First of all, I’d like to just say one thing:

BONG HITS 4 JESUS

How many of you felt that this phrase was trying to convince you to use illegal drugs? What if it were on a banner held by teenagers?

The majority of Supreme Court justices thought this rather comical phrase was a sufficient enticement to encouraging illegal drug use that schools were entitled to confiscate such a banner and suspend a student for holding such a banner at “a school sponsered and sanctioned event” which was apparently to stand on the side of a street as the Olympic torch passed by.

When did we become such a nation of pansies? That the merest mention of something which which we might disagree requires that we squash it by rejecting all legal precedent and tossing our First Amendment rights onto the fire?

Justice Stevens writes in the dissent:

In my judgment, the First Amendment protects student speech if the message itself neither violates a permissible rule nor expressly advocates conduct that is illegal and harmful to students. This nonsense banner does neither, and the Court does serious violence to the First Amendment in upholding—indeed, lauding—a school’s decision to punish Frederick for expressing a view with which it disagreed.

Justice Stevens’ dissent is in fact very good, and (while I’m no law student) I think draws on precedent to a much larger and more thorough degree that the majority opinion. I urge you all to read this decision.

Morse v. Frederick – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[tags]First Amendment[/tags]

Addendum: BoingBoing has a replacement banner for you students that would seemingly avoid the issues that Justice Roberts raised in the majority opinion.

Over on Eric Wolf’s blog, he writes an interesting post about the Internet boom phenomenon: Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to blow it this time…

I have a slightly different take.

We all like to jump on the bandwagon when something is new and exciting. I’m a lucky man: I chose to be educated in a field which has been the source of many of these new trends, namely computer science. More than that though, I tried (and continue to try) to monitor what’s new, what’s coming down the pike, what trends are gonna be big. I’m an early adopter. I have yahoo and gmail identities without digits in them. I’ve been through six generations of cell phones. I created one hundred podcasts, and then got off the bandwagon. And you know what? It hasn’t really helped me make any money (other than perhaps my salary) because ultimately I don’t buy into the hype nearly as much as the masses.

As we sit poised on another of these “boom” product release (the impending release of the iPhone) and my livelihood continues to be dependent upon the boom of an impending movie release (Ratatouille), I can’t help but ask if we could develop a society which moved at a slightly more leisurely pace, which didn’t rely on the herky-jerky motion of “progress” to get us out of bed every morning.

In Japan, there are cultural movements which are a reaction to the breakneck pace of advancement that Japan has acheived over the last century. They want to adopt a different style of life, a slower pace, by choice. This “Slow Life” philosophy is governed by the following principles:

SLOW PACE:

We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.

SLOW WEAR:

We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).

SLOW FOOD:

We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.

SLOW HOUSE:

We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.

SLOW INDUSTRY:

We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.

SLOW EDUCATION:

We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.

SLOW AGING:

We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.

SLOW LIFE:

Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.

(From this article).

We tend to admire growth. We crave the excitement of explosions, of boom and bust. We have accelerated our lives to the point that each of us will likely have multiple careers. We will make and squander fortunes. Marry, divorce and marry again. When we make a plea to have another boom, perhaps we should take a step back, slow down, and figure out what will really make us happy.

Oh, by the way, I’ve got $50 for anyone who will stand in line for me at AT&T…

[tags]Rants and Raves[/tags]

I was reminded that the deadline for cheaper prices for attending SIGGRAPH is this Friday. That reminded me that I had not gone out and discovered what papers will actually be presented at this year’s conference, so a moment’s Googling revealed:

SIGGRAPH 2007 Papers

Are any other brainwagon readers going to be at SIGGRAPH? Podcasters? Just cool people I should meet? Send some mail to me and maybe we can get together and smooze.

Addendum: This paper on a novel 3D light field display seems like it owes some heritage to the old mirror screw television sets I’ve been reading about lately. Does this remind you of the scene with Chewbacca playing chess? Or perhaps the Krell machine in Forbidden Planet?

[tags]Siggraph[/tags]

The Hydra Consome Game Developer’s Kit is getting quite a bit of play on various blogs. It’s a little game console based upon the Propeller chip created by Parallax (more here) which is an interesting little gadget. It has eight relatively simple cores sitting on a single chip, and is relatively cheap and fast. You can dedicate individual cores to implementing virtual peripherals like NTSC output or monitoring I/O devices, and still have plenty of other computational resources to use for other purposes.

The only real problem with this system is its rather steep price: $200 is more than a DS, more than a PSP, more than a GameCube, and very close to a Wii. You could rightfully say that “yeah, but those don’t have developer kits and information”, and you’d be right. But I still think that a market opportunity is being missed for a simple game machines that perhaps non-programmers would buy, but that amateur programmers might actually create content for. I’d think that something at half the price would be worthy of lots more attention.

ThinkGeek :: Hydra Console Game Dev. Kit

[tags]Games Programming[/tags]

Slashdot had an article today marking the 25th anniversary of the release of Ridley Scott’s vision of Bladerunner, and points at Mythbuster Adam Savage’s claim that it stands at the apex of science fiction effects, created in a time before computer graphics.

I think I agree.

I’m tempted to add another Ridley Scott film into the mix: of course the classic Alien, complete in 1979, and I’m also quite fond of the John Carpenter film The Thing from this era, but the combination of visuals and story in Bladerunner are awfully amazing. Astounding even. If there is one movie that would compel me to upgrade my DVD player to something more high definition, a good release of Bladerunner would be near the top of the list (seeing it on conventional DVD just does not do it justice.)

But to be honest, it isn’t really the big effects shots that stun me with this film. I mean really, check this out…

Okay, this is a nice wide establishing shot with some clever background work. But now look at these shots:

Bladerunner succeeds in no small measure because of the care which is taken in all the shots which are not the big effects shots, which just show photos of the actors giving solid performances. Try comparing this to shots in the latest Star Wars trilogy. It’s no contest. None at all. True classic movies succeed not because one or two shots are unforgettable, but because they nearly all are.

Oh, and this movie might actually be one that might make me believe that film still has some merit and relevance.

[tags]Bladerunner[/tags]

I’ve read quite a bit about computer chess and checkers (although my own program, Milhouse, has been fairly stagnant for over a month). I’ve read somewhat less about systems which play games like backgammon, othello, poker or mancala. But it turns out I’m almost completely ignorant of the state of the art in programs to play Go. Part of it is simple: I don’t play go. It confuses me. But it does have a bunch of interesting characteristics that makes it particularly challenging for computer play. I ran across these links to Mogo: considered one of the stronger players. Looks like I’ve got some more reading to do.

Sylvain GELLY’s Home Page

[tags]Go[/tags]

If you wandered into my office, you’d probably be shocked by the vast amount of just raw paper I have lying around. I scribble notes, I use photocopy machines, I print stuff all the time. And I have lots of books and magazine articles I’ve clipped over the years.

I’d like to do some optical character recognition and digitize these papers, but I frankly am too cheap to buy OCR software, and besides, most of it runs on that Microsoft Operating System that Shall Not Be Named, and I have foresworn that I shall not give Microsoft any more money. I’ve tried a couple of really awful open source solutions like gocr, but it’s frankly terrible. On the Google Blog, I recently read that Google had used the tesseract engine and had created a suite of applications called ocropus that could be used for the purpose.

ocropus – Google Code

I did a quick test. I scanned a page from an old Sky and Telescope article: it describes a lensless Wright Camera. It contains inset boxes and graphics, and I had found it a fairly challenging thing to extract almost anything out of. To run ocropus, i simply typed the command “ocropus ocr testocropus.png > testocropus.html” and got this result. It isn’t perfect, but it’s not that bad, and probably represents a pretty significant reduction in labor (at least, given the speed at which I can type) in terms of getting a reasonably accurate representation of the fairly difficult text.

If you have some ocr tasks, you might think about giving it a shot. I will be doing some more experiments, and will keep you all posted.

[tags]OCR, OCRopus, Google Code[/tags]

Addendum: A second test with a second scan of a less challenging paper, done at the recommended 300 dpi and the resulting output.

I was noodling around, and found reference to a patent on an early “mirror screw” version of mechanical television. Don’t know that that is? Don’t worry, this link is more for me than for you.

REFLECTING AND SCANNING APPARATUS – Google Patents

Addendum: It’s amazing what you can find online. Archive.org has a scanned copy of A. F. Collins’ Experimental Television. Very cool.

Addendum²: Another book on early television. And another.

If you read the same blogs as me or if you watch the same nerd TV show as me, you might have an inkling about what code the following message utilizes. If you are as clever as me, you should be able to crack this code fairly straightforwardly, and tell me what the message is.

63460 67786 67678 48886 58467 86089 31826 38665 83676 00888
46763 84888 88638 66589 48689 66863 62698 43658 96082 48635
46089 41698 38236 96284 62914 84878 68493 86846 51856 08883
38665 69836 36085 16983 84386 38684 65600 88634 60678 96908
83846 38398 46386 16983 36786 98569 06286 60088 86289 86866
56008 89189 98687 86384 06563 86084 89606 98367 60656 98362
63840 16908 65609 98489 63838 49915 69366 48436 58606 98388
46369 84896 38384 99165 86896 96586 63460 67786 67678 48886
67838 98986 67678 58399 1

[tags]Code,Ciphers,Numb3rs[/tags]

NASA has released their CLARAty framework for robotics to the public for download.
JPL Robotics: News

CLARAty is an integrated framework for reusable robotic software. It defines interfaces for common robotic functionality and integrates multiple implementations of any given functionality. Examples of such capabilities include pose estimation, navigation, locomotion and planning. In addition to supporting multiple algorithms, it provides adaptations to multiple robotic platforms. CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program and it serves as the integration environment for the program’s rover technology developments.

Show a kid a 3.5″ floppy disk today, and he might look at you in quizzically. Show him a 5.25″ floppy, and he’ll think you showed him some kind of ancient talisman. But in the days before floppies, programs were typically distributed as audio on cassettes. (My recollection of programs on my Atari was that they used 600 bps.) But what I don’t remember (and hadn’t seen before) was that people actually distributed programs as audio tracks on old vinyl LPs (themselves a relic from the past). Check out the link below for more info (and you might find out who Clive Sinclair was…):

Kempa.com: Vinyl Data

Ran across this rather nice applet that lets you probe the Nalimov endgame databases to evaluate chess endgames. Very nice!

Web Query for Nalimov Endgame Tablebases

[tags]Chess[/tags]

It’s about a month until the ICFP programming contest begins, and I’ve found out that I’m scheduled to return from Vegas the day of the beginning. I think I’m gonna give it a try this year if I can get my crap together. I don’t suffer from any illusion that I’ll do particularly well, but I find that the experience of working on last year’s puzzle, even after the contest was sufficiently intellectually challenging and stimulating that I think it’ll be fun. To any of the excellent programmers I’ve worked with over the year: consider this an invitation. If you’d like to participate with me, drop me an email and we shall see what we can do.

ICFP Programming Contest 2007

Tom and I have briefly discussed how someone might use a Wii controller in performing and controlling electronic music. Here’s a simple example, originally snarfed from the Make blog:

YouTube – Nintendo Wiimote Theremin with Moog Little Phatty

This weekend was a double-movie weekend. On Friday night, I went out to see the new Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer movie with some of my peeps from work, and late Saturday I succumbed to the influence of the females in my house, and went to catch the new Nancy Drew film.

The good news: my expectations were suitably low, so the movies weren’t actually physically painful.

That sounds like a pretty mediocre recommendation, but let’s face it: the first Fantastic Four movie was dreadful. Really dreadful. Painful to watch. While it would be a stretch to call the second one “good”, it’s got at least some good bits and a climax which is sort of cool. But since negative criticism is more fun to write:

• Dear God. Jessica Alba is a beautiful girl. She does not need to be painted, bronzed, and wear a wig. Her skin tone varies from “somewhat reasonable” to “oompa loompa”. Her opening scene just made me blink and ask “how much botox did they shoot into her face?” Yaz asked “what did they have the makeup gun set to? Whore?”
• A word I never want to hear in any non Star Trek movie: “tachyon”.
• Spiderman 3 jumped the shark with the Tobey McGuire dance sequence. F4 came dangerously, dangerously close.
• A wedding. No action film should ever have a wedding. A wedding between characters of a TV show is the kiss of death, and it’s again quite dangerous in this one.
• Why did they bring back Von Doom? He’s pointless. Again, better than Spiderman 3, where EVERY villain was pointless, but still.

Still, it was better. No great, but I didn’t leave feeling rooked out of $10. Maybe just $2.50.

Nancy Drew: a completely different movie, but again, I entered with low expectations. Some negatives:

• Nancy adopts an annoying sidekick named Corky. We get it: he’s the fat dorky younger brother type who is trying to act cool. How stereotypical is that?
• Nancy performs an emergency trachiotomy. Nuff said.
• The bad guy tries to get her with a bomb. A bomb which beeps. Which has a convenient counter on the front indicating how much time is left. Just sitting on the drivers seat when she goes back to the car. Sigh.
• Nancy’s dad is working hard to make ends meet. So… they take a job in L.A. And somehow manage to rent a vast run down mansion. In Hollywood. Because that’s all they could afford. Ahem.

Still, it had secret passages, a mystery, boxes with secret panels. My wife didn’t like it, but since my expectations were so low, I didn’t actually mind it all that much. If you are a fourteen year old girl, maybe you’ll find it worth matinee money.

One bright note: Nancy’s costuming was really well done. A strangely eclectic voyage through preppy chic.

Upcoming preview that I saw: Transformers. I’ll probably see it on opening weekend.