Smart Shoes on KPCC's AirTalk

I was a guest on KPCC's AirTalk program, hosted by Larry Mantle. I was speaking on wearable technologies, such as smart shoes. The other guest was Peter Rubin, from Wired Magazine. You can hear the segment here.  This was my first experience being on live radio.

ARL West Video

I am part of a video showcasing the Army Research Lab West as one of their collaborators.

It is an honor be part of a video that includes Nobel Prize winner Francis Arnold at Caltech, my colleagues at USC, and other researchers at UCSB, UCR. There is nice footage of low cost VR displays and other VR systems developed in my lab.

The Untempered Schism

I recently visited Caltech, where I earned my undergraduate degree. I met old friends and caught up on the stories of old classmates. The challenges of a Caltech education and its lifelong impact on students made me think of a cute analogy with characters and events of the long running science fiction television series Doctor Who.

Doctor Who relates the adventures of the Doctor, an alien who wanders through space and time, thwarting the bad guys and helping those in need. He is of an ancient race of time travelers. One of their customs is to select their best and brightest children to gaze upon the Untempered Schism, a rift in space and time, exposing the children to the wonders and dangers of the Universe.

Caltech is a bit like the Untempered Schism, with students exposed to a firehose of information in Freshman Physics, Math, and Chemistry courses. I put together some images of Professor Richard Feynman, a long time Caltech scientist, lecturing on Physics, with a quote from the Doctor about the Untempered Schism.

Click to see larger images. Yes, the images are a little tongue in cheek.

I unfortunately never met Professor Feynman. He had passed away a few years before I came to Caltech. However, he is an icon of Physics and Physics instruction at Caltech to this day.

Tiled Displays

This is more of a historical footnote, rather than a new development.

A few years ago, in 2006, I worked with an intern from Virginia Tech who built a small cluster of tiled displays for me. There were four Linux machines networked together. One was the master machine, and the remaining three machines  each drove two displays. I recall that it used Chromium, the networked OpenGL implementation.

This was pretty scalable, so additional machines and monitors could be tiled together. We could have built a huge visualization wall with some more investment. I recall encouraging some folks to use it for large circuit designs as well as visualizations of combustion simulations.

The other cool thing I remember was that you could remote desktop into another Windows box from the cluster, which gave you a truly huge Windows desktop. Applications like Google Maps gave a significantly different experience. You could not take in the whole display. Your eyes and your head moved around as you scanned and focused on different details. It is hard to describe how qualitatively and quantitatively a different experience this was to me.

Today, displays cost even less. There are high resolution displays, like the retina displays from Apple, and graphics horsepower is significantly better. Studies have shown that more computer display space helps make users more effective. I think that many power users opt for two or more large displays for their machines.

This tiled display was still super cool and useful. It is easier than ever to attach a lot of pixels to your computer. I don't think you even need Chromium so much anymore. So just do it!

Long Exposure Photography

On a recent trip to Catalina Island, I brought a Canon camera that I had prepared with alternative firmware from the CHDK project. This firmware opens up more of the capabilities of the firmware such as saving pictures in the RAW image format, scripting, and very long exposures. It only supports certain Canon cameras.

Using a small tripod and long exposures of about 2 minutes, I captured the following images of the night sky. This was a first time experiment, but the results were very interesting.

The red streak in the lower right is the tail light of a passing car. The dotted line through the center of the image is likely a passing airplane.

To the naked eye, the trees and bushes were very dimly lit. The hills were black.

You can definitely see some structure of the Milky Way.

In these images, you can see the stars are elongated, showing the earth's movement over the exposure time.

The building lights cast an interesting glow.

Halloween Pumpkins

I'm not carving a pumpkin this year. However, I did do some carving last year and in 2009. The Hello Kitty is a basically a relief carving.

 My 2011 Hello Kitty Pumpkin

My 2011 Hello Kitty Pumpkin

My 2011 Hello Kitty Pumpkin

 My 2009 Toothy Pumpkin

My 2009 Toothy Pumpkin

I used a paring knife, a Leatherman Micra, and an XActo knife. I'm thinking about upgrading to clay sculpting loops in the future. I usually do some internet searching for inspiration and my 2009 pumpkin is an "homage" to another pumpkin.

I won some movie tickets for the Hello Kitty pumpkin from my workplace. However, there was only one other entry in the pumpkin carving contest that year.

That'll do shuttle, that'll do.

The shuttle Endeavour passed over California today. It landed at LAX and will begin a slow journey to her final retirement at the California Science Center.

That'll do shuttle, that'll do.