Kidlapse - Make a Movie of Your Child Growing Up
Kidlapse is now live. This is a service I've been working on that uses machine learning to recognize faces and then rotate and zoom you so get pretty good alignment between each photo. You upload one photo per month and Kidlapse then creates a timelapse movie of your child growing up. If that sounds like something you'd be interested in sign up and give it a try.
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ITHCWY Newsletter for October 2019
Timelapse of the 2019 Parade of Ships at San Francisco Fleet Week.
Bangalore Timelapse.
Previously:
- 2017: End the Electoral College: Amendment, Compact, or Supreme Court?
- 2016: San Francisco November 2016 Propositions
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- Fleet Week 2019 Parade of Ships
- Fleet Week 2021 Air Show (Photos and Timelapse)
- Timelapse, Week of Jan 31 2022
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ITHCWY Newsletter for August 2019
SFO has just banned bottled water. Why not Coke?
In need of a simple tool to de-duplicate and sort photos and videos into year and month folders on Windows? Check out PhotoSorter.
Rebuttal of an op-ed in the NYT on the simulation hypothesis.
More on simulation. Have we proved this isn't true? No. Also - what does analyzing the physics of Conway's Game of Life tell us?
New project: generate a timelapse of a kid growing up from a set of any photos (uses machine learning to spot and align faces). Check it out at kidlapse.com.
Previously:
- 2018: Draw the rest of the Hummingbird
- 2017: Why Microsoft is Likely Doomed Based on one Email Folder
- 2016: Slow Camera for Android
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Kidlapse
I'm working on a project to generate a timelapse of a kid growing up. I wasn't organized enough to shoot my kids in the same pose on the same background so it's quite a tough problem. To fix this I'm using machine learning to recognize faces in photos and then automatically rotate and align them so the face is in the same place in every shot. From there it's just a matter of generating frames that fade between the different photos and stitching them together into a video. If this sounds interesting check it out at kidlapse.com and sign up to get notified when the service launches.
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Life, Non-locality and the Simulation Hypothesis
Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton where simple rules lead to surprisingly complex behavior. You can even build a Turing Machine in it. Life consists of a grid of cells which are either alive or dead. For each generation a cell flips from dead to alive if it has three alive neighbors. If a cell is alive and has two or three neighbors then it survives to the next generation, otherwise if dies. When programming a non-infinite Life game it's common to wrap the logic at the extent of the grid - so the some 'neighbors' of the cells at the very top are the cells at the very bottom and so on.
Imagine that you discover such a system and try to figure out the physics of it.
After observation of a sample of cells you'd figure out the rules that govern the life and death of most cells. You'd also figure out a speed of 'light' for the system - information can only travel one cell per generation. The state of cells further away have no influence. You've got a kind of classical physics of the Game of Life.
Further study would throw up a puzzle though. Cells at the extremes of the system are influenced by cells at the other extreme. In some cases the speed of 'light' is violated - you now have a non-local physics in the mix. At this point you might fix the problem with geometry - maybe the grid is actually wrapped around a torus (even though you're looking at a rectangular grid). This makes the system logically consistent again but it's wrong - the non-local behavior occurs because you're trying to analyze a simulation.
In quantum physics observing the state of a property on one particle in a pair of entangled particles will instantly effect the observation of that property on the other particle, no matter the distance between them. This is Einstein's spooky action at a distance. It seems like it can't possibly be true, but has been demonstrated repeatedly (and quite spectacularly using starlight to select which property to measure).
There are many different interpretations of how to understand quantum physics. But as you might expect from physicists these concern themselves with a physical universe (or multiverse depending on the flavor). It's possible though that non-locality (and the apparant quantized nature of our reality) is trying to tell us something else. Non-local effects are entirely consistent with a reality that is being generated frame by frame, just like a souped up Game of Life.
Simulation Hypothesis Series
- Have we Already Proved that the Simulation Hypothesis is False?
- Can I move to a Better Simulation Please?
Have we Already Proved that the Simulation Hypothesis is False?
A couple of years ago a spate of articles claimed that there was proof that the simulation hypothesis was false, like Sorry, Elon. Physicists Say We Definitely Aren’t Living in a Computer Simulation in Futurism:
"A recent study by theoretical physicists from Oxford University in the U.K., which was published in the journal Scientific Advances just last week, definitively confirms that life and reality aren’t products of a computer simulation."
Strong statement. This is because they determined that running a simulation of a small quantum system was intractable:
"To store information about a couple hundred electrons, they noted, one needs a computer memory that requires more atoms than what’s available in the universe."
This might have something to say about what we can simulate on a classical computer in our universe, but it has no bearing on if our universe is itself simulated. If it is we have no idea what kind of computer is doing the simulating, nor what the physical laws are of the universe where that computer is running, nor even how many atoms it has at its disposal.
It's okay Elon, you still might be on to something.
Simulation Hypothesis Series
Can I move to a Better Simulation Please?
In the New York Times last weekend Preston Greene has an op-ed piece on the simulation hypothesis where he argues that we shouldn't check, because:
"If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world."
But let's back up. To start with he trots out Bostrom:
"In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom made an ingenious argument that we might be living in a computer simulation created by a more advanced civilization."
Am I living in a simulated universe where I am the only person to have ever consumed any science fiction, or spent late nights discussing the nature of the universe in a bad simulation of a kitchen? For some reason Nick Bostrom is now almost universally credited with the simulation hypothesis. Every article on the topic seems to starts with this revelation. In 2003! Like right after he finished watching The Matrix Revolutions. Have no newspaper editors ever read any Philip K. Dick? Descartes? This is not a new idea, and Bostrom's ancestor simulations are a rather tortured special case of a much wider set of possibilities.
And then:
"Professor Smoot estimates that the ratio of simulated to real people might be as high as 1012 to 1."
Sounds specific. It could be 1016 though. Or 7. Not really subject to numerical analysis at our current level of knowledge (which Greene would not increase).
And given that we don't know this invalidates the whole point of the article:
"In much the same way, as I argue in a forthcoming paper in the journal Erkenntnis, if our universe has been created by an advanced civilization for research purposes, then it is reasonable to assume that it is crucial to the researchers that we don’t find out that we’re in a simulation."
That's one possibility, sure. Reasonable to assume? No. Equally possible is that the researchers are trying to find universes that figure out that they are simulated. They keep the ones that manage it within 13.773 billion years or so and discard the others.
I think it's even more likely that simulated universes are a commodity and the number running as screen savers vastly outnumbers those used for serious research projects. Our fate depends on whether the entity that installed us is having a three martini lunch or heading back after two.
Simulation Hypothesis Series
- Life, Non-locality and the Simulation Hypothesis
- Have we Already Proved that the Simulation Hypothesis is False?
ITHCWY Newsletter for July 2019
Timelapse of the night sky over Pinnacles National Park.
Google just broke automatic backup of Google Photos to Google Drive. Here's an apps script to get it working again.
Could Google do one or two things to fix phone spam already?
Compilation timelapse from a road trip - features Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier and Humboldt Redwoods.
Previously:
- 2018: What if the Senate Voted Proportionally to Population
- 2017: Email Alerts for new Referers in Google Analytics using Apps Script
- 2016: Methyl L-α-aspartyl-L-fucking-phenylalaninate
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ITHCWY Newsletter for June 2019
Timelapse of Pacifica State Beach.
Cory Doctorow argues for adversarial interoperability as a tool to weaken tech monopolies. I've reached the same conclusion: Facebook shouldn't own your social graph.
Dead Ringers S18E04 (available very briefly) has a halfway decent Brexit / Douglas Adams joke. Here's a better one.
A longer hike at China Camp State Park.
Previously:
- 2018: Animation of a year of Global Cloud Cover
- 2017: Reading and Writing Office 365 Excel from a Console app using the Microsoft.Graph C# Client API
- 2016: West Portal Timelapse of Timelapses
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ITHCWY Newsletter for May 2019
Nevada is close to joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Why this is important and how you can help.
Should there be a constitutional amendment for tire chalking?
Limantour Spit hike.
Previously:
- 2018: I just want to get rid of Windows 10 Notifications with one click
- 2017: Real Time
- 2016: GGNRA Dog Management Round 3
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- 10 Electoral College Votes Closer
- End the Electoral College: Amendment, Compact, or Supreme Court?
- Fuck the Electoral College