Valley Proofs

I was at a lecture a couple of days ago given by Hisashi Taniguchi, David Aliaga of ZMP and saw a demo of a robot called Miuro. Miuro is a network music player that moves freely around a house. The user with the touch of a button, can record his favourite places for listening music and Miuro is able to move to those places by itself and let its owner enjoy his/her favourite music. It does so in two ways, by an inertial guidance system and also by means of a camera that over a time period constructs a map of a house or apartment. The reasoning for this, what if a kid picks up Miuro and moves it to a different location. This in effect resets the inertial navigation system. Here’s more from the authors themselves: “We would like that Miuro can learn the user patterns of music listening, so that it can naturally adapt its own behavior to the user tastes. This through the use of a large size database and methods of musical information search in the Internet for example. In Mountain View for

N. Korea Reports 1st Nuclear Arms Test. Here’s the coverage in the NYT. The decision to set off a nuclear device could profoundly change the politics of Asia. “North Korea’s decision to conduct the test demonstrated what the world has suspected for years: the country has joined India, Pakistan and Israel as one of the world’s “undeclared” nuclear powers. India and Pakistan conducted tests in 1998; Israel has never acknowledged conducting a test or possessing a weapon. But by actually setting off a weapon, if that is proven, the North has chosen to end years of carefully crafted and diplomatically useful ambiguity about its abilities.” “The test occurred only a week after Japan installed a new, more nationalistic prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and just as the country was renewing a debate about whether its ban on possessing nuclear weapons — deeply felt in a country that saw two of its cities incinerated in 1945 — still makes strategic sense.” The Doomsday Clock has not moved since 2002

It’s on the left. So in the past I had two blogs, the pic one which is being maintained, though I still have to plug in images from Regensburg, Amsterdam and Death Valley. However the pacific blog was lost, not indexed by any search engine as I have not linked it anywhere. People who needed to read it at the time, to keep track of my wanderings, knew the address. Well it’s time to plug in in some keywords for search engines. The pacific blog was maintained using bloggar over an inmarsat data link during a sailing trip from Hawaii to Tahiti with friends Greg and David. Bloggar worked quite well because it’s not web based but you work offline and send chunks of text over xml-rpc once done editing or once you have an available connection. This is also less bandwidth hungry than traditional browser based clients which in addition require an open Internet connection. It took two weeks to sail the distance and get to Rangiroa and later the atoll Fakarava. The pictures taken during the sai

This is the hello world from the old Wordpress blog which I shut down after a move to the cloud. (11/20/2010). All right, here we go. I spent a good part of this morning discussing over email slama’s new pet project, how to discern a sine wave buried between two sawtooth signals. The general idea is to build a simple processor that could later end extended to handle speech. What kind of processing to plug in is still in the air but the workings of the cochlea seem an obvious inspiration. Notably, signal processing for cochlear implants. Two papers by Philipos C. Loizou on this page give a solid introduction into the state of affairs in the cochlear arena. Now this took a bit of googling to get the emails out, however along the way I picked up “A Briefer History of Time” by the astronomer Eric Schulmann. It’s licensed under the creative commons license. Go ahead and grab your copy, it’s a great read. Here in his own words: “You’ll learn why–even though the Universe is expanding–it never