Missing Mary Road

A SINGLE-PIXEL DIGITAL CAMERA, scientists at Rice University believe, will reduce power consumption and storage space without sacrificing spatial resolution. The new approach aims to confront one of the basic dilemmas of digital imaging, namely the huge waste factor. Consider that a megapixel camera will, when you take the picture, capture and momentarily store a million numbers (the light levels from the pixels). No camera can store that much information for hundreds of pictures, so an immediate data compression takes place right there inside the camera. A tiny microprocessor performs a Fourier transform; that is, it converts the digital image into a weighted sum of many sinusoid waves. Instead of a million numbers, the representation of the image can now been compressed into something like 10,000 numbers, corresponding to the most important coefficients from the mathematical transformation. These are the numbers actually retained for later processing into pictures. The Rice camera saves space and energy by eliminating the first step. It gets rid of the million pixels. Instead it goes right to a transformed version (about 10,000 numbers rather than a million) by viewing the scene prismatically with a single pixel. No, the light from the object doesn’t go through a prism, but it is viewed about 10,000 different ways. The light, in a quick succession of glances, bounces off the myriad individually driven facets of a digital micromirror device, or DMD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_micromirror_device). The mirrors of a DMD (only a micron or so in size) do not image an object or record data but merely steer light; they can be individually angled in such a way that the light strikes a photo detector or not, depending on whether the light is representing a digital 1 or 0 at that moment.

The main idea is that the DMD is acting as a sort of analog optical computer. Each time the pixel views the object, a different set of orientations is imposed on the array of micromirrors. And, in an interesting twist, the Rice camera uses random orientations. Looking like the haphazard splotch of black and white squares of a crossword puzzle, the DMD’s surface is reflective here and dark there; some of the mirrors will faithfully reflect light from the object to the pixel while others will, in effect, appear black. Then the object is viewed again with a different micromirror activation pattern; again the pixel will record an overall light level. This process recurs about 10,000 times. Later, offline on a computer, the single pixel light levels, along with the micromirror patterns are processed using new algorithms to reconstruct a sharp image. This isn’t quite the old type of imaging process, the kind used in x-ray crystallography or CAT scans (which also convert pinpoints of data into images), but a new kind of imaging called compressive sensing that is only about two years old.

To summarize, the acquisition of imaging data is reduced many-fold (saving on data storage), only a single pixel is needed (freeing up valuable space in the primary detector), and the bulk of the processing can be offloaded to a remote computer rather than a chip inside the camera, thus greatly reducing power needs and extending the usefulness of batteries. Rice researchers Richard Baraniuk (richb@rice.edu) and Kevin Kelly (kkelly@rice.edu) say that an additional virtue of the camera is that with only a single pixel, the detector (a photodiode) can be as fancy as you want. It can even accommodate wavelengths currently unavailable to digital photography, such as x ray, terrahertz waves, even radar. A working camera prototype has been built. One of the main tasks is to reduce the time it takes to record an image; the price for compressing space, pixels, and power is to spread everything out in time since the cyclops-like pixel must blink ten thousand or more times to capture the image. As Baraniuk says, the Rice form of photography is multiplexed in time. The Rice results were reported last week at the Frontiers in Optics Meeting of the Optical Society of America (OSA) held in Rochester (www.osa.org/meetings/annual/) (For a picture of the setup and the imaging results, see the web page http://dsp.rice.edu/cscamera and the research paper at http://www.dsp.ece.rice.edu/cs/cscam-SPIEJan06.pdf )

some of my posts comes with a unique title. a lot of them may seem nonsensical but they’re really not. does anyone ever get them, or am i just too random for most people?

let’s take a test. see if you can figure out the references in these post titles.

link 1 , link 2 , link 3 , link 4 , link 5 , link 6 , link 7 , link 8 , link 9 , link 10

Battlestar Galactica, now entering its third season, is not science fiction—or “speculative fiction” or “SF,” or whatever you’re supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-’70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir. Listen to Adm. William Adama (Edward James Olmos) gruffly rumble along as a weary soldier in a crooked universe. Check out the way that Hitchcock kisses lead seamlessly to knives in the gut. Just look at the Venetian blinds.

Keep reading damn you!

FIRST ANTIMATTER CHEMISTRY. The Athena collaboration, an experimental group working at the CERN lab in Geneva, has measured chemical reactions involving antiprotonic hydrogen, a bound object consisting of a negatively charged antiproton paired with a positively charged proton. This composite object, which can also be called protonium, eventually annihilates itself, creating an even number of telltale charged pions. Normally the annihilation comes about in a trillionth of a second, but in the Athena apparatus (and its very thorough vacuum conditions) the duration is a whopping millionth of a second. The protonium comes about in the following way. First, antiprotons are created in CERN’s proton synchrotron by smashing protons into a thin target. The resultant antiprotons then undergo the deceleration, from 97% down to 10% the speed of light. Several more stages of cooling, including immersion in a bath of slow electrons, brings the antiprotons to a point where they can be caught in Athena’s electrostatic trap. This allows the researchers to study then, for the first time, a chemical reaction between the simplest antimatter ion—the antiproton—and the simplest matter molecular ion, namely H2+ (two H atoms with one electron missing). Joining these two ions results in the protonium plus a neutral hydrogen atom (see figure at http://www.aip.org/png/2006/269.htm ). This represents the first antimatter-matter chemistry, if you don’t count the interaction of positrons (anti-electrons) with ordinary matter. (Previously antiprotons have been inserted into helium atoms but this did not really constitute “chemistry” since the antiprotons merely replaced an electron in the helium atom.) According to Nicola Zurlo of the Universita’ di Brescia (zurlo@bs.infn.it) and her colleagues, the experimental output from the eventual protonium annihilation (see depiction at www.aip.org/png) allowed the Athena scientists to deduce that the principal quantum number (denoted by the letter n) of the protonium had an average value of 70 rather than the expected value of 30. Furthermore, the angular momentum of the protonium was typically much lower than expected—perhaps because of the low relative velocity at which the matter and antimatter ions approached each other before reaction. The Athena scientists hope to perform more detailed spectroscopy on their proton-antiproton “atom”in addition to the already scheduled spectroscopy of trapped anti-hydrogen atoms, which consist of antiprotons wedded to positrons. (Zurlo et al., Physical Review Letters, 13 October 2006 lab website at http://athena.web.cern.ch/athena/ )

via aip.

i love comics. though i think i’ve gone past the stereotype of marvel and dc comics, they still fascinate me. i think i’m more of a dc fan than i am a marvel one though. not really sure why. in any case, here’s an individual directory with bio’s of over 700 characters from the marvel universe.

a telemarketer bugging you? you do realize that they follow a script to make all their conversations. well, how about you use the same thing on them.

here’s the anti-telemarketing counterscript.

Zara salees o shagufta Urdu hai, but highly recommended, especially since Musharraf get’s blasted up the ass.

a giant list of band name origins.

AC/DC – 1) It is said that one of the band member saw it on an appliance and thought it had something to do with power. (It does mean “alternating current / direct current”.) The band used it not realizing it was also slang for a bisexual- the band claims NOT to be bisexual. 2) In the vogue of other anti-everything bands it stands for Against Christ/Devil’s Children.

ALICE IN CHAINS – a funny rumor is that they were named after a lost episode from The Brady Bunch series!…

CHUMBAWAMBA – In a band member’s dream, he didn’t know which door to use in a public toilet because the signs said “Chumba” and “Wamba” instead of “Men” and “Women”…

JETHRO TULL – popular 70′s band that is named after the rather obscure inventor of the farmer’s seed drill…

JUDAS PRIEST – originally a mild curse said to avoid saying “Jesus Christ” – also from the Bob Dylan song “The ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”…

T PAU – after a high priestess from the planet VULCAN in the American TV series STAR TREK…

YO LA TENGO -translates to “I have it” from Spanish – said to be the phrase called out by Hispanic baseball players when fielding a pop fly ball. Singer/guitar player Ira Kaplan got the expression from a book he was reading about baseball called The Five Seasons.

ZZ TOP – taken from the name of a Texas Blues man ZZ Hill. Though a rumor is that they got their name by combining Zig Zag and Top, two well known brands of “cigarette” rolling papers.

The population of earth fell into “ecological debt” with the planet yesterday. “The date symbolised the day of the year when people’s demands exceeded the Earth’s ability to supply resources and absorb the demands placed upon it.” In 1987, ecological debt day fell on December 19.

Weirdly enough, Bob Holmes for New Scientist has this interesting tidbit.

Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

Yossi Vardi shows that data transfer by snail is faster than broadband. “He showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water.”

• Sensors will be fitted to pedestrians and in buses as part of a £4.1m project aiming to measure pollution levels across England.
• Indian firms are facing a talent crunch.
• Hydrogen sulphide gas can induce “suspended animation” in mice and may one day help preserve organ function during intensive surgery.
• The founders of The Church of Cognizance, that considers marijuana a sacrament and deity, have stepped down as leaders, saying pending federal criminal charges make it impossible to fulfill their roles.
• A German lawyer hopes to drum up more business by pursuing state compensation claims for people who believe they were abducted by aliens.
• Within a Deep Forest is a freeware 2D platform game for Windows, featuring challenging gameplay, beautiful music, an evil doctor, infinite cuteness, and a deep forest.
• Researchers at Goddard and the Merate Observatory, Merate, Italy, studied a type of quasar called a blazar. Blazars are quasars with their particle jets aimed in our direction.
• Russian customs officers say they have discovered a mile long pipeline that was pumping vodka to Latvia.
• Archeologists have uncovered a 600-year-old, large underground cemetery belonging to a Peruvian warrior culture, thought to be the first discovery of its kind.
• With the population soaring past one billion and with a driving need to boost agricultural production, Indians are tapping groundwater faster than nature can replenish it, so fast that they are hitting deposits formed at the time of the dinosaurs.
• Frustrated by their government’s position on the environment/climate change/stem cell research, a group of US scientists have decided to actively promote the election of a president in 2008 who is more receptive to science.
• A team of U.S. scientists says it has used a plant virus to construct a memory device.

well boys and girls, it had to happen. google just bought the tube for $1.65B .

if you could reduce the earth’s population down to a small community of 100 people, this is what that miniature earth would look like.

man. i don’t know how many of you are fred and barney fans out there, but this is just ridiculous. i love it.

p.s. i’m sorry for posting so many videos, but youtube is just kicking ass lately.

see this korean archer split a soy bean from 30m away. he then goes on to manage the stereotypical arrow splitting from robin hood fame. cwazy stuff.