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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
anhinga_anhinga's LiveJournal:
| Friday, December 21st, 2012 | |
| 12:01 am | I am using the friends list here mosly to create a useful Friends page. And this is my Friends of Friends page. I filter my default Friends page somewhat since December 2005. This is my unfiltered Friends page. This is an "express selection" (about 30% of the volume). Russian Virtual Keyboard by Paul Gorodyansky. Online translation by translate.ru. All tags of this journal. |
| Friday, November 20th, 2009 | |
| 7:54 pm | Firefox add-ons: WebPredict, TooManyTabs I'd like to review a couple of Firefox add-ons I am using every day: our own WebPredict, and TooManyTabs. Both are intended for people who browse a lot. WebPredict allows user to rate some Web pages, and based on those ratings predicts the quality of other Web pages. We made a beta-release of this add-on recently, and this beta-release prompted me to write this review. ( Read more... ) TooManyTabs allows user who has too many tabs to save tabs, so that they don't eat memory and don't slow down the browser.( Read more... ) |
| Friday, November 6th, 2009 | |
| 11:18 pm | t The strangest impression from my October trip to Moscow was mainstreaming of Pelevin. The ads for his new novel, "t", were on subway escalators, the book itself was featured prominently in airport book kiosks. ( Read more... ) Since I started to talk about "t", I want to write a bit about treatment of time in the "Quantum Gravity" book I mentioned in the previous post. The most interesting is his "Thermal time hypothesis", a conjecture that time is on its fundamental level induced by the thermodynamic considerations. ( Read more... ) |
| Monday, October 12th, 2009 | |
| 12:01 am | Carlo Rovelli, "Quantum Gravity" '(Newtonian) space was the "sensorium" of God, the World as perceived by God.' ( online reference ) This is the only textbook on loop quantum gravity and it can actually be partially understood by non-physicists. For example, in mid-90s I was trying to imagine how one could have discrete space at the quantum scale, but so that it still appears continuous at the macroscopic level. All variants I could come up with were pretty ugly. This book contains a very neat construction of that. ( Read more... ) |
| Monday, September 21st, 2009 | |
| 10:09 pm | More on perception of conscious will The perception of conscious will is an inference. Daniel Wegner demonstrated a while ago, that it is easy to create experimental setups, where the subject has illusion of freely causing events, which are completely independent of his actions or intentions. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small} cognitivedaily is reporting on an experiment, which sheds some extra light on the inference of conscious will:http://scienceblogs.com/cognitiveda Here, the subject presses the button, and the beep sounds as a result, but a random delay is added between pressing the button and the resulting beep sound. Then the subject is asked to pinpoint the moment of time, when the decision to press the button was made. It turns out that subjects on average estimate that moment as approximately 130 milliseconds before the beep sound (and that the estimate depends very weekly on the actual time when the subject pressed the button). ( a bit of discussion ) |
| Friday, September 4th, 2009 | |
| 6:08 pm | Russian in Linux (UTF-8) Last spring I have posted an Emacs trick allowing to edit Russian texts and to include Russian substrings into the command line. It turns out that there is a much simpler way to accomplish these tasks. ( Read more... ) |
| Thursday, August 27th, 2009 | |
| 12:06 am | "Placebos are getting more effective" http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/maga "Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s." The whole article is a bit too long, which is typical for "Wired".( Some highlights ) |
| Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | |
| 11:30 am | Duality between metric and logical viewpoints The metric viewpoint: how far two objects are from each other. The logical viewpoint: to what degree two objects overlap. Fuzzy mathematics is traditionally done from the logical viewpoint, so the first step in introducing fuzzy metrics is often the transformation f(x,y) = exp(-d(x,y)).( Read more... ) However, this seems to be a rather superficial duality: basically two equivalent ways to write the same things using different notation. The question is whether there is also a natural deeper duality here (of a contravariant nature, where function arrows would reverse direction when one switches between these two viewpoints). |
| Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | |
| 7:39 pm | Скульптуры из воды http://nature-wonder.livejournal.com/16 В том же журнале хорошая выдержка из беседы с К.Еськовым про эволюцию: http://nature-wonder.livejournal.com/16 |
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | |
| 4:47 pm | From a workshop on role of theory in design automation "One of the recurrent themes of the discussion is: we have SAT solvers that seem to work on all examples we try them on. How does this fit with the conventional wisdom that P not equal to NP? This is a very interesting open problem, that we should work on in the future." from http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/07/0 rjlipton |
| Friday, May 29th, 2009 | |
| 6:17 pm | |
| Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | |
| 4:58 pm | Anti-angiogenesis drugs :-( I still remember time when great hopes in anti-cancer therapy were raised in connection with drugs blocking formation of new blood vessels. And (as it is often the case) the results in mice were great.Then the hopes dimmed, and the controversial approval of Avastin by FDA in 2008 against the recommendation of its advisory panel underscored the fact that the advances were quite marginal (the panel objected because for that class of tumors Avastin only slowed tumor growth but failed to extend survival): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevacizuma Here is an article which seems to shed some light on why the "magic bullet" does not quite work: http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.o ( summary ) |
| Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | |
| 7:56 pm | Карликовый тушканчик/Pygmy jerboa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnn-wMP Маленькие зелёные человечки среди нас.. ( references ) |
| Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | |
| 11:56 am | |
| Friday, April 17th, 2009 | |
| 3:12 pm | Scanning laser ophthalmoscopy Now the eye exam can be made without eye drops which dilate the pupils, so one can read or drive afterwards. Another good thing is that the resulting pictures are stored, so it is possible to track the changes over the years. And the pictures are pretty cool and resemble some of pictures obtained from space telescopes, which is not so surprising, since the same methods of adaptive optics are used: http://www.totalfamilyeyecare.com/o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_l ( downsides ) |
| Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | |
| 1:58 pm | |
| Friday, March 27th, 2009 | |
| 4:58 pm | D. Gabor, Associative Holographic Memories I recently found a very cool short paper (4 pages) which Dennis Gabor written 40 years ago. It explains the math of associative holographic memory, which turns out to be very simple. Because it is that simple, neither holograms, nor even waves and oscillations, are actually necessary to implement this scheme of associative memory. D. Gabor, Associative Holographic Memories, IBM Journal of Research and Development, 13(2), 156-159 (1969). Abstract, PDF |
| Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 | |
| 5:01 pm | |
| Sunday, January 4th, 2009 | |
| 2:28 pm | flash mob Возьми ближайшую книгу. Открой на странице 123. Найди третье предложение. Помести его в своём ЖЖ вместе с этими инструкциями. So the entropy of the whole system is less then the entropy of the two coordinates added together, and the amount by which it is less is exactly the mutual information: Imutual = S[X] + S[Y] - S[X, Y]. (via http://yan.livejournal.com/1509810.h |
| Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | |
| 3:23 pm | "Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousnes" Recently, I reread a number of papers in neuro. The one I liked the most is "Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness" by Francis Crick and Christof Koch in Seminars in the Neurosciences (1990), Volume 2, pages 263–275: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/C/F/D/_/s ( a bit about this paper ) I hope the next year will be better than the outgoing one... Good luck in the New Year! |