my favorite interview

i think colin powells words on islamic americans are probably the most important spoken this election season, but this interview is probably my favorite so far...



personally, i think a really robust interview, or in this case - a hilariously slanted one - provides a unique opportunity to speak to some of the fringe ideas out there.  and biden was unflappable.

which makes me wonder ... is there really such a thing as an *unfair* interview? i mean the interviewee is not limited by how they choose to respond... they can either defend their position... which may require synopsis-ing your assumptions and positions in a 30 second "elevator pitch"... or they can sit there and complain about the question.

can anyone provide a link to a truly "unfair" interview?

Wassup 2008

visual processing

one of the most important problems the defense industry has yet to solve is that of Identification Friend of Foe. active methods of IFF require emitting a signal - essentially "yelling across the room: are you a good guy or a bad guy??", and waiting for an answer. if the "bogie" chooses not to answer, you still haven't confirmed anything more than he might be hard of hearing right now for any number of reasons - or he doesn't want to respond to you and "yell back" giving away his position.

consequently, the preferred method of identification would be a passive mechanism... something like the mark 1 eyeball would be awesome... and passive as long as you weren't using a flashlight. but this problem is surprisingly hard to teach to a computer. even when we teach a machine what an object looks like on all sides - we have no way for it to anticipate the orientation of that object or how much of it is exposed when one is encountered – so the computer can’t do the matching. and we can't get ahead of this.

as i think about my own object recognition capabilities - or that of a six year old, we have no problem recognizing "chair ness". when we encounter a chair obscured, or at a odd angle, we have no problem rotating it around in our head, filling in the blanks, and identifying it. this capacity eludes our programming strategies and capabilities of today.

at the day job, we’ve been trying to create a model / computer program that solves a problem that has a number of constraints - and, once we formulate those constraints, were trying to identify the maximum point - which would be our optimum. for instance, if you visualized a messed up bed - and that geometric pattern was defined by a series of data and equations, we're looking to teach a computer a smart way to find the highest point on that bed. via e.g. a heuristic, linear program, or differential equation.

since ive done little of this kind of algorithm formulation in the real world - and recall what i know from classes that were back in '99 - i find i am a wee bit rusty on some of my math. however, i am finding i am having no problem at all discussing the problem and approaches, being a sounding board, testing ideas, even making jokes - because everything we're doing has a visual allegory to it. i don't have the math handy - but all the processing and imaging can take place in the visual domain.

this caused me to think of computer graphics chipmakers nvidea, and their old slogan, "the display is the computer". and ponder the significance that visual processing is likely to make in future computer design - most especially in artificial intelligence. visual processing has been selected by nature as such a powerful tool for coping with our reality. from the series of differential equations a cheetah "intuitively" solves to intercept its prey - to even more awesome maneuvers performed by little birds twittering by us day in and day out. visual processing is hugely powerful.

i'm just saying, buy stock in nvidia.

a love note

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008, J4CK13 wrote:

Wish i didn't know that the man who did the training videos should have used a pop filter when recording...

You need to stop explaining stuff to me honey. :(

:-*

I love my girl!

On Being American

The Interview (on iTunes)

More significant than even Powell's ringing (and right on) endorsement of Barack, is his shining of light onto the very Un-American ideas currently imbedded in Republican thought.

I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim,and he might be associated with terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards — Purple Heart, Bronze Star — showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I'm troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.

DRM

Digital Rights Management

don't vote

i'm not. here's why you shouldn't either:

"Look"

= my most hated word out of a politicians mouth.

feedback

i'm not an economist. and just like the economists, i don't understand how the economy works.

but fortunately i don't have to understand how the economy works. i'm only a systems engineer. i merely need to envision a system to understand something.

"feedback" is one of those things we know is good for us, but we don't often like, or necessarily pursue. in this sense, we're talking about negative feedback, which is almost never perceived as good. positive feedback is perceived as good. or at least happier.

but from a systems perspective, the opposite is true.

negative feedback is extremely important to the stability of systems (of which, nearly anything can be viewed as). and it'd be really cool - for it to get a good wrap at a gut/intuitive level.

amplifier design, for instance. the goal here is to take an itty bitty electrical signal of only a few milli-volts amplitude and power measure in milli-watts, and amplify that signal so that it has a much larger amplitude and much more power, to drive big speakers that push lots of physical air. especially for our beloved 'merican subwoofers. making a bitty signal big is fairly straightforward. the magic is in harnessing that power so that it doesn't get too big, and in essence pulling that signal gain down in an accurate way so that the amplifier doesn't blow up to infinity when you turn it on.

negative feedback is crucial to life: e.g. a friend of mine thought of leprosy patients - those who loose the negative feedback of pain... another perfect example.

positive feedback on the other hand, is unstable. i can't really point to a common shared example of positive feedback because those systems are inherently unstable - that is, they blow up. a nuclear weapon is about the only example i can think of. like i said, boom.

so, turns out our tinkerbell economy seems to be exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of a positive feedback system. that is when speculators feel good about things, our economy does better, so they feel better, so it does better... until your head explodes. but say, for some reason, those speculators don't feel good about things, well, our economy does worse, so they feel worse, so it does worse... until your head implodes. i betcha there is a clinical psychological term for someone who exhibits these kinds of behavior. and i'm sure its a long one.

i can't help think, and for a long time now, that our economy is a house of cards. who among us can understand this crap - let alone its implications? the big guys at the top only care about one thing - and they don't care *how* because everyone is in it for the short term returns. except us. so, on this point: i'm not exactly disagreeing with bush - our economy does self correct. it's just that were not letting it. because they've got us by the gonads.

would somebody please build an inherently stable financial system. please? one with negative feedback applied to the more sensitive areas of those who benefit from risk. thank you.