Photo Enhancements

Photo enhancement through technology.

His website is Stuck In Customs

Nam-A-Rama

Nam-A-Rama by Phillip Jennings
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Hill Air E Us. I brought this book to the beach not realizing it was a satire. The sting of his humor is directed not at the War or the soldier, rather the establishment. The writing is similar to Catch-22 and the lampoons are both sharp and subtle. It was a little embarrassing to find myself sitting on the beach and laughing out loud to no one in particular.

The author was a marine in Vietnam, so he is quite detailed in the events and culture of the time. As a side note, I found out later that he also wrote a serious book on the entire history of the war in Vietnam. He appears to research the subject well and brought to light many ideas and insights I had never heard before.

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Prediction

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins offers that the mind is a prediction machine.  We predict.  We predict more than you may think.  

Bayes' Theorem is Nate Silver's key to managing predictions.

Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio talks about how homeostasis comes about and how predictions are essential.  The brain began to predict "good" by sensing the molecules like dopamine or oxytocin.  

Three very enlightening and enjoyable books

Twitter:
@numenta Jeff Hawkins of Numenta
Nate Silver @fivethirtyeight
Antonio Damasio

Man Vs Machine

"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."
  -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In the 1870's the legendary steel driver, John Henry, took on the machine in the form of a steam powered hammer.  He won, but at what cost.  Fast forward to the late 1990's where one Grand Master of Chess, Gary Kasparov takes on the culmination of hundreds of thousands of man hours in brain power are compressed into a single machine -- IBM's Deep Blue.

IBM's Deep Blue defeats Chess Champion Gary Kasparov.  Nate Silver has a wonderful discussion of the match in his book, The Signal and the Noise.  What do intelligent men do well, what do computers do well, where is one better than the other.

Brute force it what the computer does better than any man, yet is that enough to win at chess.  Yet, as pointed out in Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, the Chess Master isn't better at memorizing the individual pieces on a board, the Chess Master is memorized a huge collection of patterns.  And he know the significance of each pattern.

Twitter: Joshua Foer @joshuafoer Nate Silver @fivethirtyeight

Technology and Manufacturing

Bob Dylan thought "Times, they are a changing" back in the 60's.  If he were alive today, what would he think about the robotic technology in today's manufacturing.  Okay, so he is alive, but that's not the point.

Phrases like "3D Printing" are all the buzz now.   WorldSkills International hosts an Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies  contest to highlight the State-of-the-Arts in this field.

For an in-depth look, catch Russ Robert's interview with former Editor of Wired and current CEO of DIY Drones, Chris Anderson, on Makers and Manufacturing.

Twitter: Chris Anderson @chr1sa Russ Roberts @EconTalker World Skills @WorldSkills 

Golf Simulators

For the price, the OptiShot by Dancin' Dogg appears to be the best quality simulator with budget pricing.  Would be curious to hear if anyone has actually used the OptiShot or other golf simulators.  The demo below looks interesting.  

Reviews of the OptiShot appear positive in general:

• The Hacker's Paradise by Josh Babbitt
• Golf Link's Top 3

Retailers online seem to have a similar pricing:

•  Dancin' Dogg Golf Simulator on Amazon.
• In The Hole Golf
• D.W.Quail Golf

YQL for Web Data

The web is your own personal database.  All the information is out there, you simply need an efficient way to access it.  YQL is the Yahoo Query Language and goes a long way toward bring your data directly to you in a well structured format.

So how do you get started in YQL and do you need to be a programmer?  Let's start here: try grabbing some stock quotes.  Sure, it looks a little imposing with angle brackets and keyword tags, but play around with it -- test it, give it a go.

Yes, the data is out there and someone might already have your data in a YQL table -- check it out.

The old way of downloading web information used what is called a screen scrapper or some other form of parsing the HTML from a web page.  The problem here, if the web page changes, the data access is broken.  Or you could grab a spreadsheet like format, like the Yahoo stock quotes in CSV format and use a programming environment like the Windows .NET framework to parse the data in a proprietary fashion.

Now you can get the stock data using a standard YQL approach.

Other sources of information:

• Gurchet-rai.net
• YQL on StackOverflow
• Andy Edinborough's Post
• Jarloo here and here.
• And the old way on CodeProject.