i-eclectica.org

Wow, I just came across a blog by Keri Smith, author, illustrator, guerilla artist … a space I need to explore more. That little blurb below totally touches my soul, like being tailor-made. When practiced, it sharpens the eclectic outlook on life while allowing to fall deeper, towards the root tips of things … quite beautiful and very sensitive …

I only had heard of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in the context of the so-called DARPA Urban Challenge, which was to build an autonomous vehicle capable of negotiating an urban environment without human intervention. I thought already that that was a pretty crazy and dangerous project, but these guys are much worse - just check out the link after reading below … as for the rest of this article - it comes via Engadget:

Well this is just great. One of our few remaining advantages over the robots who wish to enslave us — the ability to run away and cower in an inaccessible location — may soon be gone forever, if DARPA’s bid for softball-sized, morphing ‘ChemBots’ proves successful. The government’s mad scientist wing wants proposals for a soft, flexible bot that is able to collapse down to a tenth of its original size, crawl through a one centimeter opening at a quarter of a meter per hour, and bulk back up to its original size in under 15 seconds. Think you’re up for the challenge? White papers are due on May 3rd of this year, and since liquid metal robots won’t be feasible until about the year 2029, interested parties better get cracking.

Via UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering …

San Diego, CA, March 29, 2007 — A Google image search for “tiger” yields many tiger photos – but also returns images of a tiger pear cactus stuck in a tire, a race car, Tiger Woods, the boxer Dick Tiger, Antarctica, and many others. Why? Today’s large Internet search engines look for images using captions or other text linked to images rather than looking at what is actually in the picture. Electrical engineers from UC San Diego are making progress on a different kind of image search engine – one that analyzes the images themselves. This approach may be folded into next-generation image search engines for the Internet; and in the shorter term, could be used to annotate and search commercial and private image collections.At the core of this Supervised Multiclass Labeling (SML) system is a set of simple yet powerful algorithms developed at UCSD. Once you train the system, you can set it loose on a database of unlabeled images. The system calculates the probability that various objects or “classes” it has been trained to recognize are present – and labels the images accordingly. After labeling, images can be retrieved via keyword searches. Accuracy of the UCSD system has outpaced that of other content-based image labeling and retrieval systems in the literature. The SML system also splits up images based on content – the historically difficult task of image segmentation. For example, the system can separate a landscape photo into mountain, sky and lake regions.

Here are a couple of examples for how how effective the new search engine can be. Asking for ‘blooms’ the system returned the following results:

Asking for ‘mountains’, these results were returned:

Since I am using a lot of images in my blog, I am certainly looking forward to this new technology being applied - it looks like it’ll make blogging much easier .

I was always wondering about the differences, but never checked it out. Today’s Highlights from Answers.com did indeed have the answer. Monkeys have tails while the ape families (chimps, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons) don’t. Apes, having a different shoulder bone structure compared to monkeys, can swing from branch to branch, while monkeys run instead along the top of branches. finally, of course, apes resemble humans more than monkeys do.

This is a piece of software that will live on my new Apple laptop, once Leopard will see the light of the consumer market (it looks more and more like it’ll be June):

• Inquisitor… it’s like Spotlight for the web.
• Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with ideas to refine a search.
• It’ll auto-complete words and one can add more search engines to Safari with customised keyboard shortcuts.
• Oh, and it’s free.

3.0 (v41) Donations appreciated!