Piar Square continued....

Piar Square continuing at haz.mat.ucsb.edu/~thekuo/blog/.

Science at its best

“I made a calculation error and used a lot more than I should have. And my cells died,” Schaefer said.

A colleague overheard her complaining. “The co-author on my paper said,’ Did I hear you say you killed some cancer?’ I said ‘Oh’, and took a closer look.”

Nerd Stereotypes

Comedy Central showed recently The Breakfast Club, and the movie is fine. But the one problem I have with the movie is the treatment of Brian, the "brain," at the end of the movie. Specifically, he's told and agrees to finish the essay, while everyone else makes out.

7.1 megapixels for the New Year

It's the time of year for happy voices: Christmas carols, bratty kids, "ho ho ho," the Dreidel song. There is one voice though which loudly protests, "Nah! Nah! Oh, dear God, Allah, Buddha, Thor, and Zeus! Stop!" But it is never heard. It is never heard because it's usually drowned out by a voice that says, "I'm going to get more exercise this year." or "I'm going to silence those creditors." or "I'm going to find aliens in the 4th dimension." It is never heard because passion and eggnog rule over reason and logic any day of the week. It is never heard because the hope of New Year's Resolutions is greater than the horror of reality.

To that voice, I say, "NOTE: THIS TEXT HAS BEEN CENSORED".

Projects for 2007

Research

1. Tracking across Multiple Non-overlapping camera views: my current overarching project.
   
2. Face Detection: finishing project.
   
3. Tracking within camera: useful for face detection and my overarching project.
   
4. Classification (The Toyon Project): I think I've been recruited.
   
5. Maybe some stuff with blimps: some my adviser mentioned that sounds like fun, but there's other stuff to work on.
   

Audio/Visual

1. Shoot a different person a day: so maybe it should be more of an average. This should help my portrait taking skills.
2. Shoot a self portrait a day: for practice.
3. Shoot a scene a day: more practice of techniques.
4. A movie a month: take photos and movies and edit them into something, hopefully interesting.
5. Weekly news podcast: This would be the ultimate A/V project and least attainable as it would require other equipment and other people. And the first part would be to drum up interest for it to happen. Why news? Because nothing else has so many story ideas so easily. If presented a la SNL's Weekend Update or The Daily Show "monologue," it could actually interest drunk college kids.

If you'd like to be my subjects for experimentation for any of these, please come and see me. I can shoot you on the spot. Just warn me long enough to load my deagles.

j/k I suck at Counter Strike.

Robotica's Funniest Home Videos

Robots have come a long way since Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari made his drinking boat.  Their moving close and closer towards perfection, but perhaps in that way farther from humans.

Enter "Advanced Step in Innovative MObility," better known as ASIMO.  Honda's famous robot that has been touring the world and greets dignitaries with a certain grace rarely seen in a robot, until one faithful day that was captured on video and put on the Internet (Google Video), as everything is nowadays.

I'm sure we should thank the crew at Honda,who quickly hid ASIMO and shut down the event to the laughter of the crowd.

I first caught this on Engadget.

People Against People Against Facebook

It seems like everyone on Facebook is up in arms about the new Newsfeed and mini-feed features. I don't get why. My typical Facebook session before the update was:
(1) I log into Facebook
(2) make sure there aren't messages or invites
(3) click on "My Friends"
(4) look at who has made updates
(5) click on a few of the friends to try and find out what they changed.
(6) Logout

Half the time, I have no idea what the person changed in step 5. I would have loved a feature that would tell me what was changed. Now what does Facebook offer? A way to know what people changed, and even on the home page. Is there some reason people don't want to know this information?

People complain that Facebook has become too "stalkerish" or they deserve the privacy of not having everyone know that they changed something. How you can't complain about privacy to people you agreed to look at your profile, and whom you control what they see. You can even delete the entries.

Maybe these people want to be seen more than they want to see. These are often the type of people who collect "friends" without regard if they really are friends.

I think Facebook can do a little to assuage concerns by setting options on either who gets your feeds or what categories you send out; however, I think when you click on a person it should still show what was changed.

So there's my opinion. I, for one, like the features and hope Facebook keeps it.

Plastique

So Apple have now extended their recall of Sony-made batteries before August 2006. That means I get a new battery!! :) However, I am confident my battery will surive the 4-6 weeks it's suppose to take. Now that I've said it, just watch it blow up in my face.

In other cool news, Pluto is no longer a planet. That'll be a fun thing for the kids to learn, and lucrative for the textbook companies.

Who is Harold Frank?

So a straight title for once. The building that my lab is in, Engineering I, underwent a name change early last week. The new name is Harold Frank Hall. This leads us back to the title, who is Harold Frank? My Google searches have found that he lives in Santa Barbara and he has a lot of money. The money conclusion comes from several scholarships in his name.

So the Daily Nexus article is the best information I've found.

Snow White's Sleeping Pill

So I stopped by the local student computer store to check out the new MacBook, and with the 5 minutes I played with it, it seemed like good computer. For reference, it happened to be a black Macbook.

I compiled the following comments:
1. The LED did move next to the IR sensor.
2. The keys felt fine, except for the up/down arrow keys didn't have a gap and felt too close together.
3. The trackpad had two-finger right click, which is awesome. I wish they would do a firmware update, so that I can do that with my Powerbook.
4. The trackpad's button depressed a little with light pressure, so that a few times I felt like I pressed it, eventhough I didn't.
5. It was still really hot on the bottom.
6. The glossy screen wasn't as glossy as some laptops I've seen, which is good.

RIP Powerbook

So Apple Computer has finally replaced the 12" Powerbook with..... the MacBook. Sadness. It's not a MacBook Pro. On the one hand, the available options for the MacBook cover the space the 12" Powerbook use to cover. However, it has lost the moniker of a "professional" laptop.

Actually, I can live with that. The differences between the high end MacBook and the 15" MacBook Pro are comparable to those between the 12" and 15" Powerbooks: video card, miniDVI, etc. The differences now are purely asthetic: the white or black case, instead of metallic; the differently shaped keyboard (that I'm interested to see in person). And it certainly is nice that have no moving latches, just the magnetic latch. There is only one thing that I really have to complain about the MacBook replacing the 12" Powerbook. Just one thing.

The weight! The specs say it is 5.2 lbs. I think the 15" Powerbook was 5.4 lbs. My 12" Powerbook is 4.6 lbs. Though 0.6 lbs is not a lot, it does feel like a lot you carry it for a while. As a matter of fact, one of the selling points for me of the 12" Powerbook was that it was under 5 lbs. Even then, it's deceiving heavy.

Otherwise, I'll have to wait to see it when it arrives at my local apple retailer (i.e. the student store).

P.S. Did it lose the breathing light, or is it now next to the IR reader?