Author: moleitau

Large/Big/High Numbers

moleitau

While trying to find stuff on Graham’s Number ( dimly-remembered from childhood obsession over the Guinness Book of Records) I come across Robert Munafo”s large numbers page, and his fascinating, Hofstadter-inspired classification of numbers:

” Class-1 numbers are those that are small enough to be perceived as a bunch of objects seen directly by the human eye. What I mean by “seen directly” is that it is possible to see the number as a set of separate, distinct objects in a single scene (no time limit, but the observer and the objects cannot move). 100 is a class-1 number because it is possible to see 100 objects (goats for example) in a single scene. The limit for class-1 numbers is around a million, 1,000,000 or 10^6. You can just barely put 1,000,000 dots on a large piece of paper and stand at a distance such that you can perceive each individual dot as a distinct dot, and at the same time be within viewing distance of the other 999,999 dots. (I have actually done this, just for fun!)”

Big Numbers was the name of a troubled Alan Moore / Bill Sienkiewicz co-creation. The High Numbers was the original name of The Who.

Ah!

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THAT’s where you’ve gone!. Starting to get really fed up of finding out that mates of yours have gone over to Typepad, and hence have a new URL, but you have no idea.

The Trotts should build in a “change of address” card feature.

Not spiders, but snakes.

moleitau

“”When a dog loses a leg it’s got a clever enough brain to allow it to adapt,” says computer scientist Peter Bentley at University College London. But robots still lack this adaptive ability and so tend to give up the ghost when circumstances change.

Bentley and his colleague Siavash Haroun Mahdavi borrowed a trick from evolution to allow their robot to adapt to damage. The snakebot is made up of modular vertebral units that “snap” together to form a snake-like body

…The software for making a robot wriggle like a snake is fairly straightforward. But ensuring that the snake will keep moving even if a segment is damaged is trickier, and relies on different segments taking over from the damaged ones.

So Bentley and Mahdavi have created a genetic algorithm (GA) – a software routine that takes a “survival of the fittest” approach – to produce a system that continually evolves to improve itself.”

» NewScientist: Robot spy can survive battlefield damage

Braaaaiiinnnsssssss

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Picture of kid making mobile phone from clay in Africa from Newsweek, over at my moblog

From this week’s European edition of Newsweek, which is all about tech, kids use of tech and how our tech is changing our brains:

“Is the stimulation of new media preparing kids for a future high-tech world—or turning them into antisocial, superficial dolts? There are no definitive answers. Only in the past few years have scientists begun to plumb children’s brains to see what goes on during the hours they spend engrossed in videogames or surfing the Web. What seems clear is that children are developing a far different set of skills than they had before. They are growing adept at handling visual information and multitasking. And the messaging free-for-all may actually help some kids overcome childhood awkwardness in relating to their peers.”

» Newsweek.com: Bionic Youth: Too Much Information?
» Newsweek.com: Kids: Tuning in, Turning On
» Newsweek.com: Tech: Listening to the Kids
» Newsweek.com: Kids: The End of Make Believe

UI: the next-generation.

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Jakob’s latest alertbox: “Mobile Devices: One Generation From Useful” in which he states that GUIs and email must be fundamentally rethought for mobile devices, rather than squishing legacy UIs from desk-based devices. Gives me the excuse to dredge something interesting written by Chris from the comments on this post:

“I’m the external examiner on a couple of undergrad multimedia design courses, and this summer I’ve seen the first set of students who design intuitively for the phone. What I mean is, they don’t need briefs telling them to design for the phone, but because they’re the texting generation, they’re as comfortable with the alphanumeric keypad and txt language as a data entry method than they are with the point and click interface.

The phone-based projects they showed me just worked. when I asked for their research, there was little. They just knew what the best methods were, because they’ve spent their entire teenage lives texting.”

Can’t wait to see some of these projects…

“Google is a bad unix shell”

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Stefan on Google’s new calculator feature, and the (perhaps confusing) future of the “one-box” features:

“…what google is now losing (and the bane of all command line interfaces) is any kind of discoverability for all these new functions. I’ll never remember half those features, because there are few visual cues to tell me they’re there, and I can’t be arsed to remember anything. If I could remember stuff, I wouldn’t need sites like google.”

Not unusually, I’m not sure I agree with him. Google’s “one-box” features (generally) look for expressions or formats of information in your query that mean you’re trying to complete a very defined task – like an address, or a mathematical expression. They’re not trying to bind you into the syntax of a programming language or, indeed in many cases leave you with just the returned output of that features – extending (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth^2) = 9.82085555 m / s into Search for documents containing the terms (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth ^ 2); as featured on Google.com as an example for instance.

This is a smart (and getting smarter) conversational interface – if you know the language, the syntax of the query that will drop you right next to the answer – it fullfils it. If not, then Google will probably do it’s damnest to guess.

Not much like a unix shell.

» Whitelabel.org: Google Calculator