Hollywood here we come

The KALVEET software is a project to use Microsoft Kinect hardware and software to capture sign language, eventually in most of the 130 known signing languages; transform the gestures to text; and speak the text in a language the receptive-enabled listener can comprehend as well as to translate vocal expressions from that listener into text and thence into a video clip of sign language configurations the user can understand. We had intended the software be useful not just for people with deafness or hearing challenges, but also for a diverse spectrum of people with expressive language disabilities such as autism, ALS and Alzheimers.

About thirty screenshots from an 18 hour burst of coding frenzy were available to make a movie. Initially, we wound up with a 122 megabyte avi file which was unloadable – at least by FileZilla’s ftp function. Eventually, using an elderly copy of Microsoft MovieMaker on a single core Vista machine, we obtained a file under five (5) megabytes in size – including a sound track which was the opening few minutes of Beehoven’s Eroica symphony. Go to www.imagsts.com click Products and then click Kalveet. Click the Business Plan link and (finally) the movie link. We’ll post a tinyURL next entry. 

 

 

California High Sped Rail Project

After being progressively dismayed by the CHSRP’s choices of routes, modes and timing, we were quite disappointed to see that perhaps as much as three million dollars was borrowed, for lack of a better term, to try and lobby legislators in Sacramento. All our numbers say (and have said for a very long time) what is needed are mixed mode (freight and passenger) trains travelling at better than 300 miles per hour and avoiding cities. At this point, neither California nor the United States can afford to build a high speed rail network with accompanying suburbs – hypermodern super-urban areas. Yet it is not possible, if there is to be an economic recovery, not to build. The answer to this paradox is to be part of a series of joint ventures that connect Japan, perhaps by a link from Busan in southern Korea, up to the Russian border; across the Bering Straits and eventually down to Belize. And with three main east-west trunks to Boston, Baltimore and Boca Raton.

Refined numbers

Debate rages here at the Phobos-Grunt Death Watch. Will any of the toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fuel mix survive re-entry? It seems unlikely as the tanks are supposedly aluminum instead of titanium. In contrast, what might be described as the nose was designed to get to Phobos, land, obtain samples, relaunch (no big deal – no atmosphere there), transport the rocks back to Earth, slash through our atmosphere and make a parachute-free landing.

It is not obvious what might happen to the Chinese Yinghou1

Back on November 11 the prediction as Phobos-Grunt would crash around December 3 per David Warmflash and others on Space.com. Currently, the betting is that Phobos-Grunt will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on Jan. 9, 2012, but at present, the forecast includes an uncertainty of plus or minus 5.5 days. Some of my gloomier colleague are wagering January 1 or 2.

 

Numbers

Fans of space exploration are a bit taken aback by not only the Russian Phobos probe’s failure to get out of Earth orbit (outward bound) but its looming failure to stay in Earth orbit. The Roscosmos folks are currently saying no one should worry about the estimated 20 to 30 pieces weighing a total of 200 kg falling somewhere populated. That’s good, assuming the other FOURTEEN tons of material burns up. Also we are not to worry about any of the toxic fuel (80+% of the mass) or the especially radioactive fuel which is 10 kg of Cobalt 57 (half life 271 days). 

We quants especially admire the following statement which I deem worthy of RIM management 

Phobos-Ground spacecraft will plummet to Earth between Jan. 6 and Jan. 19, and the rough area of where the fragments could fall can only be calculated a few days ahead of its plunge. The official limits for the probe’s fragments are between 51.4 degrees north to 51.4 degrees south. Note the point 4.  

Gauss became quite famous for accurately calculating by hand where and when the newly discovered asteroid Ceres would re-emerge from behind the Sun based on a few observations. That was 200 years ago. We have computers, tens of thousands of absurdly accurate positional measurements, absolute knowledge of the PG’s mass … 

Beware the Bering Sea

Some Kamchatka geology (almost 15,000 seismic events in the last 40 years and plenty of active volcanoes) as well as Alaskan archaeology featuring a WWII naval battle; a P3 Orion plane crash where ten of the fifteen aircrew were rescued by a Russian fishing trawler (meriting a book in English and a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko);  and a mysterious bronze belt buckle starting at www.imagsts.com/AlaskaIce10.html. It would be discouraging to find the buckle was swept there by some tsunami.  

And some years ago, since we couldn’t run a maglev to Cyprus, Mark Saito Sr. and I had rather laboriously tried to predict methane deposits based on seismic data. For a brief summary of our out-reach to politicians in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus see www.imagsts.com/Cyprus2011.html. It certainly seems like sharing that money would look pretty good to Greeks right now.

Alaska pack ice and a parallel programming problem

Trouble ahead

What looks to be the most powerful storm in the last 35 years is bearing down on the Bering Strait School District. A correspondent asked us what effect pack ice has on suppressing or limiting the damage a tsunami (or a storm surge) will do. To my considerable surprise, performance monitoring of the calculations turned up an anomaly – on a quad core with hyperthreading it does not help throughput time to spin up 5 or more threads. More at www.imagsts.com/AlaskaIce.html

Chess, life, sacrifices and floods

New material on educational achievement badges (click Badges), an early chess game of Emanuel Lasker (click Lasker) and Bangkok seismo-hydrology (click Thailand) at www.imagsts.com

 

Coming soon: some comments on the latest California High-Speed Rail proposal.

Archaeological Chess 9

Instead, Menas played Qh8.

Black has virtually no choice – he plays pawn to h1 = Queen (or Rook). White must capture the Black Queen with his queen at h8. Black has no (zero) moves, so it is a draw. Alas, in real life, no matter how many knights (teachers) and pawns (children) one sacrifices, there is no stalemate when it comes to economic recovery and salvaging America’s educational infrastructure.

Plays

 

Archaeological Chess 8

White accepts the sacrifice and Black plays pawn to h2. This position has been given as a puzzle: White to play and win. 

Give up?

White must play Q takes pawn at f4 with check. If King takes Queen, WHite plays K to g2 and wins. If the King goes to h3, then Q takes pawn and wins.

 

Archaeological Chess 7

 

The tournament cross-table from Bucharest