Brown Eyed Susan

Another flower from yesterday. Sharpening in camera and none in Photoshop.

Sample Photos from E620

Red flowers in my neighborhood. I cropped this photo and cropped it again as you can see. I sharpened in the camera, but not with Photoshop. I think I will go back and take a photo of this flower with a bit less sharpening. I hope it is still there.

Lars and the Real Girl

I finally watched this movie. A friend told me about it when it first arrived in theaters. It seems like a movie we should see once a month so we can remember that people can help each other to get where they need to be. Of course, it is unrealistic and is that not too bad?

reCaptcha

Carnegie Mellon University has provided a free CAPTCHA service that will help to digitize old books, newspapers, and radio shows. A Captcha is a program (software) that enables us to login or to post messages in social networking programs on the internet.. you type into a little box several times a day in all liklihood. You are a human and you can figure out what the word or sequence of letters are, but some mischievious program out on the internet cannot. A Captcha distinquishes a human from a non-human bot on the internet. ( If you took certain math or computer courses or just read, you might remember the Turing test. Think how this connects.)

A reCaptcha is enabling those of us who type these words in (about 200 million per day) to help in the digitizing of the world's books etc. I thought this was a really nice cooperative effort.. we get into the website and we translate at the same time. Now last night I found out not all people like this. They think we are working for nothing. Nevermind that someone else has scanned the books. Carnegie Mellon has provided the software free of charge. In all liklihood we will have free access to the materials once digitized accurately also (think about the Internet Public Library). At any rate, I thought I would throw this out to see what people think if anyone ever reads this blog.

Millions of people let grid computing projects use the extra cycles on their computer and these projects are attempting to solve some very big problems. One of my computers worked on protein sequencing. Lots of people's computers work on SETI. Some search for prime numbers. It seems to be these are wonderful cooperative uses of cycles that would be wasted while we are up getting a drink of water.

Evidently not all people thing that way. Wow, I was completely disappointed to learn that people purposefully mistranslate the word intended for decoding something in a book we may want to read.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This book by Mohsin Hamid has a very interesting schema for telling the story. A Princeton educated Pakistani returns to Pakistan, meets an American in Old Anarkari. He says he will be of service as surely the American is searching for the perfect cup of tea. Off they go to the tea house where the story unfolds. I think of this as a serious Pakistani Bob Newhart. Hear one voice, but you know all this is being said or surmised.

We need to read more stories that provide us with some other ways of thinking as this book does. I find it interesting though that Hamid lives in London and not Lahore!

Good, fast read because you cannot put this beautifully written book aside.

Virginia Woolf and the Brain

This is one interesting story that was on Weekend Edition Saturday on August 2. If you have read Virginia Woolf you may be interested in this story about art and science.

The photo is from Barcelona. I just find it interesting.

Friend's web site

Like poetry? Try reading something new. One of my high school and actually, college, friends has a website where he posts his poetry and more. http://www.cebulski.net/

We both attended the University of Colorado (when there was only one main campus and thus, just known as CU. Now it is UCB.) We had but one class together, a senior level literature class. The lowly math major sat in this class with all these brainy literature majors. I remember one fellow who could tell us all about the music in Ulysses. I sat in awe, but it was fun and I was glad I escaped with a B. I even wrote what I considered an interesting paper. I wonder if I would now.

In that class in addition to Ulysses by James Joyce, we read Passage to India, Mrs. Dalloway, Sons and Lovers, and a few other books, plus one separate book of our own choosing for the paper. I will find my notebook and remind myself what else we read. I am glad I can remember each of those books and, especially, those authors. It was really good class and definitely different from my math classes.

Interestingly, I still read quite a few books, but rarely prove anything mathematically. I do still help kids with math, however, and I love mathematical and logic puzzles, as well as, reading Clifford Pickover and Martin Gardner. I have to add that without the math degree, I would never have worked at NBS and learned to program computers. Who would have thought in 1958 that the first home computer I had would be as powerful as the one I used to program a gigantic book of Microwave Spectral Tables and other scientific endeavors such as the velocity of light as determined by several experimental setups.