a priest, a rabbi, and a bodhisattva walk into a bar

As of yesterday afternoon I am now one of those guys who owns computers running all three of the major operating systems currently used in the US - Windows XP, Mac OSX, and Ubuntu. Of course this realization also brought me to realize that I actually own at least 3 computers.

The actual number is 5. I own 5 computers.

One of those is actually over 5 years old and is currently collecting dust, unused for a lack of a monitor. I've thought about donating it, but that would involve wiping the hard-drive and I can't trust any open-source software to do that job thoroughly enough. So since I don't own an industrial strength magnet, and most donation services would not likely accept a computer sans hard-disk, this old pc is just sitting there, collecting dust.

Then, there's a really old laptop that's actually not mine, but my wife's. That one actually is a bit newer than the other desktop, but because it's a laptop, it has less speedy components. It's still working but I'm thinking about installing some really low-intensity linux distro so we can get a few more years' use out of it.

Then, there are the three which are currently in the greatest use, which make up the OS triumvirate previously discussed.

So I own 5 computers... Actually, 6, if you count my playstation. If that's not a mark of privilege, I don't know what is.

lip reading

Some researchers at the University of East Anglia are hoping to create a 'lip reading' machine -- in essance: a computer which uses only video of a person's face, as she is talking, to decipher what is being said.

First off - lip reading is, at best, unreliable. This is because the vast majority of contrastive sounds are not visible (or barely visible) at the lips (or the front of the oral cavity). For example: to the average speaker of American-English, the words "do" and "to/two/too" look almost identical to each other when being pronounced. This is because the major difference between them is whether the vocal folds are vibrating during the pronunciation of the first consonant. However, the way the lips are shaped during the pronunciation of these words varies a lot, as it is dependent on the words preceding and following. This is basically because of the grammatical function and the shortness of these words.

Furthermore - even tiny visible differences which you might expect can differ drastically from speaker to speaker. It is surprisingly common, for example, for young American-English speakers of certain regions to pronounce some 'l' sounds with the tongue placed prominently between the teeth. This could actually help lip readers, but because it is not applicable to all speakers, it is not something a computer will be able to apply all that well.

There are many more reasons why lip reading is difficult, and why no one can lipread as reliably as a hearing individual can hear. In a paper linked to the bottom of this article, it seems that the researchers have some understanding of these problems. However, they still think they can overcome them.

Presumably, the researchers are motivated by the fact that there exist a few people who have become quite good at lip reading. But here is the real kicker - the way that those people become good is that they use cues from syntax and semantics to make good educated guesses about what the words might be.

For example the following two sentences (when I pronounce them) look identical at the lips:
I tread the path to success
I dread the path to success

If I'm having a conversation with an expert lip reader, she will use many non-lip cues to figure out which of these sentences I've said: cues like what kind of person I am, or what my previous sentence meant, or what our conversation has been about.

So, for example, if I had said "I want to be successful but I [d/t]read the path to success" then one of those words is going to make a lot more sense than the other. As far as I know, no English parsing software exists which can reliably use such semantic cues to help make sense of a sentence.

Good Luck, British researchers...

Taking over the world, one IP address at a time

Using this nifty webpage here I discovered today that the University I attend has a huge stake in the internet as far as IP addresses go. I wonder what the story behind that is.

Japanese innovation will never cease to impress me

Why can't American corporations invent something as cool as beta gel. This gel is such an amazing shock absorber that you can drop an egg on it from 22m high, heck, you can even throw an egg at it from up close, and the egg will not break. Watch it in action:



So why aren't American corporations inventing these things? Because they're busy funding creation museums and designing the next best war machine (saw this two mornings ago on the local channel 8 morning news show). Who's got the money to R&D these frivolous toys? (That's right, I verbed R&D)

Global, human-induced climate change

Of course, the main problem with his argument is that we can choose column A, but we might already be too late, in which case we'll still get the horrible outcome of row2colB. But if we add column C, which is a contingency plan for when the earth turns to shit (such as building hydroponic food towers, elimination of all WMDs, cure for AIDS, increase to stem cell research funding) then we can get benefits either way while diminishing the negative outcomes of the worst case scenario.


Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Watch more free videos

Speaking of Linux

If I had a child, I would want it to have its own computer by the time it was 5. I would want that computer to run Linux. People have tried this and it seems to have worked. But I don't think they were concerned with internet safety. I don't think I would have to police a 16 year old's internet access, but I sure as heck wouldn't want my 5 year old accidentally or purposefully stumbling into one of those awful awful sex sites! Awful!

What kind of open source 'net-nanny' program is available for a linux-based OS? I think the answer is -none- and that's a shame. I believe the whole open-source movement would benefit from getting these kids young.