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.



I recently read "[On Intelligence](https://www.onintelligence.org/)" 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.

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.

Just moved here from samgrover.blogspot.com. Time to start afresh. Technorati Profile

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.

Exactly what the world needs, another WMD. How fast can you say dual use?

Congratulations to everyone involved in the project and thanks for a great web resource.

Press Release

Fund them!

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’s ISAS has successfully deployed (1, 2) two solar sails for a first in space endeavors. Congratulations to all involved!

“Earth from Above” is a great collection of aerial photos by Yann Bertrand taken all over the world. Some are just spectacular.