Physicists at UC Santa Barbara published recently their results of experiments to create what is effectively a 'Quantum Microphone'. Part of the experiment showed a macroscopic realization of quantum superpositioning: the device simultaneously exists in moving and stationary states.
An overview article for the lay reader can be found at
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-microphone.
Readers with a background in or understanding of quantum mechanics that are not already aware of this marvelous work can find more detailed publications in Nature, and through the web portals for the researchers involved.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Things Unexpectedly Technical
Along with enjoying things technical from hardware and software to several of the sciences, I've been an avid collector of complicated wristwatches for some time.This particular watch, the Vacheron Constantin Tour de l'Ile, is the most complicated 'production' watch yet made.
This amazing piece comprises 834 hand made pieces, requiring over four years of research and development.
The complications of the watch, spread across two faces, include: minute repeater with sonnerie, tourbillon, power reserve indication, 2nd time zone, moonphase, age of the moon, Sonnerie level indication, Perpetual calendar, Day, Date, Month, Leap year, Equation of time, Sunrise, Sunset, and Celestial chart.
Only seven of these masterpieces have been produced, at a retail price of $1.5 million, though if you can find one you'll need to pony up perhaps another million on top of that.
I had the pleasure of handling one of these, truly an amazing work by gifted craftsmen, and likely the most complex mechanism in a small space ever made by human hands.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
One of the more interesting game problem cases I've worked on.
A poster in a game forum was pleading for help. A pretty high-end system, all the best components, top-end Windows 7, fresh and clean, along with a clean game install.
All was well until a couple of weeks ago, then load times for the maps went to hell, taking five to eight minutes, with the screen alternating between white and black. Once loaded, selection of menu items or login resulted in another minute or so of stalling.
The poster was using one of the highest-end and newest GPUs that had a known minor issue with load times for the game (but usually only resulting in 30 second or so loads for others, with no stalls once loaded) that had been remedied in a recent GPU driver release.
The poster, and an apparently savvy friend, were pulling their hair out, having tried every option reasonable: reinstall game, windows, no anti-virus, different drivers, disable sound, etc. but still no joy.
This was one of the weird ones. Like the PC of an old friend that would randomly play "It's a small world" out of the internal speaker (that took me a bit to figure out...)
I've been doing this a long time, as many of you probably have, giving us an advantage: We've probably seen it before, and had to figure it out.
The problem: USB bus conflict/flooding. I first saw this a few years back on a fellow gamer's machine, after trying all the obvious things to resolve their strange performance issues, I pulled out my USB bus analyzer, and bingo!
For this poster, simply unplugging all USB devices, then plugging them back in completely solved the issue. The same (actually more thorough) can be done by uninstalling the sub-branches of the USB device branch and rebooting the machine, allowing it to reinstall and enumerate the devices.
This very same problem manifested itself for a couple of players I worked with where their game ran in slow motion, as if time were slowed down. Not laggy game play, in fact no jerkiness of any sort, just six million dollar man slow motion effects for everything in the game!
A cool effect of this was they could FRAPS record game play, and when played back, it was normal speed. Spooky! When I had them do this, I'm sure they must have thought I was pulling some kind of practical joke on them.
The same fix (resetting USB by unplugging their USB devices) remedied the problem.
These strange and obscure ones must make life interesting for tech support.
All was well until a couple of weeks ago, then load times for the maps went to hell, taking five to eight minutes, with the screen alternating between white and black. Once loaded, selection of menu items or login resulted in another minute or so of stalling.
The poster was using one of the highest-end and newest GPUs that had a known minor issue with load times for the game (but usually only resulting in 30 second or so loads for others, with no stalls once loaded) that had been remedied in a recent GPU driver release.
The poster, and an apparently savvy friend, were pulling their hair out, having tried every option reasonable: reinstall game, windows, no anti-virus, different drivers, disable sound, etc. but still no joy.
This was one of the weird ones. Like the PC of an old friend that would randomly play "It's a small world" out of the internal speaker (that took me a bit to figure out...)
I've been doing this a long time, as many of you probably have, giving us an advantage: We've probably seen it before, and had to figure it out.
The problem: USB bus conflict/flooding. I first saw this a few years back on a fellow gamer's machine, after trying all the obvious things to resolve their strange performance issues, I pulled out my USB bus analyzer, and bingo!
For this poster, simply unplugging all USB devices, then plugging them back in completely solved the issue. The same (actually more thorough) can be done by uninstalling the sub-branches of the USB device branch and rebooting the machine, allowing it to reinstall and enumerate the devices.
This very same problem manifested itself for a couple of players I worked with where their game ran in slow motion, as if time were slowed down. Not laggy game play, in fact no jerkiness of any sort, just six million dollar man slow motion effects for everything in the game!
A cool effect of this was they could FRAPS record game play, and when played back, it was normal speed. Spooky! When I had them do this, I'm sure they must have thought I was pulling some kind of practical joke on them.
The same fix (resetting USB by unplugging their USB devices) remedied the problem.
These strange and obscure ones must make life interesting for tech support.
The Race for Real-Time Photorealism
Having built a simple client-server FPS game including a simple rendering infrastructure and even simpler netcode from scratch as a brain exercise, I'm always amazed at what the real experts in the field can do.
A most fascinating article in the March 2010 issue of American Scientist covers aspects of rendering for realistic scene generation. My feeling is we are less than a decade away from games that can render environments indistinguishable from a movie. The rendering of humans, or other familiar living things, may be a bit further down the road: We are so programmed to incredibly subtle visual triggers, while it is currently posssible to render a human that is indistinguishable from reality, the illusion collapses once movement, speech, or other interaction occurs.
A fascinating read, available at the time of this post at: http://sigmaxi.org/4Lane/QMag/AMS_Mar_2010.pdf
A most fascinating article in the March 2010 issue of American Scientist covers aspects of rendering for realistic scene generation. My feeling is we are less than a decade away from games that can render environments indistinguishable from a movie. The rendering of humans, or other familiar living things, may be a bit further down the road: We are so programmed to incredibly subtle visual triggers, while it is currently posssible to render a human that is indistinguishable from reality, the illusion collapses once movement, speech, or other interaction occurs.
A fascinating read, available at the time of this post at: http://sigmaxi.org/4Lane/QMag/AMS_Mar_2010.pdf
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
How about a knowledge / intelligence filter for forums, and the internet in general?
I read a recent blog entry titled 'Idiots', where the writer lamented the state of knowledge exhibited in 'technical' forum postings. I LOL'd.
The reality is, we as posters need to be 'self-regulating', lest we fall into the class of those covered in the amusing book 'The Cult of the Amateur' by Keen.
The framework I've come up with is:
1) The questioner: Anyone can ask any question, there are no 'dumb questions.'
2) The answerer: Incumbent on them to know what they're talking about.
3) The corrector: Corrects misinformed answers. Should really know what they're talking about.
4) The Uber-corrector: Corrects the correctors. Had better be an expert.
5) The debater: Will argue points with correctors and U-correctors. Had better be an expert, else be prepared to be made an Internet jackass.
There seems to be far too many of the debater, regurgitating wikipedia information without any real understanding of the issues involved, and seemingly unwilling to do the research and footwork required to understand deep technical issues.
We owe it to fellow readers, and ourselves, to be introspective and aware of our own limits of knowledge, and committed to do our homework to ensure proper understanding of things when offering our advice to technical questions.
I'd normally let a carcass lie, but this is a great example of what being made an Internet jackass feels like, we all have the power to control whether we're made to look like a fool in public, and as the adage goes, 'payback is a bitch'. The beauty of the web is the speed of information flow. The ugliness is the vast number of self-proclaimed 'experts' that haven't a clue. That what one posts is usually there for an eternity for the world to see should be a cautionary clue to these kinds of posters. This poster, having barraged a forum with 'technical' posts way beyond their pay grade, was banned after incessantly arguing nonsense. The reaction in a different forum speaks for itself. The author will be fortunate if they don't end up sued by the parent company and the admins they libel. For the record, I am of course not an employee of EA or DICE, nor benefit in any way from either company other than buying their games.
Classic!
The reality is, we as posters need to be 'self-regulating', lest we fall into the class of those covered in the amusing book 'The Cult of the Amateur' by Keen.
The framework I've come up with is:
1) The questioner: Anyone can ask any question, there are no 'dumb questions.'
2) The answerer: Incumbent on them to know what they're talking about.
3) The corrector: Corrects misinformed answers. Should really know what they're talking about.
4) The Uber-corrector: Corrects the correctors. Had better be an expert.
5) The debater: Will argue points with correctors and U-correctors. Had better be an expert, else be prepared to be made an Internet jackass.
There seems to be far too many of the debater, regurgitating wikipedia information without any real understanding of the issues involved, and seemingly unwilling to do the research and footwork required to understand deep technical issues.
We owe it to fellow readers, and ourselves, to be introspective and aware of our own limits of knowledge, and committed to do our homework to ensure proper understanding of things when offering our advice to technical questions.
I'd normally let a carcass lie, but this is a great example of what being made an Internet jackass feels like, we all have the power to control whether we're made to look like a fool in public, and as the adage goes, 'payback is a bitch'. The beauty of the web is the speed of information flow. The ugliness is the vast number of self-proclaimed 'experts' that haven't a clue. That what one posts is usually there for an eternity for the world to see should be a cautionary clue to these kinds of posters. This poster, having barraged a forum with 'technical' posts way beyond their pay grade, was banned after incessantly arguing nonsense. The reaction in a different forum speaks for itself. The author will be fortunate if they don't end up sued by the parent company and the admins they libel. For the record, I am of course not an employee of EA or DICE, nor benefit in any way from either company other than buying their games.
Classic!
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