots glow and blink. $4!

Toysmith "Never fall UFO"

It's a wind-up plastic UFO that scoots along a tabletop, but a little mechanism inside makes it change direction just before it would have plummeted off the edge! The salesperson suggested that it would be a fun way to keep your one-year-old entertained at a restaurant, since it can't fall off the table. $2!

I hope to see more inventive toys with curious mechanisms inside...

g-fav

Optics: 2 papers @ OSA meeting. Me on 3-D, and Accardi / Wornell on QUASI light fields

2009-09-06T00:09:00.003-04:00

Hi -

I finally posted the 2-pager for an invited talk I'm giving at the OSA's 93rd Annual Meeting (Frontiers in Optics 2009 / Laser Science XXV): "Progress in Volumetric Three-Dimensional Displays and Their Applications."

It'll be on Tuesday, Oct. 13 (2009) in San Jose, CA.

Also: Anthony Accardi and his advisor Gregory Wornell will be publicly presenting very creative and multi-disciplinary work, along the lines of their recent JOSA paper, "Quasi light fields: extending the light field to coherent radiation." For free previews, see the PDF of one of Anthony's recent talks mirrored at Prof. Raskar's site, or an earlier post on related topics at ArXiv.

-g

Whew! Now you can swing side-to-side without fear of being sued!

2009-08-29T20:45:00.003-04:00

Hi -

If, for fear of patent infringement, you had been avoiding swinging side-to-side on a swing suspended by trees - - breathe a sigh of relief! Read on...

One example of some of the problems with the U.S. patent system is exemplified by U.S. Pat. 6,368,227, "METHOD OF SWINGING ON A SWING," which generated substantial publicity for its young inventor when it issued in 2002.

Or, I should say, the expired '227. According to the USPTO database, it expired in 2006.

What did it cover?

1. A method of swinging on a swing, the method comprising the steps of:
a) suspending a seat for supporting a user between only two chains that are hung from a tree branch;
b) positioning a user on the seat so that the user is facing a direction perpendicular to the tree branch;
c) having the user pull alternately on one chain to induce movement of the user and the swing toward one side, and then on the other chain to induce movement of the user and the swing toward the other side; and
d) repeating step c) to create side-to-side swinging motion, relative to the user, that is parallel to the tree branch.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the method is practiced independently by the user to create the side-to-side motion from an initial dead stop.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the method further comprises the step of:

e) inducing a component of forward and back motion into the swinging motion, resulting in a swinging path that is generally shaped as an oval.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the magnitude of the component of forward and back motion is less than the component of side-to-side motion.

Whew! Google Patents: 6,368,227. Or search for the prosecution history in the file wrapper at the USPTO, here.

-g

Mass High Tech profile

2009-08-28T06:28:00.003-04:00

Hi there -

I'm profiled in this week's Mass High Tech in a piece by Jim Connolly: "Gregg Favalora sets his sights on the optics industry."

Maybe it’s in his genes or maybe it was from his environment, but Gregg Favalora feels he was destined to work with optics and imaging. In fact he has been working with 3-D imaging since he was in junior high...

-g

(Edge) Short course on synthetic genomics

2009-08-01T23:57:00.003-04:00

Hello -

Brockman's Edge.org continues to showcase interesting work from his cadre of leading-edge thinkers (or, as I think of them, "the smart cool-kids.") George Church and Craig Venter taught a 6-hour course on synthetic genomics, presented at Edge.org, for free.

I didn't make it through all six hours, though what I watched I found really absorbing. I also admit I find the selection of students equally fascinating - they introduce themselves in the first minutes of part one. If you are a frequent visitor to Edge.org, or watch TED videos, or, really, go to any of the "conferences by big thinkers," they'll be familiar (though mostly West Coast) names.

Edge Master Class: A Short Course on Synthetic Genomics

g-fav

Watching simulated chromosomes mutate as they try to reach a "goal"

2009-07-24T20:48:00.009-04:00

Hi -

What might a time-lapse of evolution look like, at the genetic level, watching genes win and lose on the basis of how well the organism was able to survive? In this blog post, we'll look at a really dumbed-down version of this that's still, I think, conceptually compelling.

How is a recipe different from an evolving organism? What if real-world problems, like designing bridges or electronic circuits, were solved by a computer that hunted around for a good solution rather than at the explicit, exacting direction of a team of engineers?

Genetic algorithms are computational "recipes" that function in this manner. Broadly, it's been possible to program a computer to program itself, using a technique that has some analogies with real-life evolution. This won't surprise any computer scientists, since the technique has been around since the 1950s and gained popularity in the 1970s. But I thought you might be interested in GAs because we can peer (diagrammatically) into an accelerated world of simulated, simplified "evolution" - and, also, it's a fun programming exercise that lets me get a little more experience with languages like Mathematica and C.

(If this is new to you, see the brief overview that I blogged about in 2007.)

In short, we give our evolution-simulating program a few things:

A population of organisms (usually called chromosomes), each chromosome being composed of a bunch of genes... and each gene can be as simple as a 0 or 1 -- or as complicated as a mathematical function like Sin(x). Usually the population is random, a bunch of Frankensteins.
A goal to achieve, like "figure out what math function best approximates this stock-ticker," or "figure out how to place 100 Lego blocks to make a really long bridge that doesn't collapse under its own weight." Usually the goal is presented in terms of a test called a fitness function. We test each organism (or chromosome's) ability to pass the test. The chromosomes that do better survive - pairs of chomosomes (parents) breed, make children, the kids are mutated, and the weaker parents are killed. Repeat.
And you need to let the simulation know how likely it is that genes will mutate or that breeding parents will swap chromosomal segments ("crossover").

As a prelude to a larger project, I put together a simple Mathematica notebook that would try out a problem in a textbook on the subject, Melanie Mitchell's An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. The test?

Turning random "binary" chromosomes into a freaky population that loves the number 1

Start with a bunch of random chromosomes, like:

{0,0,1,0,1,1,1,0} (chromosome 1)

{1,0,0,1,1,0,0,0} (chromosome 2)

...and let them breed and mutate. The chromosomes that looked most like {1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1} were not killed off.

Our population had 40 chromosomes, each with 10 genes valued 0 or 1. The universe runs for 100 time-steps.

Here's a chromosome from the randomized primordial ooze, our friend chromosome 5:

And here is its universe, textually:

..and graphically (Mr. Five is in the fifth row from the top):

A few simple experiments: does it work?

Of course, I implemented the basic GA stuff, like a function for "fitness-proportionate selection using roulette wheel sampling," a fancy way of saying "a way to favor the parents that most look like a bunch of ones." At the end I'll link to the notebook so you can use it, laugh at my code, and offer suggestions.

Here I'll show you a few plots that show how the population's fitness improves (hopefully) over 100 sessions of selection, mating with crossover, and "honey, I mutated the kids."

Above, we use the recommended parameters for mutation (0.001 = 0.1% likely) and crossover (70%). As you can see, the population approaches the theoretical maximum fitness (400, which is the number of chromosomes multiplied by the number of genes each) at about step 20.

The curve goes up, meaning that the "fitness" of the chromosomes is improving. A plot of the chromosomes at ten snapshots in their history are provided right under that. They're getting more black - which means that they're becoming filled with 1s. (Under that is what the first ten generations looked like.)

It bounces around, too. That's because the genes mutate now and then.

What if we go outside without sunblock?

What if we turn the mutation probability up to a whopping 10%?

Augh! The population never has a chance to improve its fitness; just as it tries to get healthy, we flip bits and really screw things up.

One other quick experiment: do what extent does the crossover probability matter? Let's turn it down to 0.5%, so that crossover happens about 1 in 200 matings. We'll increase the number of generations to 500:

Neat! Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it's as if improvements in fitness happen in punctuated jumps.

Oh, what does the life of one chromosome over the whole history look like? Going back to our original parameters for mutation and crossover, Mr. Five indeed tends toward all ones (or "all black," reading downward.)

Well, that's it. If you find this interesting, you might want to code some of this stuff up on your own. I suggest a few video clips of neat stuff (e.g. synthetic organisms learning to crawl, Lego bridges...) and good books on these blog posts:

g-fav's first attempt to write a GA, in C (May 2007)
"virtual schadenfraude" - turn on your speakers! (Oct 2008)
Lego bridges and truck backer-uppers (May 2009)

The Mathematica notebook (do whatever you want with this, was written for fun and not error-tested, not responsible for damages...) max_ones.nb - free Wolfram Mathematica Player

Have a good weekend!

Gregg

Maps on FedEx shipping labels

2009-07-04T21:20:00.003-04:00

Hi -

Among Kevin Kelly's numerous thoughtful blog posts about network effects, the Web, and various design-issues is this brief post about FedEx's use of road maps printed directly on packages. Check it out. (One commenter noted that it would be more useful in the cab of the truck on a clipboard, instead of in the back of the truck stuck to a package, but still...)

Where do things go when companies wind down? Boston Globe...

2009-06-28T07:38:00.002-04:00

Good morning -

New England's top tech / business journalist, Scott Kirsner, wrote an article about a topic that most entrepreneurs stay quiet about: what is the gritty reality (or what are the opportunities presented by) the "desks, PCs, patents up for grabs as more companies wind down?".

My startup, Actuality Systems, is one of the examples in the story. Scott was one of the first journalists to cover Actuality (for Wired magazine in 2001!) - and I was willing to open up to him about our status in the hopes that other entrepreneurs would find it useful. (Actuality has laid off its staff and is now contemplating various options regarding its valuable patent fortress in the space of 3-D technologies.)

Best,

Gregg

Insights for new entrepreneurs

2009-06-26T21:08:00.002-04:00

Hi -

I didn't know this until today, but Microsoft is trying to make it easier for startups to buy their stuff... and as a part of this effort, they're sponsoring an online "book" for new entrepreneurs about basic lessons, like:

Building an advisory board
Choosing among LLC and Corp.
How to Pitch and not be Screwed By VCs

The intro section is here, followed by the table of contents. (This was due to a mention in the New York Times.)

Update

2009-06-24T23:14:00.002-04:00

Hello, dear (hopefully RSS-based) reader,

I just thought I'd say a bit about what I've been doing lately. (If this blog-indulgence isn't your thing, look away!)

Actuality Systems

In mid-March, in the face of some nasty financial realities, the Board asked me to become Actuality's CEO again, at which point our team was beginning to achieve important results in the field of prostate cancer treatment using machine vision (i.e. PCs helping doctors get the most out of ultrasound). We were donning scrubs and recording terabytes of data at major Boston hospitals. However, I did the math, and absent any major commercial deals, our last paid day would be April 24. That left us with savings to be a mensch about paying our vendors and maintaining our patent fortress.

"Doing the math" on a weekly rather than monthy basis is an atypical exercise, one that pits accrual accounting versus cash-based accounting. Also, the mundane details of "winding down the company" are a little tricky to get guidance on. Why? Entrepreneurs go into hiding in the final days of their startups - startups go out with a whimper, not a bang, so little is written about the process. If any entrepreneurs would find a brief lessons-learned blog post about the topic, let me know.

What's Next?

After a partial asset sale and moving the HQ to my home office, Jenn and I made some changes. She returned to work a couple of days/week, and I immersed myself in a few things:

(1) preparing our patent portfolio for sale or ongoing maintenance (we have 19+ patents that cover everything from our crystal-ball hologram-like display to various floating-image systems that previously only existed in SciFi movies);

(2) allowing myself to think about Life After Actuality, blank-slate; and in pursuit of this,

(3) many meetings ultimately involving caffeine consumption. I have been quite caffeinated lately. And happily so.

Fortunately I now have the opportunity to meet wonderfully interesting people in the Cambridge startup scene - lots of medical devices, imaging-based ventures, Web-stuff, and overall optimism. If you are looking for networking events, check here. June is New England Innovation Month. Tangentially, I am curious who is going to step in to fill the funding-vacuum between $200k and $3M, but that is a discussion of its own.

I am carving out a few hours here and there to build new skills, like continuing to work with Mathematica to explore genetic programming, something that's interested me for a while. No progress to report there yet.

More Self-Indulgent Commentary

Jenn and I are enjoying a particularly fun time with parenthood: Toby's just over three, and Gabe is nine months old. (For those of you without kids, that means we're having hysterical conversations with the elder while the younger is finally scooting happily at high speed around the house.)

There is a local firm with whom I will probably work with part-time, and when the time is rightl, I'm excited to talk about it. I'll be at What's Next In Tech tomorrow (Thurdsay) night, and hope to see some of you there. I'm listening to the Talking Heads on our stereo tonight because, with Jenn and the kids gone, it's a little too creepy to listen to Boards of Canada. (Then again, when isn't it?)

Hey, it's almost midnight, and my ice coffee isn't finished yet.

Life is good!

-g-fav

Major 3-D technology conference: call for abstracts

2009-06-10T14:11:00.003-04:00

Hello, my optics-oriented friends:

The SPIE-IS&T Stereoscopic Displays & Applications conference - hitting its 21st year - is now accepting abstracts. This is the largest, longest-running technical conference on 3-D display technologies. Displays, software, compression, perception, entertainment... you name it!

If 3-D technology is up your alley, take a moment to visit www.stereoscopic.org.

ABSTRACTS DUE JUNE 22, 2009.

Best,

Gregg

What do you think of this?

2009-06-04T00:05:00.002-04:00

Microsoft's Project Natal made a splash at E3 2009. What do you think of this video?

Upgrading your MacBook HD

2009-05-29T23:29:00.002-04:00

Hi -

If you have a MacBook that's running out of space, you might want to consider upgrading your hard drive. (Ours was, what, an 80 GB that filled up with the OS, various apps, and quite a few photos.)

It's simple if you aren't afraid of screwdrivers and avoiding static buildup; I...

0. Was relieved to see that I already had an external backup drive, a LaCie 160 GB.

1. Printed out "How to Upgrade Your MacBook's Hard Drive" from Macinstruct / Tutorama.

2. Poked around online, read reviews, and picked a hard drive. I chose the Western Digital 500 GB Scorpio 2.5" 5400 rpm jobbie from Amazon. It's an OEM component, meaning all you get is a drive in a static bag.

3. Got the right Torx screwdriver and weird flat pulling / pushing tools from some Amazon vendor. (And recalled that I had a tiny Philips screwdriver already.)

4. A few days later they arrived.

5. Pulled back the static-friendly tablecloth on the dining room table, put a piece of paper on the wood, and got to work...

6. Excluding the initial backup, it took 15 minutes to install the drive and about 1 hour to restore it.

7. Done!

Fear not... You too can have, like, 400 GB available on your MacBook!

-g

New dual-mode display: first pictures of Pixel Qi screen

2009-05-28T19:28:00.003-04:00

Fresh out of the fab, see pictures of the Pixel Qi 3qi screen on the company's blog.

Why is this interesting? According to Mary Lou,

We have been feverishly working on designing our first screen product We will be sampling our 10″ screens this spring and plan to be in high volume mass production this summer. These screens have an epaper state that rivals the best epaper on the market today. What’s different: unlike the other epaper products where one must wait a second or so to change the screen - we provide video rate refresh. Also, while we have a high resolution paper-white black and white, we also provide, in the same screen fully saturated color fidelity - the same as a standard laptop screen - same color, contrast resolution, field of view etc. Our screens consumer 25%-50% of the power of a regular notebook screen in their power savings modes and will be in available at comparable price points and volumes to standard LCD screens this summer. In addition, by integrating the screen with the electronics driving the screen a 5-fold increase in battery life between charges can be achieved.

-g

Note to self: Genetic algorithms, Lego bridges, etc.

2009-05-22T23:16:00.003-04:00

Hey there, self (and David Oliver),

Here are a few papers you've been looking for:

P. J. Funes and J. B. Pollack, "Computer Evolution of Buildable Objects for Evolutionary Design by Computers," in Evolutionary Design by Computers, P. Bentley (ed.) pp. 387-403 (1999). (Dave, see around Fig. 10 for the crazy-looking Lego bridges that were evolved computationally.)

J. R. Koza, "A Genetic Approach to Finding a Controller to Back Up a Tractor-Trailer Truck," ACC (1992). Includes the best-named section heading I've seen in a while, "THE TRUCK BACKER-UPPER PROBLEM."

I finally tracked down this Ph.D. thesis:

T. P. Meyer, "Long range predictability of high dimensional chaotic dynamics," Ph.D. thesis Univ. Ill. Urbana-Champaign (1992). [CCSR-91-17]

And finally, the oft-cited co-evolution paper:

W. D. Hillis, "Co-evolving parasites improve simulated evolution as an optimization procedure," Physica D 42 (1990) 228-234.

-g

Self-assembly of DNA into nanoscale three-dimensional shapes

2009-05-21T10:09:00.003-04:00

Hi -

Wired turned me on to the 3-D nanoassembly work in Harvard's Shih Lab.

Wired: "DNA Nanotech Gains a Third Dimension"

Bjorn Hogberg posts the Nature (2009) preprint, "Self-assembly of DNA into nanoscale three-dimensional shapes."

Here is an illustration from the Wired piece:

Scale: the horizontal white bar is 20 nm long.

If you visit the Shih Lab site, hyperlinked above, you'll find a link to a nanoscale CAD program...

-g

(Scott Kirsner's) What's Next in Tech

2009-05-14T21:00:00.005-04:00

Hey techie entrepreneurs, here's something for you to consider registering for...
Leading New England tech / business journalist Scott Kirsner wrote regarding the next step in his efforts to keep the best minds within Massachusetts and figure out where the next waves of growth are coming from. He describes his "What's Next In Tech: Exploring the Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond" event as:

The idea is to provide a picture of the tech clusters that are going to drive the next waves of growth here in Massachusetts, from cloud computing to robotics to videogames to energy efficiency to social media. Speakers include venture capitalist Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital, iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, Brian Halligan of HubSpot, and Tim Healy, who runs the publicly-traded EnerNOC. (Note: The early registration rate ends on May 15th -- tomorrow.)

See Scott's blog posting on the event (signup).

What do I think is "next in tech"?

Several folks who've answered this question focus on the leading edge of Web and mobile technologies ca. 2009, e.g. cloud computing, social networks, mobile advertising and tracking, etc.

In my own little "circle in the Venn diagram" from the worlds of medical devices, electronics, optics, and recent fatherhood, I believe the next opportunities in tech are:

Medical devices with a stronger software component. An example is retrofitting ultrasound machines with hardcore computer vision algorithms to assist the clinician in performing biopsies or interventions (e.g. my bias towards prostate brachytherapy). These fall within "intraoperative planning and guidance" - there's a huge opportunity to make money by figuring out how to track defomable organs, like the brain or liver, to tell the surgeon where the tumor is right now. Companies like Medtronic mostly focus on the 20% of the body that's rigid, e.g. orthopedic surgery. That's the easier problem. It's time to help the other 80% of the body.
Imaging, i.e., the capture and processing of light, e.g. cameras. This won't be news to you in computer graphics, but keep an eye on the labs of Ramesh Raskar (and his "imaging ventures" class co-led by Joost Bonsen), the various Stanford Graphics Lab research efforts in light fields, and Shree Nayar's work at Columbia's CAVE group. Examples: cameras that you can focus after you take the picture and return home, removing blur from scenes, seeing objects from locations you didn't take a good enough picture of... Graphics processor performance has gotten extraordinary enough that consumer-grade cameras will be capable of extraordinary things in a few years.
Display, particularly 3-D. Yeah, sure, this is what I spent my conscious life working on, but there's really something here. Stereo cinema has exploded. RealD, one of the leading providers of stereoscopic cinema technology, claims to have over 1,600 screens worldwide. This opens opportunities in: camera technology, editing / direction software, secure transmission and playback, glasses, projectors, and other areas. Further, we might tire of our 2-D desktop displays for a more holographic experience. Many organizations have developed technology that can project real, 3-D, "look-around" imagery in front of screens (or above tabletops, Death Star-style!). The day will come.
Advanced toys. That's all I'll say on that one.
Systems that begin to mimic natural processes like "emergence," "swarms," and "genetic algorithms," everywhere from automated mechanical design to distributed processing to more realistic videogame AI.

Anyhow, go take a look at Scott's original conversation on this topic.

-g

From TED 2009: Clever interface

2009-05-13T00:16:00.002-04:00

MIT Media Lab's Pattie Maes / Pranav Mistry developed a "Sixth Sense" set of technologies that get closer to letting you aquire and see visual information in some helpful ways. From TED 2009:

G-Fav

Computerworld publicity, and MIT class

2009-04-27T21:01:00.004-04:00

Hi -

A few months ago, photographer Sara Forrest profiled me as a part of a collection of pieces on various entrepreneurs and a bit of our personal side. It is running in this week's Computerworld magazine, viewable online. "The Grill: Gregg Favalora talks about 3-D imaging breakthroughs."

At the moment, I'm back at the office ingesting liquid and solid caffeine in preparation for a class that Joost Bonsen asked me to participate in this Wednesday night at MIT: MAS.964, Imaging Ventures. (Two hours! Whew.)

It was around this time of year back in 1997 that Joost was responsible for pushing me into their business plan writing competition, which led to my leaving Harvard, which led to starting Actuality. Last week, we began the process of winding down the company. So this is a good way to formalize a lot of my recent introspection about product development and entrepreneurship.

-g

Cambridge (Mass.) Science Festival this weekend

2009-04-25T07:28:00.002-04:00

Hi -

The Cambridge Science Festival starts today. The schedule is here, and includes (plug!) hands-on optics exhibits for kids from noon-4pm sponsored by volunteers from the NES/OSA.

12:00pm - 4:00pm

Optics: Light at Work

Kresge Auditorium, MIT Campus, 48 Mass. Ave.

Carnival! We have an "Optics Suitcase" filled with experiments that demonstrate the principles of light, such as transmission, refraction and reflection, in an entertaining, hands-on way. For instance, we have a water bath with optical components that demonstrates the effects of lenses. We have fiber optics made of Jello. We have an experiment with an overhead projector which shows why the sky is blue. And we have a huge kaleidoscope to demonstrate the properties of reflection. We will have give-aways for attendees, including beautiful Optics wall posters.

-g

Long-overdue techie links

2009-04-25T01:15:00.002-04:00

Hello -

Posting has been light lately due to, well, life, and also business developments, of which I might speak later. But until then a number of enticing things have accumulated in my "read later" folder, like:

EDGE "Lord of the cloud: John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter."

500 Hats on entrepreneurship, or why you ought to be crazy to do it, or...

CNN.com, "Hackers stole data on Pentagon's new fighter jet."

Wired.com on a pocket roll-out e-book reader I hadn't heard of

"Insane landing at St. Maarten airport." (YouTube)

Optics: A discussion about printing your own integral photographs at home.

Well, it should be nice and sunny tomorrow in Boston. J-Fav and I are considering doing some morning Geocaching. I still haven't found the one at the Uncle Sam statue in Arlington Center...

g-fav

Limited-time optics auction @ eBay

2009-04-15T20:18:00.002-04:00

Hello, dear reader -

Our company, Actuality Medical, has transitioned from 3-D display technology to software-based medical devices. So? We have a great collection of excellent-quality optical components and equipment for you to check out.

Come visit us at http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/route128engineers for:

Optical tables
FireWire cameras
Collections of optics, like singlets, prisms, etc.
Translation stages
Other cool stuff, like SensAble Phantom OMNI haptic interfaces

Have fun!

-Gregg

An experimental new Segway

2009-04-08T09:35:00.003-04:00

Thanks to DP for pointing me to an experimental effort between Segway and GM, the P.U.M.A. It is a longer-range vehicle that strikes me as a cross between a car and a wheelchair. What do you think?

> P.U.M.A website
> Video:

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A few entries from my "Read Later" folder

2009-03-20T00:06:00.004-04:00

Good evening -

I came back from tonight's NES-OSA meeting at the Media Lab, which was a real joy. We learned about Ed Boyden's optically-throttled neuron experiments (in which a virus genetically alters mice embryos to make their brains optically-sensitive), Ramesh Raskar's work in computational photography (including deblurring using "fluttered" shutters), and Michael Bove's progress in holographic video using surface acoustic wave modulators.

Been storing up a few interesting links for my faithful readers:

(movie clip) Dan Dennett's TED talk regarding a Darwinian view on why things are funny, or sweet, or cute, or sexy. The explanation for "funny" was the most surprising to me.

(blog) Kevin Kelley's blog, "New Rules for the New Economy," lately discusses various swarm-related ideas. He's got an RSS feed.

(utterly random nerd humor) From the people who brought you the faux-scientific educational series "Look Around You" is this very brief clip, "The Helvetica Scenario."

Like some other forms of stimuli that need to become progressively more extreme to elicit a reaction, I wonder if there's an analogy for humor. I think my sense of humor is really getting stretched towards the increasingly bafflingly bizarre.

Will this reach a limit? Next year, will I only laugh at things that are a collection of non sequiturs? I remember back in fifth grade, all it took was a good Monty Python episode. Then, in grad school, I needed something along the lines of those parody GI Joe public service announcements, overdubbed with nonsense. Then came the "Retroencabulator," followed by "Look Around You," which is a sort of meta-humor that pokes fun at how utterly arbitrary the scientific method must seem to non-scientists, and then Matthias had to up the ante and direct me to "You Look Nice Today," which I find funny for its stream of utter falsehoods passed off as obvious truths.

What's next, I wonder? :-)

(slapstick) Well, maybe it comes full circle. Here is a video collection of talking cats and dogs.

-g

3 optics talks Thurs @ MIT Media Lab - RSVP -today-

2009-03-16T09:26:00.002-04:00

Hello friends,

I am excited to announce that the New England Section of the Optical Society of America has teamed up with the Boston IEEE Lasers & Electro-optics Society to present an evening of talks with three world-class researchers:

Info: Three Talks at the Media Lab (takes a few seconds to load)

"Computational Photography" with Ramesh Raskar
"Optical Brain Control" with Ed Boyden
"Toward Consumer Holographic Video" with Michael Bove

When: Evening of Thurs. March 19, 2009
Deadline: To join the dinner networking pre-event, RSVP *today, Monday.*

For those of you who haven't been to an NES-OSA meeting before, this is a great way to meet other people in the optics community. Also, there should be sign-up sheets for people who want to join.

-G-Fav

ps Remember to RSVP now.

Mathematica Home Edition: US$295

2009-02-23T19:08:00.003-05:00

Hi there -

Following two small self-educational / art projects here using Wolfram Mathematica (see through bushes! funkify your portrait!), a Wolfram representative wrote me to let our readers know that you can get a fully-featured license to Mathematica 7 Home Edition for just $295.

This is a good deal. You can learn more about it here.

By the way, we use Mathematica 7 (I defy you to click that link) at Actuality, and have noticed some great enhancements over v6.

For example, it now runs wonderfully on my 2004-vintage IBM ThinkPad T41 - whereas, in the past, 3-D visualization would close the program. It seems to take advantage of multi-core processors. Also, it comes with new image processing functionality that makes it easier to... aw, heck, check it out for yourself. If you use the professional edition at work, I think it comes with a home-use license too.

g-fav

Good-enough synthetic aperture photography

2009-02-18T23:24:00.004-05:00

Hello -

Today I'd like to share progress on my efforts to learn about "synthetic aperture photography," a branch of computational photography.

Jenn and I drove up Mass. Ave. in Lexington (i.e., Paul Revere Lexington), put a video camera out the window, and filmed the buildings whizzing by.

Here is a typical collection of frames of, say, a school (or apartment?) blocked by trees:

After picking, say, 16 successive movie frames, you can stack them up, shear them, and slice them to simulate having a camera that's 20 feet long or so. Why? This manipulates the data so as to create the final image of the building with the trees removed:

This won't be news to those of you in the field of computer graphics since, say, 1997, but there's a lot of activity analyzing optical systems - such as large-lens or multi-lens systems - for benefits in graphics. Marc Levoy, a professor at Stanford, held a class on a collection of topics he called "computational photography." Today, the field, building on work in computer vision and 3-D display, includes:

Snapping a photo, and not worrying about focusing it until later. E.g., when you get home.

Visualizing 3-D scenes from angles between those you've taken pictures, such as the post-inauguration Microsoft / CNN project.

Taking many snapshots of a scene - say of a building obscured by bushes - and then "erasing" the bushes to show what's behind.

I've been attending talks, flipping through papers, and watching colleagues try their hand at this burgeoning field.

How It's Done

(1) Take video at constant velocity along linear track, (2) collect frames into an array - a spatio-perspective volume - and recenter synthetic film plane on the region of interest, and (3) average over all fames & display it.

I like Mathematica 7 for its functionality and elegance (though not its memory management). We took a few minutes of video & chose some few-second clips using our MacBook's video editing software. Exported it as a QuickTime movie, and from QuickTime Pro, exported an AVI. (For some reason my Mathematica won't play nice with MOV.)

Then...

Import a good 16 or 32-frame segment into an array of images. I chose frames that showed a buliding in the background with plenty of occluders, minimal vertical jumpiness (remember, we were driving), and relatively constant speed. To save memory, cropped the images to a horizontal region. Mind you, the linear camera motion doesn't need to be at constant velocity, but it will make your life easier if you'd like to automate the process.

Verify the constant velocity by viewing a 2-D slice of the 3-D "spatio-perspective volume," an informal approximation of an "epipolar-plane image," as Bolles and Baker called it in the 1980s.

What's that? For the purposes of the blog post, it is a 2-D image with time occupying the vertical axis and space occupying the horizontal.

Hang with me for a second. Even if you're not a computer graphics nut, I think this offers an interesting way to view the world, in the sprit of an earlier post regarding how engineers sometimes find it easier to manipulate information if it's first converted into a different format.

(Links to: Jan Neumann)

Imagine taking a sequence of frames from that movie, above, printing them out, and then stacking them up like a stacked deck of cards. The back card will be the car's starting point, and the facing card will be the car's ending point. Got it? Now imagine whipping out your sharpest knife, slicing through the deck, and peering down on it.

It would look like this:

Since nearby objects whiz past our field of view quickly, they cover lots of ground in very little time. The nearby trees and signposts therefore are the most horizontally-slanted objects in the image above. On the other hand, the school is in the distance, so it appears to creep along as we drive past it. It's nearly vertical in this representation.

Fortunately most of the tracks through the image are linear, meaning that this process can be completed with a minimum of pain.

What if we wanted to "freeze" the motion of the building, so we could synthetically "focus" on it? We'd need to recenter the film plane by shearing this stack of images. By trial and error, it turns out that the building moves 4 pixels to the right for each successive frame.

We recenter the data by incrementally padding it. If we do it correctly, the building's spatio-temperal tracks will be vertical:

Recentered film plane.

Great!

Now we just need to eliminate those pesky trees. Real-life lenses are good at doing that, because if the lens is big enough, it can "look around" the trees. In aggregate, little pieces of the lens really do get to see the whole face of the building. And so does our video camera.

We can simulate this giant-lens action by simply averaging over all of those frames. (And thanks to my co-worker, Joshua Napoli, for putting it so simply. Here is his similar project of last year - viewing houses through trees - but his blog post [had been] AWOL.)

What does it look like?

Success. Trees are blurred out. Compare to the photos at the top of this post.

How can we take this a step further? We can simulate a variable-focus lens by computing what every possible set of shearing parameters will do. That is, we can tilt our deck of cards by varying degrees so that the space-time path of various objects become vertical, and hence able to be imaged by our gigantic synthetic lens.

Here's how this looks. Let's recenter every 7th pixel so we can "focus" on a tree in the center, and "stop down" the aperture by averaging over fewer frames than we did above.

Whew!

Still awake? If you're interested in this stuff, try out:

Email me if you want me to post the Mathematica 7 notebook on my personal website.
Browse this collection of papers at Stanford, here. MIT is also active.
RC Bolles, HH Baker, "Epipolar-plane image analysis: a technique for analyzing motion sequences," Proc. IEEE Third Workshop on Computer Vision: Representation and Control (Bellaire, MI), Oct. 13-16, 1985.
A Adams, M Levoy, "General Linear Cameras with Finite Aperture," Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (2007).
R Ng, "Fourier Slice Photography" SIGGRAPH 2005.
W Chun, OS Cossairt, "Data processing for three-dimensional displays," allowed US Patent.
MW Halle, "Holographic stereograms as discrete imaging systems," in Proc. SPIE 2176, Practical Holography VIII (1994).
M Levoy, P Hanrahan, "Light Field Rendering," SIGGRAPH 96, 31-42.

-g

ps A big thank-you in advance to anyone who can explain why Blogger: (1) doesn't insert images at the cursor, but rather on top; and (2) why an extra linefeed appears for every paragraph whenever I insert a photo.

Facebook keeps your stuff even if you quit

2009-02-16T20:11:00.004-05:00

Plink co-founder and Polaris Ventures partner Simeon Simeonov wrote a blog post regarding a recent change to the Facebook terms of service. He links to this piece at Mashable which explains the changes that suggest Facebook owns what you've posted even if you deactivate your account.

You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

-g-fav

Audio signal processing, or "On T-Pain & Kanye West..."

2009-02-10T22:26:00.000-05:00

Hi -

Have you heard Kanye West's "Love Lockdown," an entrancing bit of intriguingly spare but heavily-engineered instrumentation? Like many 2000s hip-hop songs, it features a vocal effect attributed to pitch-correction software - Auto-tune - from Antares Audio Technologies. [1]

According to a note in XXLmag.com (ref. 1), we're supposed to understand that the pitch-locking vocal effect is not strictly a plain vocoder, but the proprietary Antares technology. Perhaps it is described by U.S. Pat 5,973,252 [Google Patents], "Pitch detection and intonation apparatus and method." (Side note: Antares's Andy Hildebrand was a former seismic 3-D data analyst! Small world, signal processing...)

Commenters on XXLmag.com offer examples of Auto-tune extreme-use (e.g. T-Pain), as opposed to traditional vocoder effects, but, frankly, I can't recall enough from my grad-school speech synthesis days regarding what the differences are between a vocoder, a phase vocoder, and Auto-Tune. Ah, well. I know a few of you reading this do indeed know the difference, so please chime in.

Before I leave you with a few YouTube clips, I want to explore the orchestration of "Love Lockdown" because it is a relatively minimal presentation of a theme for Top-40 radio.

First, the core tracks are available on Kanye's website, on the page "Love Lock Down Stems." They include a capella and (quite) distorted, guitar-esque vocals, a 4-beat 808 drum track (||: 1&2 3 ... :||), African percussion, piano (tutorial here, though I don't know if it's in the right key [YouTube]: C#m7, F#m7, B), and outro synth.

The African percussion sounds like a straightforward 1-bar loop which, for a moment there, makes me wonder if it's actually 4 bars in some subtle way. Anyhow, omitting the lead-in bar crossing and the quarter-note clap:

(0:55)

1e&a 2e&a 3e&a 4e&a 1e&a 2e&a 3e&a 4e&a

x xx x x x xx x xx x xx x x x xx x xx

1e&a 2e&a 3e&a 4e&a 1e&a 2e&a 3e&a 4e&a

x xx x x x xx x xx x xx x x x xx x xx

From the listener's point of view, four tracks are active during most of the song: the 808, vocals, piano, and African percussion. During the first half of the song, they layer (much like standard electronic "house music," i.e. kick, snare, bass, synth, black & white movie samples... :-):

iTunes length 808 voc pno Afrc

0:00 4M x

0:07 16M x x

0:40 8M x x x

0:55 8M x x x x

1:13 16M x x x

Frankly I got a bit more into it than that, mapping out the song:

Song structure

Then, dear reader, around 10pm I started to wonder why on earth I was putting so much effort into this when I could be, I don't know, doing just about anything else. I think my intrigue with the song's simplicity became... a spreadsheet.

Anyhow, here are a few YouTube clips for you to consider:

[embedding disabled]

(Video. Kanye West, "Love Lockdown" - commercial version)

(Kanye West, "Love Lockdown" - an evidently leaked SNL version)

[embedding disabled]

(T-Pain and Lonely Island / SNL digital short: "I'm On a Boat")

[embedding disabled]

(Kraftwerk, "The Robots")

(Video. See starting @ 3:00 - poking fun at how poor of a singer one can be & still sound in-tune-ish)

(A plain vocoder sounds quite different: YouTube clip)

Finally, being a New Jerseyite, I must leave you with Bon Jovi's "Living On a Prayer." No idea what this effect is.

-g-fav

Hot display technologies at CES 2009

2009-02-10T21:00:00.002-05:00

Display industry consultancy Insight Media has released their "CES 2009 Best Buzz Awards," which includes a Samsung cellphone with built-in projector, a USB-powered 7" monitor (?), and a Vizio LCD TV. As usual, Insight Media digs into the details.

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Peer Review

2009-02-04T10:57:00.002-05:00

Every now and then, I'm asked to help do anonymous review of science or engineering journal manuscripts.

For some reason I got a kick out of this paragraph (this is from the OSA):

Although this paper need not be exceptional, it should add significantly to the field for you to recommend acceptance or revision. Lately, a substantial number of papers have been submitted that can be called "not wrong" papers. These are papers that contain no errors, but they also lack any new and useful information that would move your field forward; they may provide no citable results, or document so little progress that researchers in your field will ignore them. These papers take up your time and ours; they clutter up the literature; and they do not advance research in the field. If you find this paper fits this description, you should recommend that the paper be rejected.

-g

For my entrepreneur friends who are tired of pitching to VCs

2009-02-03T20:44:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across Merlin Mann's entry into the "worst website ever" panel at SxSW 2008.

Dear reader, you need more acronyms! You need to open the kimono! You need DRM and paradigms! You need more socially-networked "friends"!

Here you go. (movie)

g-fav

CNN Reporter blogs eating via SNAP (were, "food stamps")

2009-02-02T19:31:00.000-05:00

CNN's Sean Callebs is blogging about his experience living on $176/month for food.

Netbooks, baby!

2009-02-01T22:06:00.003-05:00

With nice, compact, powerful laptops like the MacBook, what exactly makes netbooks so enticing? I'm trying to figure that out, and seeing if anything's worth buying... yet.

Here is a good top-10 review from C|Net Crave (in the UK). From Oct. 2008, but it seems reasonably up-to-date.

(Do you have and like your netbook? Ever written a document on it? Use Linux / StarOffice? Read a technical paper in PDF? I'm curious.)

g

Some Contemporary Artists

2009-01-16T21:50:00.002-05:00

I enjoy the Taschen book Art Now, a 190-page rapid survey published in 2001 of the artists the authors think are worth knowing about. Sure, that method has its drawbacks, but I really responded to some of the snippets in there. Did some web browsing on them:

Matthew Barney, who "stages timeless fictions in the form of hybrid installations, filmed performances and stylized videos." From what I gather, he films intricately-staged fictional environments, and then exhibits photographs (still frames) of those films. I think. They had it at Mass MoCA once. His Cremaster series is evidently his best-known work. Here's CREMASTER 1, which includes the cinematic trailer.

Thomas Demand also photographs fictional scenes, but he is more likely to create a stark office out of simple materials and than take a snapshot - but we don't realize it's of a fake office. (Once the PHOTOGRAPHS page loads, you can moveover to scroll some of his collection. I like "Studio.") The MoMA exhibition notes say, "Demand begins with a preexisting image culled from the media, usually of a political event, which he translates into a life-size model made of colored paper and cardboard."

Katharina Fritsch's eerie super-sized models of, I don't know, people at meetings and giant rats.

Jenny Holzer, but, hey, everyone likes Jenny Holzer. I mean, a strong sense of duty imprisons you, right?

I'd like to see Henrik Plenge Jakobsen's work in person:

And I doubt I will tire of Jeff Koons. His site is an exhaustive catalog of his work.

Steven Pippin "...succeeds in recalling for a brief moment those sentimental hopes that were once placed in photography and television..."

I wish they had included Arthur Ganson, Anna Hepler, and Steve Hollinger.

-g

Pantry Dinner: Diced marinated pork with bacon, cilantro, rice, and beans

2009-01-14T18:12:00.003-05:00

Hello -

(This post is for the "benefit" of my Facebook friends.) From time to time I like to share my culinary adventures and mishaps. In the middle of cooking this, I thought that it was going to trainwreck into disaster-land - but somehow it all came together. Fortunately this is a keeper for me, rather than an entry from the diary of my disqualification from Home Top Chef. Not yet at least.

2 boneless pork chops cut into 1"-cubes
1 can of black beans
1 can of kidney beans - open and drain the beans now so you don't burn the garlic later
1/2-ish cup of chicken stock
handful of cilantro, chopped
1 cup of Chiavetta's marinade (come to think of it, it's unlikely you'd have this on hand, but I suppose salting the pork would get you halfway there) (thank you Bridget)
2 cloves garlic, diced
5 pieces of good bacon - e.g. Boar's Head - sliced into 1/2"-wide fingers
1 little packet of Sazon Goya (why we have this I have no idea)
Juice of 1 lime
Rice, like a few cups of brown or white rice

Find yourself a decent sautee pan, like a heavy Calphalon

Put the pork cubes into a bowl or bag and marinate in Chiavetta's for 15-30 minutes
Fry the bacon fingers (excuse me, lardons) on medium-low heat until they're done, remember to flip them, and transfer to a paper towel-covered-plate
Turn heat up to medium-high
Place the pork cubes into the pan, shaking off the marinade, for about 4 minutes per side. Check the pork to make sure you don't over-cook it. They should brown nicely.
Transfer pork to a bowl and set aside
Turn heat back down to medium-low and sautee the garlic until fragrant
Add the cilantro
Make sure you don't burn the #&@! garlic, tough guy!
Add both kinds of beans
Stir up all that goodness
Add the chicken stock, Sazon Goya, pork cubes, bacon, and stir
Bring to a boil
Bring down to a simmer, add the lime if you actually have it
Reduce it until you're tired of reducing it; the goal here is to keep it wet
Cover the pan
Taste it and marvel at your impromptu brilliance
When the rice is done, feel free to add it to the pan and mix well, and let it simmer some more. Add some chicken stock to keep it moist, if needed.
When your tired family comes home from their play date, feed them, and bask in your own glory

Comments? Complaints? Contact our help line.

g-fav

Scott Kirsner on his _Inventing the Movies_; 3-D conference

2009-01-13T09:42:00.003-05:00

Hi -

Just a quick note; if you are interested in the history of cinema or the ups-and-downs of marketing a disruptive technology, you might want to attend journalist Scott Kirsner's last two East Coast book tour events: Thurs. Jan. 15 (Concord Free Public Library) or Wed. Feb. 11's chat at the Boston Public Library. He'll be discussing his new book, Inventing the Movies.

Also, the SPIE-IS&T's Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference is next week in San Jose, CA. 20th anniversary! Hoo-ah. You don't need to bring your anaglyph or polarized glasses, because, as all the cool kids know, they give them to you there.

-g

ps Optics people: have you seen the great talks scheduled for the New England Section of the OSA? Photolithography, computational photography, and biological imaging...

Brief graphic design / packaging rant

2009-01-10T15:33:00.002-05:00

Hi there -

It's possible that I'm drinking too much espresso-that-I-thought-was-coffee, reading webpages about how to use my Moka Express, and traveling to Helvetica-saturated continents. But have you seen the awful redesign of the Tropicana brand?

I was shopping at Stop & Shop and almost missed the orange juice section because it looked like a blankish wall of... I don't know... industrial-grade biochemical products, or no frills dry milk, or signage for a Swedish hospital.

No! It's the Tropicana redesign! Enjoy it here. (@ underconsideration.com )

Don't even get me started on the Eurostile-ification of MA, the newest victim being the Capitol Theatre (following the Alfewife typography mishap, I guess).

Woah, who put the extra snobby in my espresso today?

-g

Private Equity glossary (humor) / EDGE 2009 Questions

2009-01-02T10:48:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year!

I thought this was funny: peHUB's "Translating PE-Speak" by Erin Griffith. But let's stick to our knitting.

Edge posted responses to their 2009 Annual Question, "What will change everything?" Hear what Brockman's posse has to say.

-g

Rockin' Snoopy

2008-12-21T18:55:00.002-05:00

Hello -

I was on blog-hiatus for a while, down under. Now that I'm back I'd like to recommend a rock remix of the Snoopy jazz theme song that's actually good!

So, Happy Holidays, or Happy Solstice, or what have you! Now, where did I leave those Tim Tams and my Cadbury Cherry Ripe Double Dipped bars...?

-G-Fav

Your Face on a Tall Latte

2008-12-14T02:53:00.002-05:00

Hello and Happy Holidays -

I thought you'd get a kick out of this: Scott Kirsner reported on OnLatte, a startup able to print imagery on drinks like lattes and beer. See Scott's blog post here. And, as usual, Joost Bonsen worked his product-naming magic.

-g-fav

Fives: Ideas for Geek Gifts

2008-11-24T23:14:00.001-05:00

1. A solar-powered, bug-like robot kit that follows the principles of "BEAM" robotics. Basically, it ain't programmed, and stores up energy to hop from place to place. Try Solarbotics, Ltd.

2. Remote-controlled mini helicopter for $25. Air Hogs Apache Havoc Helicopter (Target / Amazon)

3. Fiction by Douglas Coupland, Neal Stephenson, or if you can get your hands on a copy, "Zeraus"'s Daemon. (That last one should be back in print in a few months at normal paperback prices.)

4. The Tenori-On (US$1,200).

5. Something Arduino.

Bonus. A t-shirt that says "Initech" but not this t-shirt that says "meh."

g

Fives: Art for bit-heads

2008-11-23T21:05:00.003-05:00

1. Anna Hepler's "Spin" documenting the motion of several hand-made spheres. At the simplest level, it looks like life imitating computer graphics, instead of the other way around. I wish I could see "Homage to Uccello" in person again, in which she captures the fleeting beauty of large collections of moving points... like fireflies or fireworks.

2. I posted this several years ago, but I still get a kick out of it. It's (Niklas Roy's?) "Graphikdemo," a green wireframe teapot suspended inside a Commodore PC that is rotated by black motors in response to keypresses. Seriously, check this out. I didn't know this guy also did "InternationalDanceParty," a weird boombox-robot that gets the party started.

3. C'mon, you don't like glitch art? (Sorry, yes, I've linked to this in the past, too. But all these years later I still love it - not sure if it's because it reminds me of my TRS-80 Color Computer, or something deeper.)

4. Game Mod, about modifying 8-bit games, or something. Give it one minute until giving up.

5. neural.it: "media art, e-music, hacktivism."

-g

Four market downturns at various scales

2008-11-22T00:25:00.002-05:00

Hello -

I produced a few plots tonight of various indices for the crash of 1929, 1987, the 2001 dotcom bubble, and the current crisis. I'm not drawing any conclusions, they're just data. I was particularly curious about the timescale of how long it took to recover from each crash.

By the way, am I the only person who has a frustrating time dragging images to the location where I want them within Blogger? They always load at the top of the post, regardless of where my cursor is.

Here we are, now. (In all cases you can click the photos to zoom in.)

And here is the dotcom bubble bursting. Although WikiPedia puts it at 2000 - and judging from the chart it's right - I recall it being in the first quarter of 2001. Well, I suppose the dotcom crash was 2000, followed by what felt like a rally, only to encounter the telecom bubble bursting in 2001. The NASDAQ never did reach those heights again, right? (The Dow is in red, NASDAQ in blue.) This is the value of a dollar invested Jan. 1, 2000:

I find the brief uptick regions interesting. I imagine for each that we were all hoping, "Hey, this is it, we're coming back to normal again."

1987 - Do you remember "Black Monday"? I was in 8th grade at the time, engaged in a school stock market simulation. It was a perfect educational opportunity for us, but also probably nightmarish for our parents. I also recall that winning teams had picked DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation).

When newspapers show you stock charts, they usually position the y-axis around the region of activity. It looks quite different with a zero-centered y-axis. (Actually, real traders look at this stuff on a log chart, which is better at expressing % changes.)

See? Here's October 1987 but with the y-axis on 0:

Here is what your dollar would be worth if you had invested in the Dow on Oct. 1, 1987. I find those undulations interesting and would like to look at various sectors to see which are leading or lagging indicators...

Let's follow that dollar for a couple of years. Looks like the right strategy was to hold on:

We hear pundits referring to the crash of 1929. What did it look like?

...and here is the Dow's struggle to return to that value:

Quick, G-Fav, say something positive!

-g

Fives: (Newborn Edition) Ideas for Some Things New Parents Actually Need (Beyond, say, food and diapers)

2008-11-21T19:51:00.000-05:00

1. The blue 65 cm yoga bouncey-ball, which has been the never-fail crying-stopping-solution in our house for two kids now. Plus, its spherical matte-blue perfection has an eerie alien aura to it. It looks like someone imported our house into one of those computer 3-D drawing tools and put a Phong-shaded primitive in our living room. I call it "unit sphere." Note: filling it to the specified diameter is tricky.

2. Tiny Love Gymini play mat, which we enjoy with more enthusiasm than just "tiny love."

3. Touchpoints - Birth to Three, by Dr. Brazelton of Children's Hospital Boston. And a good family medical book, like the one the Mayo Clinic puts out, as well as the proper thermometers, etc.

4. Do some research on good pediatricians a few months ahead of time. Actually meet with them, and chat with parents.

5. Before coming home, consider stocking your freezer with reheatable meals. Or, see if a friend will ask friends to contribute. In our case (thanks BC!) the cooking favor was paired with a request to please stay no longer than 15 minutes while the family settles in.

Bonus. Check ahead of time for the new-mom (or dad) playgroups - these are the people you and your newborn will get to know over many years. In the Boston area, Isis Maternity is a good connecting-point for such things.

-G

ps Re: 1 - Or Gouraud, whatever.

Fives: Goosebumpy commercials

2008-11-19T23:14:00.002-05:00

1. Apple, "Think Different"

2. Sony Bravia, "bouncing balls" (w/ Jose Gonzales's cover of The Knife's "Heartbeats")

3. Nike Golf - "Never" - Tiger Woods or Nike "Awake"

4. Again with the Nike - "Fate"

5. Not a commercial, but this is such stupefyingly good snare-drumming - especially the first two minutes - that I don't know why everyone doesn't rush out and become a drummer: Blast's "Battery Battle."

-g

Fives: In-Geek Shibboleths

2008-11-19T20:09:00.007-05:00

Simply use any of the following and the others will know you're one of them.

1. Epic fail

2. !!1!!one!

3. Offhand use of: {orthogonal, overclock, -endian, isotropic, "plugh" or "xyzzy", "It's a jump... to conclusions... mat.", /dev/null followed by laughter, pwned}

4. Significance associated with, or sense of "roundness" attributed to any of: {3.5 or 8, 4-40, 101 or 280, 555 or 741 or 3904, 632.8, 2600 (either), 4004, 65536}

5. Anything involving the non-existence of cake, e.g., "The cake is a lie." (*)

Bonus. Painting "Warren Robinett" on an actual Easter egg.

Feel free to add.

-g

ps (Credit to Merlin Mann who does lists of fives.)

An (overdue) art post

2008-11-16T14:16:00.002-05:00

Hello -

Here are a few contemporary artists / photographers I thought you'd like. They were highlighted by Design is Kinky and I (heart) Photograph:

Fred Murman (see "Teasing my Puppy")

The exceedingly disturbing sculpture of Patricia Piccinini

Yes, that picture is done loading. Some awesome pixel-rich "Walm-Art" from Jonathan Lewis - ah, yes, retail giants as faceless-whatevers.

-g

DJIA since depression - two snapshots

2008-11-14T06:50:00.005-05:00

Not drawing any conclusions here, just showing you some data. We keep hearing comparisons to the stock market crash of the Great Depression, but have you seen the charts?

This is a (linear, not log) plot of the DJIA since 1935:

And this is a zoomed-in portion from 1935 to 1950. Yes, 1950:

-g

Despite, well, the economy tanking and all, New England young high tech cos are alive and well

2008-11-07T16:36:00.004-05:00

Hello -

This morning I went to an interesting breakfast discussion for tech entrepreneurs that was organized by tech columnist Scott Kirsner and graciously hosted by ZINK Imaging's CEO, Wendy Caswell, here in Bedford, Mass. The missions? (1) Share what we're doing, particularly in the consumer electronics space, and (2) keep chunking along towards Scott's vision of reaching out to students before they flee MIT for California's warm coasts and increasingly imaginary pots of VC gold.

For your keeping abreast of the latest-and-greatest tech stuff, take a look at:

ZINK's zero-ink full-color photo paper, as used in instant print cameras. I'll keep it at that, under the presumption that what we learned this morning should be off-the-record.

WiTricity's efforts to commercialize "wireless power transfer" methods for, say, keeping your gadgets charged. The key scientist won a Genius Grant for this MIT-based work. Read more, including real science papers, here.

Tenebraex Corp's optical products, such as nanotube-based optical coatings that prevent reflections. Their President, Peter Jones, also deserves special attention for using that Latin-esque character that combines "a" with "e." (I can hear my friend Jim Java asking why there's no octothorpe or interrobang. Go ahead, look those up.)

Tired of paper cluttering up your house? Pixily's Prasad Thammineni to the rescue!

Do you want to know when your favorite artists are touring near you while you still have a chance to see them? Check out tourfilter.

And my company, Actuality Medical, has been quickly and quietly doing a certain something that will soon be able to give doctors a big helping hand at treating prostate cancer.

-G-Fav

ps Oh, and no, CNN's "holograms" were NOT HOLOGRAMS. Insight Media's Art Berman explains more in a brief piece in Display Daily.

Info-graphic motion graphics

2008-11-03T23:23:00.003-05:00

Hello -

Somewhere between 11pm and midnight, I sit quietly with the computer. Do I create? No, I consume. Here are a few neat info-graphic motion graphics for you to enjoy.

Royksopp, "Remind Me" (who did the graphics on this one?)

Squarepusher, "My Red Hot Car"

And, for good measure, the opening credits from Mad Men:

Vote!

g

Educational video regarding one type of gene sequencing

2008-10-29T07:00:00.002-04:00

This YouTube video describes how Helicos BioSciences's (HLCS) gene sequencer works. (For some reason, this was the basis of a Wired article.) HLCS stock is currently not doing so well, though...

-gregg

portraits from dominoes, alphabets, seashells...

2008-10-22T20:52:00.003-04:00

Hi -

We've been doing a lot of image processing at work lately, so I guess I have Fourier transforms on the mind. If you got a kick out of my weird halftone portraits a few posts below, here is some art by people who take that sort of portraiture very seriously:

Knowlton Mosaics: Computer Assisted Portrait Art
Domino Artwork: the Opt Art page is neat

Obligatory video of alphabet rap with creative motion graphics:

-G

History of Optical Print Display Hologram - Meeting (Boston area)

2008-10-15T15:04:00.003-04:00

FYI -

The New England Section of the Optical Society of America will host MIT Media Lab alumnus Steven Smith for his talk, "A history of the optical print display hologram" this Thursday, Oct. 16 in Waltham, MA.

See the full meeting announcement at the NES/OSA website. Remember to RSVP. It is too late to sign up for dinner, but if you're interested, contact the organizers to see if they can get you in anyway. This is a great way to meet local optical engineers.

-Gregg (an NES/OSA Councilor)

So where are we financially, really...?

2008-10-12T06:06:00.003-04:00

Wonder how various aspects of the economy are doing in comparison to booms and busts in the past?

This "slideshare" by a new Sequoia Capital partner (a veteran from Stanford's endowment) has a lot of people talking - it is a call to action for its portfolio companies to batten down the hatches, save money, etc. etc. However, it is a wide compilation of graphs and financial data that could put things into perspective for you: housing prices, mortgage-types, the use of derivatives, etc.

Get full-screen mode with the icon in the lower right.

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

-g

Virtual schadenfreude

2008-10-07T20:37:00.002-04:00

Hi -

Sure, this is just a video of an algorithm "learning" how to optimize a stick-figure's motions in a physics simulation so as to jump as high as possible.

But I have to admit I caught myself enjoying watching the little dude fall, even if he's just the result of a genetic algorithm.

The soundtrack is what really does it:

By the way, one physics simulation environment for GAs is "Breve." Here's a 2007 paper by Lassabe (et al) describing one way to use it.

Another video:

-g

CTRL-ALT-DEL of my debate-watching soul

2008-10-02T23:35:00.004-04:00

I wonder if my uttering this tag-cloud will be suitably cathartic:

"nucular" maverick Ahmadinejad O'Biden doggone six-pack Main Street tax break six billion surge resurgence same-sex "nucular" "nucular"

Nope.

-g

ps Hmm, how about this video?

Ah! That helped.

A better reason why this week is historic

2008-09-29T12:06:00.002-04:00

This is a story buried under the headlines about the economy: on the fourth attempt - SpaceX's Falcon is now the first privately-built space vehicle to reach Earth orbit from a ground launch.

The employees go wild around 2:49 because that's the point at which things failed on the third attempt. SpaceX was founded by eBay founder Elon Musk.

g

A defense-oriented braintrust you might not have heard of, and...

2008-09-26T22:31:00.002-04:00

The JASONs
"JASON members all have security clearances, and they include physicists, biologists, chemists, oceanographers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. They are selected for their scientific brilliance, and, over the years, have included eleven Nobel Prize laureates and several dozen members of the United States National Academy of Sciences." (Wikipedia).

Here is a supposed list of members. If this is up your alley, see Ann Finkbeiner's The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite. It's at Barnes & Noble stores, and available through Amazon.

GOOD Magazine: Pay what you want.
Subscriptions to GOOD magazine are now "pay what you want," down to $1 that's donated to charity.

The Week magazine
Have you checked out this weekly compilation of news from the US and around the world? Highlights include: summaries of top news stories, impressions of what others think of the US, interesting real estate finds, explanations of key issues "from scratch," and snippets about good television programming, food, and gadgets. If I only subscribed to one news publication, this would be it.

g

It's a Boy!

2008-09-19T22:46:00.004-04:00

Hi there -

We joyfully welcomed our new baby boy - Gabriel Mark Favalora - this Thursday in the wee hours of the morning. Little "Gabe" is doing well and is blessing us with quite a bit of cozy sleep-time while mom and dad recharge our rest-batteries. We are particularly thankful that Gabe is happy and healthy, and that we have family members having fun with Toby back at Chez Favingham.

His middle name is in honor of my brother, Mark, who passed away when I was younger.

At long last, Toby got to meet Gabe - he's been talking about him for months. Ultimately, we used the name we chose rather than Toby's, because Toby wanted to name him "hot dog." Although I think that would have been cool, too.

Toby sizes up his little brother.

(You know, just in case you missed my announcement on any other remaining electronic media...)

So, blogging will be light for the time being as we settle in.

Best,
-G-Fav

G-Fav's Meanderings in Science, Business, and Art

Last-minute gift ideas for clever 4-6 yr olds

Google Street View Car up-close

How to fix " Windows Update cannot currently check for updates because... "

See Gregg's Bookmarks

Some good nonfiction

New tools for entrepreneurs who make (real, tangible) things (out of atoms)

Projection Summit 2011: Green lasers, “green” projectors, and etendue

So, what was covered at PS2011?

What were some key takeaways?

Summertime Inspirational Reading and Viewing

Seeing Saturn with a $25 telescope

Gregg's List, or Shibboleths: Sound Like an Expert in Any Field!

Display tech conferences: SID 2011, LA

CE Companies Pushing Autostereo Too Soon

Some papers

Something literally cool

Time to Return to the East Coast

Sponsors

Fix incorrect album art on iPod Touch / how-to

Optics career profiled in Boston Globe

A lonely atom, or, The Best Few Paragraphs I've Read in a While

The D-Cup -ification of optics, or "C'mon, Edmund Optics, really?"

Our favorite "kidstuff" that remained interesting for several years

Learn about autostereoscopic 3-D displays

(kids, science, space) Easy way to make scale model of solar system for your hallway

3-D without glasses: Class 1 of 3 on autostereoscopic displays (free, YouTube)

Short science projects for inquisitive young kids

Soccer on 3-D TV: looks good!

Make stuff!

startup / corporate techies: NE Innovation Month

Getting back the powers of concentration we once had; maybe the product marketing was too good?

Off FB (to my friends)

Cheap, fun drawing tablet

Springer's new journal: 3D Research

Patents: descriptions

Optics project: soda box no-film "camera" with simple lens

Coin toss fractal in Mathematica [edit]

3M's autostereo illumination film

Get Excited and Make Things...

Highly multiview hologram-like 3-D display - explained on YouTube

A Few Simple Steps: comments regarding my own "happiness project"

Hackintosh: Dell 10v into Mac OS X 10.6

OFH acquires Actuality's assets. Actuality is officially closed.

Cited in Gizmodo display piece re:3-D display

Apple's Jonathan Ive's wonderfully thoughtful interview segment

A Creative Whack: Exaggerate

Sony's 360-degree display

Two sub-$5 toys with curious operational mechanisms

Optics: 2 papers @ OSA meeting. Me on 3-D, and Accardi / Wornell on QUASI light fields

Whew! Now you can swing side-to-side without fear of being sued!

Mass High Tech profile

(Edge) Short course on synthetic genomics

Watching simulated chromosomes mutate as they try to reach a "goal"

Maps on FedEx shipping labels

Where do things go when companies wind down? Boston Globe...

Insights for new entrepreneurs

Update

Major 3-D technology conference: call for abstracts

What do you think of this?

Upgrading your MacBook HD

New dual-mode display: first pictures of Pixel Qi screen

Note to self: Genetic algorithms, Lego bridges, etc.

Self-assembly of DNA into nanoscale three-dimensional shapes

(Scott Kirsner's) What's Next in Tech

From TED 2009: Clever interface

Computerworld publicity, and MIT class

Cambridge (Mass.) Science Festival this weekend

Long-overdue techie links

Limited-time optics auction @ eBay

An experimental new Segway

A few entries from my "Read Later" folder

3 optics talks Thurs @ MIT Media Lab - RSVP -today-

Mathematica Home Edition: US$295

Good-enough synthetic aperture photography

Facebook keeps your stuff even if you quit

Audio signal processing, or "On T-Pain & Kanye West..."

Hot display technologies at CES 2009

Peer Review

For my entrepreneur friends who are tired of pitching to VCs