Slashdot mentioned work by Nayar and Nishino on generating images of what people see by processing images of reflections in the cornea. I thought the paper itself was pretty cool, but there are lots of other good things that the two authors have written about. In particular, I liked the idea of A Jitter Camera which generates superresolution images from a low resolution sensor. Good stuff.

The gents at Lambda the Ultimate note that John Meacham has set up a Cafe Press Bookstore for Haskell books, including Simon Peyton-Jones and James Lester’s Implementing Functional Languages. Peyton-Jones’ Design and Implementation of Functional Programming was a book that I studied extensively in grad school back in the late 80’s, and it’s good to see that these out of print books are available again.

Read these declassified accounts of the Trinity Test on the 59th anniversary of the first detonation of a nuclear device. I’d also recommend reading the Pulitzer Prize winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Or you could watch Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, which is narrated by William Shatner and contains a lot of declassified film of Atomic Tests. Even more information, including many pictures and video are at nuclearweaponarchive.org.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It seems like a lifetime ago, but I remember as a young five year old watching Saturn V rocket launches with my dad. In fact, it was a lifetime ago.

NASA is marking the event on their website, even while planning to return (or, for the more skeptical among us, while planning to make us think that’s what they are doing).

The recent Wired article on the use of evolutionary computation to optimize Formula-1 cars has been getting a bit of press lately, and finally made it to Slashdot. Buried in the comments I found a link to some work of which I was previously unaware: Differential Evolution. You can also read a matching tech report. The nifty thing is that DE works on real valued functions rather than discrete ones, which may make it more easily adaptable to optimizing functions which are more naturally represented in floating point. I haven’t skimmed the paper, but I suspect this evening I’ll be coding up my own version in Python to try to sort out the details.

Addendum: I had the chance to read the paper at lunch. The idea is really very simple and straightforward to implement. You begin by generating a pool of individuals, each of which contains a vector of floating point values, You can use these values to generate a fitness value for the individual by passing it through a fitness function. Initially, the individuals are assigned random floating point values uniformly generated over sensible domains. In each time step, two individuals are chosen from the population, and a difference vector is generated as the difference between these two individuals. A third individual is chosen, and a subset of its parameters are modified by adding a scaled version of the delta vector to the original values. This new individual is then evaluated, and if its fitness is greater than the previous one, it replaces it in the gene pool.

It seems almost too simple to be useful, but it’s dead simple to code. I’ll have to write up some demo code to give it a try in the not too distant future.

A nifty group of template for various cards and boxes can be found at Mirkwood Designs. Useful for craft projects, no doubt, and the author does not mind if you sell products which use his templates. Rudimentary, but with some good ideas.

This origami CD case is more clever and more useful. I’ve used it a couple of times when I’ve needed a CD case for mailing, but didn’t have any handy. I’ve thought about making a PostScript template for printing them out with logos, perhaps I’ll get to it later tonight.

Sometimes you read a headline, and it just strikes you as odd. For instance, today on Yahoo! News, I read that:

Red Sox: Nixon To Be Activated Tonight

For some reason, I immediately thought of this image:

I wonder if he plays a good left field.

Let me give credit to www.gotfuturama.com for their terrific site which allowed me to find a nice image of robot Nixon (Season 2, A Head in the Polls). And apologies to Trot Nixon.

Today the Supreme Court issued a ruling which reversed the 9th Circuit Court’s ruling that the phrase “under God” was unconstitutional. Instead of trying to present an actual legal argument about the separation of church and state, they chose instead to merely rule that Michael Newdow could not bring suit on behalf of his daughter because he did not have standing to sue. The decision resolves none of the issues surrounding the issue, and I suspect additional suits will be brought reasonably quickly to attempt to get the Justices to consider this issue and give a ruling.

Still, the court is telegraphing its intentions in its opinion in a way which I find fairly disturbing. I have to have more time to digest the full text, but Chief Justice Rehnquist seems very willing to allow the religious language in the pledge continue with what appears to me only the flimsiest of justifications. I find such reasoning inexplicable given the court’s consistent rulings in the area of school prayer.

I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this case.

There are some good articles on oyez.com concerning the case and the issues surrounding it.

I love Good Eats, and am a big fan of Alton Brown. His no-nonsense pragmatism has vastly improved my skills at preparing steaks, chicken broth and cheesecake. In honor of his brief mention in Wired, I’ve added his weblog to my list of Celebrity Blogs. Thanks Alton!

To pad this entry out, let me recommend one technique which has turned chicken breasts into something that you might actually want to eat. Alton described his broiled, butterflied chicken in his episode A Bird in the Pan. I’m sure it’s great, but I don’t buy whole chickens very often. The basic idea works very well with just ordinary chicken parts. I’ve used breasts (both bone in and boneless) and parts like thighs and wings, and they all come out tasting yummy.

The basic idea is to roast them over a bed of carrots, onions and celery. I often use veggies that are a little past their prime: it simply doesn’t matter since you are using them for their aroma, not for eating. I chop up one or two onions, a couple of carrots and a couple of sticks of celery. I then scatter them over the bottom of a roaster pan (I use my nonstick one for this) and just plop chicken parts over the top for roasting. I like my food spicy, so I hit them with a tiny bit of oil, and then dredge them in my favorite spice mix (I’ve got a big bucket of cajun style spice that gets used a lot for this). I then roast it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 35 minutes for the boneless breasts, about 45 minutes for the bone in ones (use your electronic thermometer to check for doneness if you are unsure). Yank the chicken out, let it rest for five to ten minutes tented with foil, then enjoy it with some cool side dish like coleslaw or potato salad. The aroma of the vegetables will permeate the chicken make it very flavorful. Yum-my.

Apparently the tale of Elena, the young lady who did a photolog of her trip through the quarantine zone which surrounds Chernobyl is a fraud. Her photos are apparently real, but were taken during an ordinary tour arranged through a Kyiv travel agency. Motorcycles are banned in the zone.

What a pity. Some urban legends just should be true.

I had previously mentioned her here.

Pardon my construction. I’m busy revamping brainwagon’s look and feel to be more like it’s previous incarnation, and have unveiled a few warts in the markup emitted by WordPress. All should be better shortly, but until then, don’t be surprised if some of the markup looks a bit strange.

Motivated by the change in licensing in MovableType as well as a general feeling of dissatisfaction with certain elements of its design, I decided to look at other weblogging solutions. An article on Slashdot mentioned WordPress, so I gave it a shot.

And was immediately sold. It works very well.

It will take me a few days probably to get everything transferred over, but ultimately this will be an improved weblog. Enjoy!

Cute and useful project: build yourself a $14 Steadycam. Or you could look at this plan for a camera stabilizer from the Guide Book for Guerilla Filmmakers. Or look here, here, or here.