Tag: video

SkySails

Putting a harness on ocean winds, a German shipping company plans to unfurl a giant high-tech kite over a cargo ship next year to boost the vessel’s propulsion and to conserve fuel.

the price is still too high, and too complicated to maintain, but how awesome is that? makes me wonder why they don’t put huge sails on the ship itself.

Saudi Arabia

The Iran war mongers are getting a clear warning from Saudi Arabia. Cheney was “summoned” to Riyadh.

The White House has wanted it to be believed that Cheney went about the Middle East “lining up” the Sunni leaders to support the Zelikow plan for further empowerment of the Shia Arabs against the Sunni Arab insurgents in Iraq.

2007-05-12: The super-giant Ghawar Oilfield in Saudi Arabia has been responsible for over 50% of Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production.

2008-06-21: Saudi oil increase

In the absence of any additional crude supply, for every 1% of crude demand, we will expect a 20% increase in price in order to balance the market.

2013-09-27: You don’t need alcohol to drunk drive

2014-04-02: With the ruler on his deathbed, you gotta wonder what will happen to Saudi Arabia, which isn’t really a historical construct, just held together by crazy (the oil helps too)
2015-01-16: Robb is interesting as always. It seems likely that the end game involves Saudi Arabia, and soon.

Saudi Arabia knows it is in trouble, that’s why the Saudis are trying to buy influence in the west through a cheap oil policy (at the same time, a low price puts the hurt on US frackers and ISIS oil smugglers alike). However, ISIS trumped this effort with Charlie Hebdo. It will be difficult for the Saudis to convince the west they are the real target after the attack in Paris.

2015-02-04: Saudi Arabia Holds All Male Women’s Rights Conference

As is to be expected from Saudi Arabia, a country firmly under the grip of Sharia Law, 0 women attended the event. Perhaps more hypocritically, a single woman is yet to speak at a University of Qassim summit.

2015-08-06: Saudi spending

Social spending is the glue that holds together a medieval Wahhabi regime at a time of fermenting unrest among the Shia minority of the Eastern Province, pin-prick terrorist attacks from ISIS, and blowback from the invasion of Yemen. Diplomatic spending is what underpins the Saudi sphere of influence in a Middle East suffering its own version of Europe’s 30 Year War, and still reeling from the aftershocks of a crushed democratic revolt. We may yet find that the US oil industry has greater staying power than the rickety political edifice behind OPEC.

2018-04-03: Saudis Remake Middle East

But, as sweeping as MBS’s economic and cultural reforms may be, he has expressed no interest in liberalizing the country’s political system. Indeed, the model that seems to best conform to his vision is China, with its dynamic economy, literate population, and authoritarian rule. His efforts are being carried out with 1 overriding goal: to preserve the House of Saud.

Intelligence means Prediction

The cortex appears wired at its foundation to run Bayesian computations as efficiently as can be possible.

now i REALLY have to cram bayesian math.
2008-09-27:
s/Intelligence is defined by behavior/Intelligence is defined by prediction/

2017-09-06:

Surfing Uncertainty isn’t pop science and isn’t easy reading. Sometimes it’s on the border of possible-at-all reading. Author Andy Clark (a professor of logic and metaphysics, of all things!) is clearly brilliant, but prone to going on long digressions about various boring scholarly debates. In particular, he’s obsessed with showing how “embodied” everything is all the time. This gets kind of awkward, since the predictive processing model isn’t really a natural match for embodiment theory, and describes a brain which is pretty embodied in some ways but not-so-embodied in others. If you want 100 pages of apologia along the lines of “this may not look embodied, but if you squint you’ll see how super-duper embodied it really is!”, this is your book.

2018-11-30: Free energy principle

Friston’s work has 2 primary motivations. Sure, it would be nice to see the free energy principle lead to true artificial consciousness someday, but that’s not one of his top priorities. Rather, his first big desire is to advance schizophrenia research, to help repair the brains of patients like the ones he knew at the old asylum. And his second main motivation is “much more selfish.” It goes back to that evening in his bedroom, as a teenager, looking at the cherry blossoms, wondering, “Can I sort it all out in the simplest way possible?”

and a piece on Friston:

Karl Friston’s free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself.

2019-07-18:

We have never seen such a concrete example of how the brain uses prior experience to modify the neural dynamics by which it generates sequences of neural activities, to correct for its own imprecision. This is the unique strength of this paper: bringing together perception, neural dynamics, and Bayesian computation into a coherent framework, supported by both theory and measurements of behavior and neural activities

2022-04-10:

If that is not mind-bending enough, in his new book, Jeff Hawkins extends the memory framework to the construct of “reference frames”. Everything we perceive is a constructed reality, a cortical consensus from competing internal models resident in many cortical columns, the amalgam of 1000 brains. Those models are updated by data streaming from the senses. But our reality resides in the models. “The brain learns its model of the world by observing how its inputs change over time. There isn’t another way to learn. Every time we take a step, move a limb, move our eyes, tilt our head, or utter a sound, the input from our sensors change. For example, our eyes make rapid movements, called saccades, about three times a second. With each saccade, our eyes fixate on a new point in the world and the information from the eyes to the brain changes completely.” We don’t perceive any of this because we are living in the model, which is predicting the next input to come, across all the senses. “Vision is an interactive process, dependent on movement. Only by moving can we learn a model of the object.”

“To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. We are not aware of most of the predictions made by the brain unless an error occurs.”

“Thoughts and experiences are always the result of a set of neurons that are active at the same time (about 2% of the total). Individual neurons can participate in many different thoughts or experiences. Everything we know is stored in the connections between neurons. Every day, many of the synapses on an individual neuron will disappear and new ones will replace them. Thus, much of learning occurs by forming new connections between neurons that were not previously connected.”

Sequence memory (like predicting the next note in a melody or a common sequence of behaviors): “Sequence memory is also used for language. Recognizing a spoken work is like recognizing a short melody.”

Metamaterial

A metamaterial allows special optic properties, such as exceeding the diffraction limit, building cloaking devices, etc
2012-12-10: Materials science really is the unsung hero of most of our prosperity.

A new material created by Cornell researchers is so soft that it can flow like a liquid and then, strangely, return to its original shape. Rather than liquid metal, it is a hydrogel, a mesh of organic molecules with many small empty spaces that can absorb water like a sponge. It qualifies as a “metamaterial” with properties not found in nature and may be the first organic metamaterial with mechanical meta-properties.

2014-01-12: Analog computers

shining a light wave on one side of such a material would result in that wave profile’s derivative exiting the other side. Such analog computers would be much faster and energy efficient than DSPs.

2014-02-10: This is easily the most impressive nanotech demo I have ever seen.

Extremely strong yet ultra-light materials can be achieved by designing nano structured hollow lattices which promise superb thermomechanical properties at extremely low mass densities (lighter than aerogels)

2015-12-01: 1000x 3D imaging resolution

MIT researchers have shown that by exploiting the polarization of light — the physical phenomenon behind polarized sunglasses and most 3D movie systems — they can increase the resolution of conventional 3D imaging devices as much as 1000x. The technique could lead to high-quality 3D cameras built into phones, and perhaps to the ability to snap a photo of an object and then use a 3D printer to produce a replica. Further out, the work could also abet the development of driverless cars.

2021-02-07: Metalenz

Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor, Metalenz’s design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1×1 to 3×3 millimeter in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you’ll see nanostructures measuring one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Those nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects for many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems. The resulting image quality is just as sharp as what you’d get from a multilens system, and the nanostructures do the job of reducing or eliminating many of the image-degrading aberrations common to traditional cameras. And the design doesn’t just conserve space. A Metalenz camera can deliver more light back to the image sensor, allowing for brighter and sharper images than what you’d get with traditional lens elements.

2022-01-30: Not sure about “soon”, but

Imagine a camera that’s mounted on your car being able to identify black ice on the road, giving you a heads-up before you drive over it. Or a cell phone camera that can tell whether a lesion on your skin is possibly cancerous. Or the ability for Face ID to work even when you have a face mask on. These are all possibilities Metalenz is touting with its new PolarEyes polarization technology. Polarization imaging equipment has typically been bulky and expensive, but the PolarEyes system is compact and cost-effective enough to replace a smartphone camera.

2022-04-15: Nice overview of metamaterial capabilities and progress.

Metamaterials’ precise shape, geometry, size, orientation, and arrangements allow them to manipulate electromagnetic or mechanical waves, such as light or sound, by blocking, enhancing, and bending the waves. Their potential applications are multiples, including power transmission, energy harvesting, wireless charging, thermal management, and acoustic applications, Lidars, radars, superlenses for medical devices, AR displays. Electrical engineering, electromagnetics, classical optics, solid-state physics, microwave and antenna engineering, optoelectronics, material sciences, nanoscience, and semiconductor engineering are all involved in the metamaterial field’s advancement.
Metamaterials are impacting several industries: Infrastructure (Thermal management, Acoustic management – vibration and noise control, Seismic metamaterials), Power and Energy (Energy harvesting, Power transmission, Wireless charging), Electronics and Sensors (Lidars, Super lenses for medical applications, Programmable metamaterials, AR displays), Telecommunications (MmWave antennas, 3D radar, Holographic beamforming).
Since the first metamaterials product went to market in 2009, relatively few products became commercially available because the difficulty in designing metamaterials structures and their high manufacturing cost made them prohibitive for commercial applications. In the last few years, improvements in the software for design and simulation in additive manufacturing made the near-term scale adoption of metamaterials-based products possible. Sectors like automotive, telecommunication, and consumer electronics are ripe for disruption. Once metamaterials options reach the market, the conventional products will suffer and likely become obsolete. The metamaterials products don’t require high CapEx because they rely on conventional materials and manufacturing processes with innovative design. When considering a new investment opportunity or starting a company, keep in mind that companies such as Intellectual Ventures have aggressively acquired strategic patents and launched several spin-offs, including Kymeta, Pivotal Commware, and Echodyne. Intellectual property in this field is strategic for the survival of incumbents. Early patents are expected to expire between 2024-2028, and more companies will likely pop up in analogy to what happened in the 3D printing industry in 2005. Exciting times lie ahead to transform many industries with metamaterials products.

2023-08-07: Metalenz explainer video