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TIL: camera phone
Sep. 2nd, 2017 11:21 amToday I learned that in 1997 Philipe Kahn, of the Borland fame, invented the first camera phone.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Quote of the Day: Information
Aug. 19th, 2017 11:38 pmTo be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say.
That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. If one is confronted with a very elementary situation where he has to choose one of two alternatIve messages, then it is arbitrarily said that the information, associated with this situation, is unity.
The concept of information applies not to the indi- vidual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a whole, the unit information indicating that in this situation one has an amount of freedom of choice, in selecting a message, which it is convenient-to regard as a standard or unit amount.
To be somewhat more definite, the amount of information is defined, in the simplest cases, to be measured by the logarithm of the number of available choices.
-- Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949).
need to think about it in the context of learning by doing.
(no subject)
Aug. 14th, 2017 12:57 pmThey [gods] emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind.
...
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." The question may arise in the mind as to the nature of the image of God; but the answer is already given in the text, and is clear enough. "When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, He created him androgynous.'
The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where God walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall of Paradise, constituted of the "coincidence of opposites," by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.
...
... symbolizing the mystery of creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two.
--- The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Interactive webcamming is the fastest-growing sector of the global pornography business. In Romania, thousands of women work as "cam-girls" from studios and from home.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40829230
Typically, porn is a precursor of a major tech transition. Is webcamming just a replacement for phone sex or something bigger is going on?
(no subject)
Aug. 5th, 2017 11:45 pmEmpirical data shows that new technologies succeed in combination with new markets only. I have a gut feeling that we can prove it theoretically using adjoint functors.
Beautiful!
Jul. 30th, 2017 01:36 pmA poset A is often said to arise concretely if we are given a large category E of
structured spaces, choose an object X in E, and define A to be a category of parts of X (in the sense of E) with inclusions as maps.
(no subject)
Jul. 29th, 2017 09:08 pmЖизнь прекрасна. Я сегодня применил элементы теории категорий, чтобы помочь двум врачам придумать новую систему для лечения переломов. Это выглядело вот так:
A -> B -> C -> D (wherein *: C->D is monic)
or
A -> D
Проблема в том, что сегодня все строят свободные моноиды на А, и это очень долго, дорого и вызывает осложнения. А мои новые друзья будут строить свободные моноиды на D. Забавно, что один из врачей вот-вот станет son-in-law моего бывшего начальника и разговорились о переломах мы совершенно случайно.
A -> B -> C -> D (wherein *: C->D is monic)
or
A -> D
Проблема в том, что сегодня все строят свободные моноиды на А, и это очень долго, дорого и вызывает осложнения. А мои новые друзья будут строить свободные моноиды на D. Забавно, что один из врачей вот-вот станет son-in-law моего бывшего начальника и разговорились о переломах мы совершенно случайно.
...it is now clear that the elaborate organizations that human beings have constructed in the modern world to carry out the work of production and government can only be understood as machinery for coping with the limits of man’s abilities to comprehend and compute in the face of complexity and uncertainty.
Herbert A. Simon. Nobel Prize lecture, Dec 8, 1978.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1978/simon- lecture.html
Note the rapid decline on both charts after about year 2,000. I wonder whether this is a pure coincidence or there's a real connection there.
Initial object
Jul. 19th, 2017 08:33 pm
As it happened, one of Hall's contemporaries, Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens, began getting the notion that being playing goal without a mask was a bad idea. Ever creative, even as a junior player, Plante began experimenting with the idea of a face protector.
https://www.nhl.com/news/jacques-plante-becomes-first-goalie-to-wear- mask/c-290431748
Now, all hockey goalies wear masks. Moreover, all college hockey players wear masks and the vast majority of professional players wear visors. How would we predict that Jacques Plante's idea would become the initial object? Also, is it a terminal object too? How should we construct a meaningful category to model that?
And the reason for Purdue [offering a masters program on semiconductors in 1960] is most people don’t know that the transistor effect was found at Crane Naval Air Development Center three weeks after Shockley. And it’s the tragedy of being second.
https://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/kvamme.htm
(no subject)
Jul. 18th, 2017 10:29 pmIt seems like Paul Romer makes a certain mistake in his approach to the theory of innovation. He assumes that characteristic function ("the recipe") is given, while it has to be discovered. In short, the set of elements is the initial object, not the terminal one.
Maybe we can think of the set of elements as the initial object, while the free group generated by it represents the terminal object.
E.g. printed book vs handwritten book (different terminal objects built using different initial objects.)
Maybe we can think of the set of elements as the initial object, while the free group generated by it represents the terminal object.
E.g. printed book vs handwritten book (different terminal objects built using different initial objects.)
AR: Well, Fairchild Camera and Instrument was a company that was located in Syosset, New York. It's in Long Island. And it had, other than, when Sherman died the attitude changed a bit. They had a very, what I call an Eastern mentality in that they didn't want anybody to have any options in stock and the eight entrepreneurs who started Fairchild Semiconductor decided individually and together that they would gradually peel off and, and form their own enterprises because they couldn't get any more equity in, and a lot of the people there felt that they should be giving equity to some of the people who had, hadn't helped start the company but were instrumental in its, in its success. And Fairchild Camera and Instrument were, was unwilling to do that. So gradually they peeled off and finally by 1968 there were only Noyce and Moore left.
https://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/rock.htm
Quote of the Day: Successful People
Jul. 18th, 2017 09:55 pmMost people who succeed are not very objective or realistic about why. They think it's all their personal brilliance. And in significant part it is, but they forget the luck factor and the contribution of other people and timing and the economy and all the rest of it. People who fail often times are desperately in need of a success. They're smarter, they're more clever about how they do things, their sometimes tremendous egos are suspended in check.
...
So we rarely will finance somebody at Sequoia who's had an outrageous success. My - my best example is my friend Steve Jobs. We financed Steve in 1977 at Apple. Steve was twenty, un-degreed, some people said unwashed, and he looked like Ho Chi Min. But he was a bright person then, and is a brighter man now. And here was a man that created Apple, and in the creation of Apple helped create the personal computer business. Phenomenal achievement done by somebody in his very early twenties. Outrageously success - successful, and after he - his stay at Apple he then evolved to an individual who was having lunch with the governor of California, then Jerry Brown, who had an apartment in New York City. When I met him he didn't know where New York City was.
https://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/valentine.htm
Cyberweapons can be used as remotely controlled cross-border mines affecting the enemy's infrastructure at a critical juncture. For example, in the early 2000s Israel and USA mined Iranian centrifuges to slow down uranium enrichment in Iran. Recently we could see how foreign hacking helped mine US political infrastructure for the purpose of influencing the 2016 elections campaign.
Today, we have no idea how much of our infrastructure has been mined already and for what purpose. Unlike nuclear weapons, cyberweapons can be applied in a scalable manner to demonstrate one's resolve to use a crippling force. I wonder whether private utility companies would be required to submit to government-mandated tests. Or maybe insurance companies will have to set something up after a spectacular infrastructure failure. Wrt individuals, what would be an equivalent of a sticky note covering the laptop camera if one wants protection against eavesdropping or outright sabotage in an autonomous vehicle?
Today, we have no idea how much of our infrastructure has been mined already and for what purpose. Unlike nuclear weapons, cyberweapons can be applied in a scalable manner to demonstrate one's resolve to use a crippling force. I wonder whether private utility companies would be required to submit to government-mandated tests. Or maybe insurance companies will have to set something up after a spectacular infrastructure failure. Wrt individuals, what would be an equivalent of a sticky note covering the laptop camera if one wants protection against eavesdropping or outright sabotage in an autonomous vehicle?
(no subject)
Jul. 4th, 2017 09:44 pmA righteous person among all people (A) is an equalizer (R); therefore s/he can be used as a role model for another person (X).
R -> A -> Ω
R -> 1 -> Ω
X -> R
The existence of an ordinary righteous person R simplifies life choices for X because it relieves X from thinking, doubt and anxiety.
Also see the discussion of religion vs personal moral quest ( terminology?) in Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari.
R -> A -> Ω
R -> 1 -> Ω
X -> R
The existence of an ordinary righteous person R simplifies life choices for X because it relieves X from thinking, doubt and anxiety.
Also see the discussion of religion vs personal moral quest ( terminology?) in Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari.
(no subject)
Jul. 2nd, 2017 04:09 pmI wonder whether the subobject classifier approach can be used to detect new developments in technology. For example, expressions like _horseless carriage_, _smarphone with no keyboard_, _driverless car_, _artificial intelligence_ indicate that the object in question doesn't belong to a boolean topos ( or is it a slice topos?).
