True's beaked whale.jpg

Western spotted skunk

Hooded skunk

Yellow-throated Marten

Wolverine

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Ideas: sensors

Thursday, January 2nd, 2014

Further notes on using digital camera sensors as high density multimodal sensor arrays.

1) Detect loading / strain using a module incorporating a strain sensor (e.g. the resistive type used in scales and strain gauges) to a diode. The diode is coupled to a fiber optic line that takes the signal to the camera.spectrometer.

2) Position sensors. Use an arc of partially clear plastic that has a light at one of the ends at the arc edge. A fiber optic line at the oriented normal to the arc gathers light that takes the signal to the camera. As the joint moves, the plastic arc moves and distance between the light and the fiber optic changes. This change is converted to a position.

For joints with 360 rotation, the arc of plastic is replaced by a disk. The light source is placed at the center, and an opaque radial line gives each position of the disk a different light intensity.

3) Touch sensors. Use my previous idea of an array of sensors embedded in a squishy and translucent layer with one or more light sources. Touch distorts the light path of direct or reflected light between the light source(s) and sensor in reproducible ways. The set of sensors is trained to recognize the pattern of light formed by different touches. The pattern may also be changed by movement of the surface, for example if the array of sensors covers a hand, and could bed used to detect hand position.

4) An array of fibers can be placed to collect light from a spectrometer. An array of spectrometers can be developed using this approach, as the camera can collect light from several 1D fiber optic arrays.

Library Ancient and Universal

Wednesday, September 18th, 2013

Does there exist a project to assemble an online library of ancient written works intended to be complete? It sounds ridiculous, I know. But, if you start back far enough–say 3000 BCE–there is hardly anything to compile. And then the project can work forward until the project spreads out too much.

There are practical problems–images vs symbols and alphabets, fragmentary or derivative manuscripts, arguments over translation, historical translations versus modern ones, organization by region or language, but they have all been worked over by traditional publishers. The result would look like a cross proto-Project Gutenberg / Wiki.

If anyone tries this (assuming I just haven’t heard of it), I fear one of the most frustrating issues would be copyright. Museums forbidding the taking or use of images of the rare manuscripts or tablets or whatnot that they control.

It seems that most of the ancient manuscripts are described are referenced in fragments in medieval studies books and rare manuscripts. I hear about this stuff by third hand descriptions rather than by to links to online reference copies.

Update: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG)

Links for July 2013

Tuesday, July 2nd, 2013

FBI ignored plot to assassinate Occupy protesters
12 Very Real Voter-Suppression Tactics
Electro-Permanent cargo gripper
Electropermanent Magnetic Connectors and Actuators: Devices and Their Application in Programmable Matter by Ara Nerses Knaian
ALNiCo magnets
Sand resonance pattern video
MEAM waterjet, senior design project, 10k psi
Nothing About Abortion in the Bible
Iodine’s effect on IQ test scores–15 pts in iodine-deficient areas
Replacing Samsung SGH-T679M Digitizer
Silicon Valley (and the history of toxic waste)
Makers of Things
Human vestigial tail
A hundred proofs the Earth is not a Globe
History of Inequality
The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic by Kim Messick

App game idea

Friday, February 15th, 2013

Flip it

This game board is an array of tiles. The tiles have letters. The game play involves flipping a pair of letters, as if the two tiles can move through the screen on the axis that connects them. In any case, they move switches them. The goal is to rearrange the tiles to spell words.
Move:

cat --flip c:a--> act
dog ------------> dog

cat --flip c:d--> dat
dog ------------> cog

The game can be played different sized boards, and with boards with cutouts.
Variation 1: Have the tiles have both color and a letter, to distinguish common letters.
Variation 2: Have the tiles be two sided, so that flipping them exposes the other sides.

What is interesting about this is that it is a class of games easy to implement in the computer but which is hard or impossible to implement as a physical game. There is a whole class of variations on pen and pencil or board games that haven’t been tried because of this!

Squish! v1.0 released

Thursday, February 7th, 2013
Squish icon

Squish! released for Android devices! The free app can be downloaded from the Google Play store here.

How many liberal newspapers are left?

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

Saw in the news that the Seattle Times endorsed for Congress a Repub with ties to the militia/patriot movement–violent right wing nuts. I liberal Seattle has a hard right newspaper, how many cities have a Dem leaning paper left? I realize that Seattle has a big Defense industry economy, but that was my question.

newspaper political measure
from Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010

I found this graph listing newspapers and giving them a score. I don’t follow enough papers to have a feel for how good a measure this is. I would place the Washington Post on the conservative side of the line, the NYT in the middle (painfully in the middle). Which doesn’t leave many liberal (or even Democratic) big city newspapers–the LA Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle. I don’t know enough about the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, or Philedelphia Inquirer to have a feel for their content.

HTML5 app developement info

Friday, January 27th, 2012

PhoneGap: a native app wrapper for HTML5 apps
Windows 7 HTML5 app example using PhoneGap
HTML5 iPhone app example
HTML5 app intro

HTML5 info canvas
HTML5 demos and browser support list

Usbpicprog

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

Built a USB PIC microcontroller programmer, the usbpicprog. I used Marcelo Maggi’s version with daughter boards for the USB and ZIF. The boards had some narrow traces–I had two small defects after eteching, and lost a few more pads soldering the components on. Small wires fixed things up and it worked first time.

The instructions aren’t very clear. The bootloader .hex gets burned using a JDM programmer using the self programmer header. Then place a jumper on the self programming header Vpp and Vdd, plug it into the USB port, run usbpicprog. These messages appear on the command line:
Bootloader Devid: 11240
Autodetected PIC ID: 0x11240

Then open the firmware .hex and burn it. The program said it completed OK. Then quit the program, remove the USB cord, and add a second jumper on the self programming header from the Clk pin to Gnd.

After this it I connected my PIC18F46K20 to the ICSP header (on a breadboard), plugged in the USB cable, and ran usbpicprog again. I opened my .hex and burned it. It said the code burned OK but gave an error for the configuration bits (like I was getting from the JDM programmers). Then I tried erasing it followed by running blank check. Both of these completed OK. I re-burned my program, and this time it worked! Configuration bits were programmed and verified!

So far I’ve only finished the main board. I made the USB board but haven’t populated it yet. I intend this mainly for ICSP programming, so I haven’t decided on whether to make the ZIF board. I do need to make an enclosure.

usbpicprog top side
usbpicprog bottom side
You can see some of the trace repairs.

Links for November 2011

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

Nepotism and wealth go together like father and son

Source

US corporate tax rates:

Source


Revenue Statistics of O.E.C.D. Member Countries, 2010, Source

Polyvinyl alcohol, neat stuff

Making an inkjet nozzle with a piezo buzzer. Drop size and speed not measured. Both seem to be on the order of a µl.

Inkjet 3d printer that prints into dental power / PVA
3D DLP printer build log. What is being built is unclear.
Tests of UV curing resins for 3D printing

Scalzi on the sf/fantasy question

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

John Scalzi, writer of science fiction and recent GOH at Capricon has an article about movies and science fiction, an often awkward pair. This is an endless topic among sf readers. Especially with movies, the nature of movie production tends to stomp the sf out of them. I still don’t think Scalzi really gets the meat of the argument.

The vital element in speculative fiction is that it raises interesting questions–predictions about the future or about whether aspects of our society are necessary or universal, just to pick two.

Star Wars is space fantasy because it eschews sf and tells a fantasy tale of adventure and superpowers. The space future setting doesn’t make it sf any more than it did for Bugs Bunny cartoons with Marvin the Martian.

The science content is not a critical aspect of sf, but it is a signifier. Good speculative fiction respects science to the extent it can while telling it’s story. It does this so the reader or viewer has a context in which to think about the ideas raised by the work. If ‘it’s all a dream’ or ‘you’ve thought about this more than the director’ is the best answer to the questions the work raises then doesn’t work as sf.

Many movies with a futurist setting ignore all the rules of the world, violating laws of nature randomly. It’s a flag that the author isn’t telling a story you are meant to think about, just an adventure romp or a horror tale. Shows like Star Trek jump back and forth across this divide–it pulls things together for a spot of speculative fiction but then retreats fantasy.