ValleyProofs

This video came by email a couple of minutes ago. And a story that ran on CNN.

“HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.”

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 instance we understand that there is wireless LAN easily available. Now let’s suppose that there are Miuro’s in offices, cafes homes around the city. We would be able to easily share our favourite playing lists and dance patterns.”

Yes, the robot is capable of dancing, well, more like break dance spinning. However it has an interesting architecture, it has two DSP processor boards and a robotics controller. Kenwood, the company that designed the speaker and audio sub system, had to tackle not with a static speaker platform but with a speaker system that moves and possibly rotates (cross fading the stereo channel comes to mind). This thing is definitely more interesting though at the present time probably less innovative than a Roomba, which will in fact take care of some of the real tedium. However, if the developers play it right this could be a great robotic platform in the future for the open source folks. My biggest criticism, they should have installed a mike into the device given the robot already has built in wireless, that way one could not only play songs from a favorite spot but video blog or podcast from it. With a microphone installed it could also serve as a skype phone but unlike a classic one it’ll come looking for you rather than the other way around. Another plus, a built in cradle for an iPod. I hope the company does open some APIs to third party developers, I can think of at least half a dozen mods I would try out on a Miuro.

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 at which point it went from nine, to seven minutes to midnight. Is it time to move the hand again, or is the answer more funds for the missile defense program? Despite the somber news the weather seems sunny over Korea.

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 sail to Tahiti complement the blog.

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 gets any easier to find a parking place. And Martha Stellar will show you how to make a star. And you’ll read a classic potboiler account of the origin of life on Earth (”It was a dark and stormy night. In the shallow tide pool, a nucleic acid base collided with a sugar molecule. An amino acid sank beneath the murky depths . . . .”). Other great moments in Eric Schulman’s whiz-bang collection of the universe’s greatest hits are:

* A Shakespearean account of the production of helium soon after the Big Bang,
* Assembly instructions for terrestrial proteins (including consumer safety warnings),
* A prospectus for potential investors in the Mammalia Class of animals,
* A dragnet-style investigation into the rise and fall of the Earth’s first empire,
* A ballad about the creation of the world-wide web,
* And much, much more.”

Welcome! These are the blog notes of Boris Debic, a Silicon Valley veteran currently hacking at Google. Once I fill up this place you should find lines on technology, science, reading and of course politics. My interests are currently split between complex software systems, the technology needed to send humans to Mars and international politics of concern to small countries. I keep an eye on UNHCR and Croatia as I have spent time with both.