The first step is acknowledging you have a problem… so like any good engineer, I like to measure things before I try to change them.
Hence, my joining the bookworms over at goodreads.com. Here is my profile, with a list of the books I’ve read, am reading and would like to read.
Should help when making recommendations to friends, or looking for inspiration for the next purchase.
This is the ultimate expression of something I’ve always been fascinated about… the ability to create a 3D space from pictures. It used to be necessary to have multiple images, detect common points and then analyze the respective positions in the multiple images to determine where they were positioned in space.
Well, we humans don’t need that. We can make a pretty good guess where stuff in space from a single, flat image… based on shading, etc. Now, so can computers: http://make3d.stanford.edu/
That is the best example to date, to my mind, of Ray Kurzweil’s definition of narrow AI… and how it gets less and less narrow all the time! We are now able to program software which can functionally mimic some pretty sophisticated parts of our visual cortex, and it’s a form of emergent understanding of the world around that software, in the sense that it creates a ‘mental’ model of that world organically.
Splurged on some wild-caught pacific salmon for saturday’s dinner. Cooked it on the griddle, starting it on the gas range to get the cast iron nice and hot before laying down the fillet skin-side down, and finished it in a 350F oven, dialed down to 200F as soon as the fish was inside. Gets it up to temperature fast, developing that crisp crust but the low ending temp prevents overshooting and dry, over-cooked flesh in the thinner bits.
It’s done as soon as the flesh is no longer translucent.
For sunday’s dinner, we also splurged, on some dry-aged beef. I had a porterhouse while the Princess had a NY strip steak. Same basic technique, but left the oven at 350F the entire time and seared it on both sides before the oven.
Accompanied it with some salad and couscous, home-made fennel-seed and parmigiano biscotti and some Napa Valley Syrah.
The Princess was so inspired, she whipped up some Bananas Foster’s for desert and well, sometimes life is tough.
Latest meme: Books that have made you dumb, by Virgil Griffith.
Couldn’t resist adding checkmarks for the books that I have read, in this insidious list. Below, the results:
Well, just when you neglect your blog and friends start noticing… you get a mention, and a link, in Make Magazine’s blog, for this:
Ok, so perhaps I should recap what happened the last two months and start posting more regular-like.
The short of it is, I went to spend the New Year with my family in Cambodia and Bangkok (as most of you know, my brother lives in Bangkok), and took a side trip to Hong Kong and Macau. Also had a couple business trips to London and DC… Bought some cool gadgets but haven’t really had time for making anything or voiding any warranties. January is always crazy busy in the consulting trade.
I’ll have more stuff to talk about soon, I promise… and I need to post the pictures from Asia to my flickr feed.
In the mean time, I will bask in the glow of that Make Magazine mention…
