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My photography in 2005
This has been a watershed year for my photography. I’ve always had a casual interest in it, but this year I invested time and money into practicing it. The time came from shunning TV. I don’t miss it. I recommend it. The money required was less than what would have been necessary in a pre-digital age. That made it affordable. flickr.com has been a great influence as it has provided me with a community with whom to share, discuss, and enjoy photography. Thanks to all of them! I’ve added two photos below that I liked a lot. You can click on them to see larger versions on flickr.
On Intelligence
I recently read "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. The book is about the author's efforts to understand the human brain's mechanism for intelligence and to apply it to machines. He presents a model of intelligence called the memory-prediction framework.
This was perhaps the first time I had read a somewhat detailed analysis of the possible mechanism that drives human intelligence. Some concepts that I found especially interesting were that of invariant and hierarchical memory. Also, the idea that the brain predicts all actions before they are executed was fascinating. If the subject interests you, I highly recommend it. It is quite readable.
Moving in cyberspace
Unfortunately, after all these days I have returned to find that blogger is lacking in features. On the other hand, wordpress.com has launched recently and that is looking pretty cool. So, I’m moving to samgrover.wordpress.com. Maybe I’ll be back or move somewhere else another day, leaving trails in cyberspace as time goes on.
450 days
I started this blog a while back and then stopped posting about fifteen months ago. Now I’m reviving it and will post stuff here occasionally. The feed is available through the new standard feed icon shown in the sidebar.
Wikipedia reaches 1e06 milestone
Congratulations to everyone involved in the project and thanks for a great web resource.
Press Release
Fund them!
Google doodles with search results
Google Doodles and holiday logos are the transformed Google logo to represent a special day or event. Currently they are running doodles showing the 2004 Summer Olympics. I recently noticed that they now have a mini version of the current doodle on the search results page too. That’s great because I use the search box on Firefox or Safari for my searches and was missing out on the doodles.
Japan deploys solar sail
Japan’s ISAS has successfully deployed (1, 2) two solar sails for a first in space endeavors. Congratulations to all involved!
Great aerial photos
“Earth from Above” is a great collection of aerial photos by Yann Bertrand taken all over the world. Some are just spectacular.
Stick Figure Animation
I like animation. Sometime ago I came across the XIAOXIAO MOVIE website. It features many stick figure animations involving kung-fu. They are awesome. Today there is a post on BoingBoing involving stick figures. Oh, and also see this stick figure recreation of the Weapon of Choice video by Fatboy Slim. Enjoy!
Got Blog?
According to this post:
- Technorati is tracking 3 million blogs, including this one.
- A new blog is created every 5.8 seconds.
- 275,000 individual posts everyday. This is one of them.
- People are moving away from the TV to the computer. I know, I am.
I think this is probably going to continue well into the next year. Even more if Yahoo! and MSN provide blogging services and Google integrates its services.
Saturn by Cassini
Last weekend I started reading about the imminent arrival of Cassini at Saturn. I’m the casual space enthusiast who doesn’t go to space.com everyday but gets quite excited when something is happening up/out there. Even more when the event is influenced by humans. Last night Cassini made it and is now in orbit around the planet. Woohoo! Congratulations to everyone involved.
Saturn Orbit Insertion | Metafilter
Digital Library of India
Just noticed this entry on WorldChanging about the Digital Library of India. Quote from the site “The mission is to create a portal for the Digital Library of India which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Digital Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, predominantly in Indian languages, available to everyone over the Internet”. Cool!
Space travel account
The most awesome thing happened today and it’s all over the place. SpaceShipOne successfully landed after a brief visit to space. Congratulations to the Scaled Composites people! Commercial space travel is looking closer than ever.
Time to start a savings account for the ticket :-)
CNN.com - Private craft soars into space, history - Jun 21, 2004
Back to blogging
I haven’t blogged for a while and now I’m back. I traveled to Seattle and to Chicago over the last two weeks to visit family and friends. Logged back into blogger today and was surprised to find an invitation to join Gmail. So, now I have a 1 GB Gmail account. Cool! Dunno how much I will use it. Let’s see.
I'm glad I mostly type it
Here’s a pronumciation guide to the characters and expressions used in Unix. It’s a few years old (dated 29th April, 1997) but Unix is much older. (Seen on Metafilter).
pronunciation guide for unix
UnbelievablePerson? RemarkableChap? Superman!
A new episode of The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman is available now. These are so cool. The new one is called “Hindsight”. Thanks Jerry!
Speculation on Apple Computer's future
Ever since I switched recently and for a little while before that too I have been following news about Apple. There is an interesting article on Robert X. Cringley’s “I, Cringley” page about the future of Apple following the creation of a separate iPod division. Mr. Cringley evaluates it in relation to a 20 year old quote from Steve Jobs. Interesting items include “What most people don’t know is that Apple, with the assistance of Intel, a few years ago ported all its software to run on Intel’s Pentium processors."
Divide and Conquer: Why Apple Has an iPod Division