(parenting) Bite-sized math/sci lessons for 6! yr-olds (12-27)

Hello -

More ideas on little 5-minute lessons after storytime. I received lots of great feedback and encouragement here and on Facebook - thanks! In continuation of the previous post, here goes!  (Toby turned 6, so now this is "for 6 yr olds.")

Lesson 12: Review of addition
Do some addition of 1-, 2-, and 3-digit numbers, with or without carrying.

Lesson 13: What's inside?
Draw a cross-section of some common mechanical device, like a ballpoint pen. Your child might want to draw it, too.

Lesson 14: Vectors
(I don't know what I was thinking here, but it worked out okay.) If you know what vectors are already this will be really simple:

• A "vector" is an arrow that you draw. Its length and direction are important.
• Length: draw a small vector and a long vector pointing in the same direction
• Direction: draw two vectors of the same length, pointing in different directions
• Show how to ADD vectors (put the tail of the second vector at the head of the first, and...)

Lesson 15: Some Angles

Show him or her what an angle is. I did it by drawing a series of increasing angles, e.g. 30, 50, 90, 95, 120, 175... And for fun, 1 degree.

• 90 degrees has a special name
• Draw a protractor and label some angles, make tick marks every 10 degrees

Lesson 16: Types of 4-sided shapes

I think this one might've been a bit much.

• Make a table of 4 columns: {angle, lengths of sides, name, picture}
• We had rows that ended up like this. I know, I know, I could have done this a lot better, but at sleepytime this was the best we could do:
• 90 degrees; 2 short, 2 longer, or all the same, "rectangle," picture
• 90 degrees; all the same; "square," picture
• parallelogram (oh, my, what's parallel?)
• ...trapezoid

I convinced myself that for a kindergartener maybe it's sufficient for them to realize that plenty of different shape-types have 4 straight sides.

Lesson 17: Parallel

Two lines are parallel if they never touch if continued forever

I still like the "near-miss" method of teaching, so I drew a bunch of parallel lines and then a bunch of "not parallel" lines.

Lesson 18: Beginner's fractions

We draw a bunch of pies with 2, 3, 4, and 5 pieces. We colored in 1 or more pieces of each. We labelled them with words and numbers, e.g.:

• half  1/2
• third  1/3
• two thirds  2/3

Lessons 19, 20, 21: Smart people telling us interesting things

I punted and relied on YouTube one evening:

• Vi Hart on drawing squiggles
• Kahn Academy on the scale of the solar system (the goal being that the spacing of the planets is much more vast than how they usually appear in children's books)
• Feynman on beauty

Lesson 22: Math - Parentheses

Show them that putting parentheses around parts of an expression tell you to calculate the stuff in the parentheses first.

First, I showed that sometimes, the order of evaluation matters.

• An example where it doesn't matter:
• 1 + 2 + 3 = ?
• 1 + 5 = 6
• (or, 3 + 3 = 6)
• An example where it does matter:
• 1 + 2 x 3 = ?
• If you do "1 + 2" first, you get: 3 x 3 = 6
• If you do "2 x 3" first, you get: 1 + 6 = 7

Oh my goodness! Luckily, people agree that you should do things in this order: PEMDAS (etc etc).

So you don't need parentheses for: 1 + 2 x 3 if you mean 1 + (2 x 3)

But you do need them if you meant: (1 + 2) x 3

Lesson 23: "Topology"

I recall my father or grandfather teaching me this when I was about 5, sitting on the bed, wondering how on earth "a donut is the same as a coffee cup." I figured it was time to teach Toby.

• Let's play a game with pretend Silly Putty. You can smoosh the Silly Putty all you want, but there are two rules: you can't make new holes, and you can't seal any holes up.
• (0 holes) A blob "is" a snake "is" an egg
• (1 hole) A donut is a coffee cup
• (2 holes) Um.... I don't know. A pair of eyeglasses is... ummm... we gave up.

Lesson 24: Simple electrical circuit

Show them the schematic symbols for: wire, battery, light, and switch.

Draw the circuit that connects them together. Explain closed and open circuits.

Let them draw it too.

Consider showing them what series and parallel mean.

Lesson 25: Subtracting big numbers (without borrowing)

Y'know, 875 - 321, 9748 - 1211, etc. Then they do a couple.

Lesson 26: Subtracting big numbers (with borrowing)

E.g., 21 - 15, 46 - 37, 52 - 16, 32 - 15.

Some get weird, like 80-79, because they'll want to do 7-7 in the tens column and get 0 but you don't write that down.

Lesson 27: Drawing a cube

Show them how to draw a wireframe cube.

Show them how to draw a solid cube, and put the sun up in the background, and show them how to shade it. Let them try too.

Enjoy!  As always, your feedback is invited.

g-fav

(parenting) Bite-sized math/sci lessons for 5 yr olds: # 1-11

Hi,

For the last few weeks, every other night, our 5 yr-old and I do a couple of bite-sized "lessons" about ideas in math or science. They take us about 3 minutes each, and are fun. He's come to ask, "is tonight lesson night?" Since he's getting a kick out of it, I'll post our first 11 lessons in case your'e looking for ideas of doing the same.

I hope our five year old won't mind that I'm putting this online, forever in Google's memory banks...

Preliminary: We reserve a special 6" x 9" spiral-bound notebook for these, and we dutifully label the top of each page with the lesson number and name. (Honest, this is part of the fun.) We assume you already are doing stuff like multiplication of single-digit numbers, and have watched some sciencey stuff like They Might Be Giants's DVDs about atoms and DNA and things.

Lesson 1: length, area, volume

• Draw three short lines: 1 inch, 2 inches, 3 inches, ticking off the inches. Draw another line. How long is it?
• Draw rectangles composed of many 1 x 1 squares. How many squares is each rectangle? What if you multiply the length of one side by the length of the other side?
• Write "one-dimensional" by length, and "two-dimensional" by area. Write "three-dimensional." Can you guess what that is? Draw a cube of cubes, etc.

Lesson 2: adding bigger numbers

• Add two two-digit numbers, in which carrying is never needed. (E.g., 23 + 34, added vertically.) Your child does some in their own handwriting.

Lesson 3: adding big numbers with carrying

• E.g., 78+94 = ... (but do it vertically of course)

Lesson 4: "place value"

• My wife had already shown him this Kahn Academy video: http://www.khanacademy.org/math/arithmetic/multiplication-division/v/place-value-1
• Pick a quick example, e.g. 9654, and label the places (ones, tens, ...)

Lesson 5a: Perpendicular

• Two lines that make a "T" shape are perpendicular. I like the near-miss form of learning: draw a couple of examples of perpendicular lines, and then provide counterexamples, saying "these are NOT perpendicular lines."
• Draw a line, and put a dot along it, and ask your child, "draw the perpendicular line that starts here."
• Try to teach the notion of angle. If the lines are perpendicular, the angles are the same on either side of the perpendicular line. The lines are not perpendicular, one angle will be larger than the other.

Lesson 5b: how to know where a laser beam would go if it hits a plane (flat) mirror

• My son likes lasers, and kids hear about them in movies like Toy Story, so...
• Draw a line segment, with hashmarks on one side to indicate it's the cross-section of a mirror. like this, but without the Thetas. ("normal" is just the physics word for "perpendicular, but in any number of dimensions")

(picture from this site)

• Draw the laser beam coming in
• Draw the dotted perpendicular line where the laser hits the mirror
• Draw the reflected laser beam, such that its angle with respect to the perpendicular line is the same as the incoming beam's angle to the perpendicular line
• Do a few examples, letting him or her draw the lines and arrows and neat stuff like that

Lesson 6: half

• Draw a line. Where's half?
• Write a number, like 10. What's half?

Lesson 7: Number patterns

This was kind of a long one, which I used just to let some words of math wash over him. I don't know how to do subscript in Blogger, so I'll use brackets.

• "What numbers come next in the pattern?" 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ?
• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... ?
• 0, 2, 4, 6, ... ?
• 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... (talk them through this) - and tell them about sunflowers, etc
• 1, 3, 5, 7, ...?
• Now explain that people who really like math have a secret key that lets them describe these patterns with just a few little special marks on their paper. First, let's give these numbers special names. Let's call the number we're interested in x[n] ("x sub n"). That's the number we're trying to figure out. Let's call the guy before it x[n-1] ("x sub n minus 1"). That's the guy right before it. And what might we call the number before THAT? (... x[n-2] )
• Here's the magic way that we can re-write these
• x[n] = 0 is shorthand for the pattern {0, 0, 0, ...}
• x[n] = x[n-1] + 1 is shorthand for how we count! {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...} (I didn't bother saying that you also need a rule defining the starting point, I figured it's overkill.)
• x[n] = x[n-1] +2 is the magic key for things like odd or even: {1, 3, 5, 7, ...}
• And that weird last pattern, the Fibonacci guy, his pattern is: x[n] = x[n-1] + x[n-2]

BONUS: Vi Hart did a few YouTube videos doodling about Fibonacci numbers, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

Lesson 8: shape pattern

This is why we asked "What's half?"

• Draw a Sierpinski triangle, or whatever the right name of it is. Draw a triangle. Put a dot at the halfway point of each side. Connect the sides to draw a new triangle inside. Put a dot at all 9 new halfway points. Draw 3 triangles. And so on. FOR-EV-ER!

Lesson 9: "Daddy's Square"

I don't know the name for this. Basically you draw an inward-spiraling square, in which the corners are a little less than 90 degrees. Like the last two figures here.

Lesson 10a: heat

• (Assumes you've already chatted about atoms and molecules.)
• Draw a little cartoon of ICE (ice cube) --> WATER (water in glass) --> STEAM (steamy lines) --> PLASMA (electrons and nuclei floating around)
• Heat is a kind of energy. When stuff heats up, the atoms and molecules inside jiggle around more and more. So the ice melts, becomes water, becomes steam, eventually the electrons tear off, etc etc. I like presenting it this way, around 4:30 [YouTube, Feynman].

Lesson 10b: Important Temperatures

• In America we have a weird way of telling the number of how hot or cold something is. It's called degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the rest of the world calls it something different. Like, here we use inches or miles, and over there they use centimeters and kilometers.
• Draw a number line with two ticks on it. The first third is called "ice," the second is "water," and the rightmost third is called "steam." Tick one is 32 (deg) F, and then 212 (deg) F.
• Talk about this. Have them recite, "ice becomes water at 32 degrees Fahrenheit." I know it might feel rote to rehearse it this way, but really, I think that is the most sensible thing.
• Still awake? Then say, remember how the rest of the world has an easier way of thinking about it? They call their way degrees Celsius, and the numbers are 0 and 100.
• There's actually a number way... over... there... (to the left) where if we ever got all the way over, those jiggling atoms would stop. But you can't ever get that far. You can get really close, very very close, but never all the way (etc). This is absolute zero.

Lesson 11: gears

• Draw two enmeshed gears
• If this one goes this way, which way does the other one spin?
• Say this has 10 teeth and the other has 20 teeth. If you spin the big one once, how many times does the little one spin?
• What if it's 10 and 30?
• What if it's 5 and 10?
• Why is this useful? Well, you know how your bike has gears here and here...?

I'd love to hear your informal bedtime lessons if you got 'em. Share! (And if you want a next installment of this, encourage me in the comments.)

G-Fav

ps BONUS: Cosmos is available on Netflix Instant. I've been really shocked at how much of Sagan's teachings stick with our kids. There's evidently a lot of "see that snow? it's from the STARS!" talk, lately.

360-degree above-table (or “Deathstar”) displays

Group discussion and collaboration would be enhanced by 3-D displays that produce imagery appearing to hover above, say, a tabletop. Visible 360° around the device, the imagery would occupy the volume straddling the flat surface of the table – appearing just slightly above, and quite a bit beneath.

From StarWarsWikia.org (Ep. IV)

At Actuality, we jokingly called these contraptions “Deathstar Displays,” after the Star Wars movies depicting hologram-ish imagery of the Deathstar for battle planning. More seriously, I dubbed them Theta Parallax Only (TPO) displays, as opposed to horizontal parallax only (HPO) displays, because the perspective changes as your angle (theta) to some vertical reference plane changes.

(New to 3-D? Mike Halle’s “Autostereoscopic Displays and Computer Graphics” wonderfully explains the physical limitations of where the imagery can appear to be before incurring window violations.)

Who’s working on this stuff?

An early patent from Actuality

Well, yours truly and my former co-worker Ollie Cossairt invented a few schemes in which a high-frame-rate image source directs imagery to an optical element, spinning like a turntable, that redirects the frames in an angular sweep around the audience. The optical element could take various forms: an off-axis lens, a diffuser-louver “sandwich,” etc.

G. E. Favalora and O. S. Cossairt, “Theta-parallax-only (TPO) displays,” US Pat 7,364,300 (Provisional: Jan. 12, 2004), (Filing: Jan. 12, 2005), (Issue: Apr 29, 2008). [Google Patents]

Conceptual animation of US 7,364,300 (no longer owned by Optics for Hire)

One of the cross-sections shown in the patent is:

A number of researchers have been building TPO displays, primarily (to my knowledge) in Asia.

Takaki Lab (Tokyo Univ. of Agriculture and Technology)

The Takaki Lab has a heritage of producing many interesting 3-D displays. Recently, they demonstrated a multi-projector system that illuminates a rotating surface. I am having a little trouble determining when their research began. But a recent paper is:

Shigeki Uchida and Yasuhiro Takaki, “360-degree three-dimensional table-screen display using small array of high-speed projectors,” in Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XXIII, edited by Andrew J. Woods, Nicolas S. Holliman, Gregg E. Favalora, Proceedings of SPIE-IS&T Electronic Imaging, SPIE Vol. 8288, 82880D (2012); http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.909603

Regrettably I cannot find videos or images of their work on their fascinating Takaki Laboratory web page.

By the way, I recommend Dr. Takaki’s excellent presentation, “Next-generation and ultimate 3D display” (IMID 2010) [pdf].

HolyMine “Holo Table”

I don’t remember how I stumbled across this company:

HolyMine “Holo Table”–start at 1:16

NICT – Conical diffuser: “fVisiOn”

Here is a different approach, using a conical diffuser. This is Shunsuke Yoshida of NICT’s Universal Media Research Center. Here is a link to the English page, which links to a more frequently updated Japanese page.

Video of fVisiOn (technical explanation towards end)

The project page has a list of related publications toward the end.

Microsoft Research Cambridge – Vermeer

The Vermeer system is a bit different; it incorporates re-imaging optics, and can also behave in an interesting dual mode of image-capture:

Microsoft “Vermeer” 3-D display

Zhejiang University (China)

Several people at Zhejiang Univ. are pursuing 360-degree displays, including Xu Liu and Zheng Zhenrong.

Xinxing Xia, Caijie Yan, Zhenrong Zheng, Haifeng Li, and Xu Liu, “48.3: A Novel Touchable Floating Color Omnidirectional-view Three-dimensional Display,” SID Symposium Digest of Technical Papers, 42(1) 699-701 (June 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.1889/1.3621420

They have also built systems with “optics above the table,” i.e. similar in spirit to those from Actuality or USC:

Xinxing Xia, Zhenrong Zheng, Xu Liu, Haifeng Li, and Caijie Yan, “Omnidirectional-view three-dimensional display system based on cylindrical selective-diffusing screen,” Appl. Opt. 49, 4915-4920 (2010). http://mypage.zju.edu.cn/0099150/592595.html 

 

G-Fav

What I’d Like to Be Reading: w/o Mar 12, 2012

Reader -

From time to time, I’ll post “WILTBR” – sharing the things which I’ve either studied or marked as something valuable to read when I have the chance. “What I’d like to be reading".

I’ve followed various branches of computational photography and the light field literature for several years, but there are some fundamentals I hadn’t gotten into. There’s a bit of that this week, amongst:

M Grosse, G Wetzstein, A Grundhoefer, and O Bimber, “Coded Aperture Projection,” Transactions on Graphics 29:3 (June 2010) SIGGRAPH 2010. [pdf]

R Horstmeyer, S B Oh, and R Raskar, “View-dependent displays and the space of light fields,” arXiv:1008.0034v1 (“…how light propagates from thin elements into a volume for viewing…” I.e. parallax displays vs holographic displays)

and presumably relatedly:

S B Oh, G Barbastathis, and R Raskar, “Augmenting light field to model wave optics effects,” a work in progress (Apr 6, 2009) [pdf]

T Bishop, S Zanetti, and P Favaro, “Light field superresolution,” ICCP 2009. (can Lytro-like cameras produce imagery of higher resolution than they ought to?) [project]

The publications of Matthias Zwicker [list]

YouTube: “Adobe demos plenoptic lens tech with GPU power” [YouTube]

Doug Lanman suggested that I look at these, when I asked him which papers do a good job of explaining the mechanics of considering light transport in the light field math framework (e.g. "shear, propagate, shear…”)

F Durand, N Holzschuch, C Soler, E Chan, and F Sillion, “A frequency analysis of light transport,” SIGGRAPH 2005. [project]

C-K Liang, Y-C Shih, and H H Chen, “Light field analysis for modeling image formation,” IEEE Trans Image Proc 20(2) (Feb 2011) [pdf]

D Lanman – Ph.D. thesis, “Mask-based light field capture and display,” (2010) [pdf]

 

G-Fav

What I’m reading: 3-D, optics

Hello from Optics for Hire, where the topic of 3-D display has been coming up even more than usual. At the moment, the clouds over Arlington are trying to figure out how much snow to deposit on Mass Ave. Feels like the right mood to share a few of the things crossing my desk:

Good LinkedIn Groups for 3-D display:

• Non-Glasses 3D Display Technology is moderated by Thomas Edwards, the VP Engineering & Development at FOX Networks Group. It seems to have a higher % of technical “meat” than some of the other autostereo groups which tend to be more self-promotional (about spatially multiplexed displays).
• Stereoscopic Displays and Applications is affiliated with the SPIE-IS&T conference of the same name. But: discussions about more than the conference itself.

Recent obsession: I wonder to what extent autostereoscopic cinema is feasible in 2012. Will the technological enabler be a many-projector system like Holografika’s, a variant of a “specular” display [refs here], or the rebirth of mid-century techniques (doubt it)? My interest in this was recently rekindled by the movie Hugo’s depiction of Georges Melies building optical systems, filming entertaining content (movies!), and exhibiting them. Then again growing up in West Orange, NJ sort of primes one for that interest (T. A. Edison).

Speaking of autostereo cinema, I recommend the SD&A 2012 proceedings paper by Walter Funk. It’s available now through the SPIE Digital Library and has 80+ references. He discusses very early work, such as Maxwell’s real-image stereoscope, the Swan “Crystal Cube Miniatures,” and the development of parallax barrier and fly’s-eye lens arrays (Berthier, Jacobson, Ives, …). And that’s not all, page after page of references regarding the early days of autostereo cinema (1920s?), Noaillon’s work, theaters in France and the USSR.

Walter Funk, “History of autostereoscopic cinema,” Proc. SPIE 8288, 82880R (2012) – link.

New conference. The OSA is experimenting with a new conference format, called “incubators.” They hope to encourage frank and less-guarded discussion amongst peers and competitors in these meetings with an interesting format: several expert panel discussions followed by lengthy discussion periods (each attendee table has a high-quality microphone). Last week, in DC, was the 3D Display Technology, Perception and Application Incubator Meeting, chaired by Nasser Peyghambarain, Mike Bove, and Hong Hua. This was a lot of fun – heck, it was the first optics meeting witness to a brief shouting match. About holo-pixels!

What new things did I learn there?

• Henry Fuchs’s group made several random-hole autostereo displays (links, discussion)
• His group also determined that you can reduce inter-Kinect interference for multi-Kinect systems by placing mechanical vibrators on each. That way, the only in-focus pattern seen by a Kinect is its own. The others are blurred.
• Several folks are pursuing 360-degree tabletop displays. At Actuality we called these “theta-parallax-only” displays, or more jokingly, “Death Star displays.” E.g., Zheng Zhenrong of Zhejiang University (P.R. China) built a system reminiscent of this.
• The MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture Group, led by Ramesh Raskar, continues to innovate “computational displays,” such as their HR3D, Layered 3D, and Polarization Field displays that push attenuation-based systems to their limits. What’s next? Tensor displays. Ramesh was a panelist, summarizing the group’s work, and Doug and Gordon each presented the advances they’re creating.
• Jannick Rolland (Univ. Ariz.), Kevin Thompson (Synopsys / ORA), and Hong Hua continue the effort to design less-obtrusive head-worn displays. Free-form optics!
• What do we do about the seemingly stalled improvement in the space-bandwidth product of SLMs? Paraphrasing Darrel Hopper (USAF, Wright Pat), “We need holo-pixels!”. Paraphrasing Fuchs, “Make do with what we have, by putting more smart software in the loop, like the Camera Culture displays!” Two panelists actually offered plots of pixel-count versus year, to enable us to guess when holo-TV might be feasible: Masahiro Yamaguchi supposed that we’ll have 10” 30-degree viewing in 2023, and 40” 90-degree viewing in 2037.
• Mike Bove (MIT Media Lab) mentioned that his group continues work on a desktop holographic video display using a custom lithium niobate waveguide component. Ready to be demonstrated this summer, perhaps? At ISDH, I wonder (25-29 Jun 2012)?
• What cues cause one’s eyes to focus? And what’s up with jumping spiders and their 4-layer retinas?
• It is indeed possible to consume a post-conference 14-course Turkish dinner.

Speaking of MIT’s contributions to holographic display, Mark Lucente and Mike Klug showed enticing videos of Zebra Imaging’s ZScape displays. Also, some footage from (1980s?) Media Lab. Digging through YouTube, I found them – and also some wonderful clips of the late Stephen Benton.

1. (1992) BBC documentary re: holovideo (YouTube)
2. (1985) Synthetic Holography, a Media Lab videodisc (YouTube) Check out 3:04 for Benton’s description of their alcove hologram.

French autostereoscopic cinema

Interview and frankly amazing footage of le cyclo-stereoscope (1940s? 1950s?). No, really, check it out. Giant spinning rods! Popcorn! What could go wrong?

Surveys of the field

I am considering adding a page to my personal website with suggested readings for new researchers in autostereo. Until then, here are a few:

Backgrounder:

• M. Halle, “Autostereoscopic displays and computer graphics,” Computer Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH, 31(2), May 1997. LINK

Surveys of recent advances: These two have different emphases:

1. N. S. Holliman, N. A. Dodgson, G. E. Favalora, and L. Pockett, “Three-Dimensional Displays: A Review and Applications Analysis (invited),” IEEE Trans Broadcasting, 57(2), 362-371 (June 2011). Available via IEEE, or here.
2. J. Hong, Y. Kim, H.-J. Choi, J. Hahn, J.-H. Park, H. Kim, S.-W. Min, N. Chen, and B. Lee, “Three-dimensional display technologies of recent interest: principles, status, and issues (invited),” Appl. Opt. 50, H87-H115 (2011). (Optics InfoBase)

And… workshop on computational displays!

Hear-ye, hear-ye! The CVPR 2012 Workshop for Computational Cameras and Displays has issued a call for papers. See here.

G-Fav

ps Look into the eyes of the Bokode Owl (Wait for it…) Click “show more” if you’re not up on bokodes.

Last-minute gift ideas for clever 4-6 yr olds

Hi!

I'll spare you the one-sentence descriptions. Ideas for holiday gifts for the just-past-little ones:

Toysmith 4M Tin Can Robot [amazon]

Quirkle [amazon]

Hardy Boys

Rory's Story Cubes [amazon]

Howtoons [amazon]

Alex My Art Spinner [amazon]

a bracelet-making kit

Milan art kits [Milan - click "products" etc]

a visit to Parts and Crafts [Somerville]

Praxinoscope kit [amazon]

Strobotop Lightphase Animator [amazon]

box of assorted, instruction-less Legos

chess board

a visit to a planetarium

Lincoln Logs [amazon]

Playmobil Large pirate ship [$! amazon]

...any other ideas?

g-fav

Google Street View Car up-close

Hey map-or-optics-lovers,

What's got 15 cameras, three laser scanners, and a very friendly driver? The Google Street View car, which took a little rest this afternoon near the offices of Optics for Hire (Arlington, MA).

This is Almina, who is in the midst of driving west from Boston in towards Arlington and beyond. Her co-worker's car's cameras bumped into something, so Almina is covering any missed areas. There are black non-slip treads on the car's roof because, every morning, Almina walks up onto the car and sets the system up. At night, she covers the optics and has to be careful about the weather. Sometimes, she is asked to drive under underpasses that are too low for the vehicle. Just to be safe, she drives certain routes in her own car before carefully re-driving the route in the Street View car. She said the overpass at the Esplanade is too too low for the car.

The car is sporting 15 or so cameras and what I think are three Class 1 laser-based depth scanners. Peering inside the window, I could see a few computers, a router, and other stuff. A wide bank of cables enters the passenger-side rear window through a couple of big connectors.

Her next mission? Wait for the snow, because Google wants her to drive around to show people "snowy New England."

Here's a neat behind-the-scenes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_lTKDu0IY&feature=player_embedded

g-fav

How to fix " Windows Update cannot currently check for updates because... "

Note to self (and anyone else searching for help) -

DISCLAIMER: THIS WORKED FOR ME BUT MIGHT NOT WORK FOR YOU. BACK UP YOUR DATA.

I run a Lenovo T400 ThinkPad with Windows 7 Professional. I have been using Acronis to perform image and file backups. Following a hard drive crash (of a 500 MB Western Digital drive), I put in a brand new 500 MB Western Digital drive and managed to do an image restore and file restore.

After slogging through various bugs (which I am too bleary-eyed to recall), I kept hitting two vexing problems:

1. Windows wouldn't update. I'd get an error message saying that "Windows Update cannot currently check for updates because the update service is not running," and

2. From time to time, Windows was convinced that somehow I wasn't running an authentic version of windows, even though the "it's authentic!" seal appeared in My Computer: Properties.

What worked?

I followed the advice on this Microsoft forum http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_update/error-code-0xc8000247-cant-install-updates/198166df-9549-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5?page=2

which suggested I go to this particular-language HP driver site to download something called "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" to fix an issue with users of Western Digital Drives: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c02219204&lc=en&cc=uk&destPage=document&dlc=en&product=

What didn't work (or, rather, what didn't seem to help)?

• Rebooting
• Installing a ton of Lenovo ThinkVantage updates (actually this seemed only to cause a new problem related to an ATI video driver)
• Turning off the update service, deleting the contents of a particular Windows folder, and restarting the update service
• Generally freaking out at 11 pm

Anyway, I hope Google finds this post so that more Western Digital / Acronis customers find the solution.

-g-fav

See Gregg's Bookmarks

I have a "Read Later" folder in my browser. You know: you're at work, you notice something interesting, you swipe it to a "read later" folder which only gets visited at 12.30am in obscure hotels in the wrong time zone on some business trip.

Scott Kirsner has a "read Scott's email" blog. In the spirit of that, here's a "See Gregg's Bookmarks" post.

BUILDING NEAT STUFF / PRODUCT DESIGN

• Hack a Day
• Cool light-oriented product designer: Right Brain Electronics LLC
• Weather balloon space probes [Make]
• Electronic circuit design for beginners
• Cool animated LED art (though lately NSFW)
• A cat-cam "CatEye"

STARTUPS (or, "young companies lacking vowels")

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Boston Tech Community 2011
• Steve Blank's startup tools and blogs - massive list
• "How I raised $24k on kickstarter"
• (literally) Killer Elevator Pitches [MIT YouTube]
• How VCs value startups differently than entrepreneurs (Tricks)
• "The story of General Computer" (my former landlord was the MIT student who co-invented Ms. Pac Man)

FUN & GAMES

• Alternate Reality Games (Sean Stewart)
• Modern Interactive Fiction
• Dr Toy's best kid's toys (2009)

PATENTS / PATENT LAW

• New type of patent auction: "covenant not to sue" [PatentNews]

SELF-HELP / LIFE OPTIMIZATION / LIFESTYLE ENGINEERING

• Michael Nagle on dichotomy: indulging passions vs. detaching
• Inside David Foster Wallace's private self-help library [theawl.org]
• Fooled by Randomness: "Why I Walk" (from The Black Swan)
• Why kids get sicker at night [CNN]
• "Not being here now"

MATH / ENGINEERING / SCIENCE

• LANL paper, "Life Cycle of a Minimal Protocell - A Dissipative Particle Dynamics Study"
• Gigantic PDF of the complete blueprints of the Clock of the Long Now
• Web help for Mathematica 3 (!! 3 !!)
• Fundamentals of holographic data storage [Madrid]
• Prakash: Lighting-aware motion capture [MIT Media Lab]
• MITRE "modified light field architecture for reconfigurable multimode imaging"
• [EDGE] A short course on synthetic genomics
• Perception: see lots of colors despite there being very few... [Land]
• How plants grow rings of branches: New Kind of Science pg 410
• Beal / Bachrach "infrastructure for engineered emergence on sensor / actuator networks" [PDF / CSAIL]

CRAVE - STUFF TO BUY

• Boston Acoustics - budget audiophile speaker

WEB TOOLS / TIPS

• How to jump ship from GoDaddy to a better host
• Screencap: Camtasia
• Building a quick website, RISD (2010) tips
• Transvideo studios
• The anatomy of a perfect landing page

POP CULTURE / MISANTHROPY

• [CNN.com] Why on earth are the Kardashians famous?
• Yes - live performance of "Changes" [YouTube]
• Remember these stickers from the 1970s? WACKY PACKAGES!
• In defense of the "Jump the shark" episode
• A big trend in sunglasses
• TV appearance of Lincoln assassination witness (!?) a 96 yr-old in 1956

FOOD

• Boston Globe: Great Donuts
• Chasing the perfect cup of coffee with science

BOOKS N STUFF

• Bloom: Western Canon
• Book list for newcomers to science fiction

ART / MUSIC

• How Nick Dewar illustrates
• Douglas Coupland profile interview
• HI-BIAS RECORDS INC (Deadmau5)
• Symphony for Percussion
• Bert & Ernie try gangsta' rap

And, a really cool "evolution timechart," from the Economist, h/t Maximizing Progress.

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Some good nonfiction

Hello -

From time to time, friends ask me to recommend good nonfiction. No problem! Here are a few books that have survived the "still glad I read 'em" test a few years later. The focus here is on science and art. (The foci?)

You are not a gadget: a manifesto (J. Lanier). Staying human in a world of Web 2.0-accelerated info-surfing and ambient friend-hood. And octopi.

Consilience: the unity of knowledge (E. O. Wilson). Scientists and humanitarians, unite! Learned lots about the history of science, and I loved the book despite the core message's inability to really hit home.

This is Modern Art (M. Collings) If you even just-sort-of like contemporary art, this book is an awesome, friendly introduction to its many flavors and personalities. Don't know why it averages only 3 stars.

The visual display of quantitative information (E. Tufte) The standard book of good and bad information depiction.

Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion (R. Cialdini) How to know when you're being manipulated, or, a handbook on how to manipulate others.

Learn to Play Go (J. Kim) 'nuff said.

Optics (E. Hecht) "Hey Gregg, what's a good book on optics for someone who's taken calculus?" This one!

Godel, Escher, Bach (D. Hofstader) You seriously haven't read this yet? Go learn some links between patterns, music, DNA, and predicate calculus (or whatever it's called). I only made it 50% through, but when I walked into a cafe with it under my arm, I met a nice woman, and we got married! So, there's that.

Prometheus Rising (R. A. Wilson) Forgive its trippy LSD tone. A book about the various stages of mind, which helps you understand everything from why we swear, to how brainwashing and military indoctrination works, to various forms of enlightenment.

Sync: how order emerges from chaos... (S. H. Strogatz) Complex systems and synchrony, from fireflies to lasers. (See also his textbook on nonlinear dynamic systems.)

Games People Play (E Berne) Try to get your hands on this 1965 paperback that diagrams typical conversational patterns and the child/parent levels from which they originate. Neat stuff!

The Discoveries (A Lightman) Get this! The stories of a handful of awesome 20th century discoveries - and - for real - the journal articles in which they were announced. So cool!

A course in mathematics for students of physics (Bamberg) A Harvard textbook from linear algebra and calculus to differential forms and some really minimal-looking expression of Maxwell's equations. I kid you not, I got this in 1995 and am still reading it.

Dark hero of the information age: in search of Norbert Wiener the father of cybernetics (F Conway) Kids these days. They just don't know that uncle Norbert invented essentially everything.

A People's History of the United States (H Zinn). I am the only person around here who hasn't read this book. Well, I read one chapter. Now I know that the people who came and took North America were really quite mean.

Benton's SPIE milestone series on selected fundamental papers in three-dimensional display (SPIE Press) is just incredible. If you like 3-D display technology. And if you are into that sort of thing, Barry Blundell has a great collection of books which dive deep into the history of display technologies. And I'm not just saying that because I wrote the Forward to one of them.

Two books I read recently and enjoyed were:

The 4-Hour Workweek and Just Listen: the secret to getting through to absolutely anyone.

Finally, I am in the middle of What Technology Wants, which suggests that our technologies have been evolving in ways similar to organisms. An enjoyable read (for its various historical and trendline anecdotes) so far.

What are some of your favorites?

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