http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html
A very cool 26 gigapixel panorama stitched together from a bazillion different pictures.
The prebuilt tours in the lower right are very cool.
I’d love to see this for more cities.
In someways, Google Earth is like this, but without the particular perspective.
Two reasons mainly… they try very hard and they adapt constantly.
That’s where the contextual signals come in. All search engines incorporate them, but none has added as many or made use of them as skillfully as Google has. PageRank itself is a signal, an attribute of a Web page (in this case, its importance relative to the rest of the Web) that can be used to help determine relevance. Some of the signals now seem obvious. Early on, Google’s algorithm gave special consideration to the title on a Web page — clearly an important signal for determining relevance. Another key technique exploited anchor text, the words that make up the actual hyperlink connecting one page to another. As a result, “when you did a search, the right page would come up, even if the page didn’t include the actual words you were searching for,” says Scott Hassan, an early Google architect who worked with Page and Brin at Stanford. “That was pretty cool.” Later signals included attributes like freshness (for certain queries, pages created more recently may be more valuable than older ones) and location (Google knows the rough geographic coordinates of searchers and favors local results). The search engine currently uses more than 200 signals to help rank its results
The article was fascinating to this Computer Scientist and I bet you non-technical Google users will find how they do what they do pretty interesting too.
The student becomes the master…
I knew it had to happen sometime. I just didn’t quite expect it so soon. My son smacked me down. Sat on me. Owned me. In pistol shooting… that is.
In the past, he had beat me once ,by a very small percentage and only when I’d had severe jamming of my pistol.
But yesterday, he started with an early 1st stage smack down, and then turned on the heat. He finished 4th overall (of 36 shooters) , with 116 seconds, I in the middle of the pack with 157 seconds. His score was within 1.5 seconds of 2nd place. I would have had top ten if I had not had a lot of jams on the 5th and 6th stages, but even if the gun had run, I wasn’t in his league on that day.
Which pleases me (-;
This match didn’t have a lot of movement. I can still move better than him, but in stages stressing shooting and gun handling – he has an edge…. for now.
Oh… and he’s just 12.
My home schooled son has posted an essay from his home schooling on his site:
http://briankevinnelson.com/report-richard-henry-lee-60
He’d love feedback.
We have him write most days. Not every day yields a full essay, sometimes we focus on just strong parts – like active sentences, or a strong paragraph from a particular essay.
While there subscribe and be notified of future posts.
The Road of Death… in Boliva:
Amazingly only #6 on the top 19 most complex and dangerous roads in the world.
After updating Picasa yesterday, something odd happened. A bunch of faces appeared:
Apparently, Picasa now finds faces and tries to put a name to them. It asked me a few, mainly Brian, Jenny & Paula, and then it went off and automatically found them. It did a fine job.
But… it also told me, without a doubt, that my kids look like my wife, not me.
Every single “wrong answer”, and every single suggestion, was that Brian looked like Paula, or that Jenny looked like Paula.
Lucky kids!
Home schooled, practical pistol and rifle shooting, blogging, 12 year old
My 12 year old son, Brian, has a blog now. And he has learned to post to it. We reposted a couple things he wrote for my site, and then he wrote a fresh piece on the match he shot today.
http://www.briankevinnelson.com
Bookmark it today!
Whether finger style guitar, downhill skiing at 80+ miles an hour, or making incredible basketball shots, what humans can do astounds.
The shots are amazing even if shot conventionally. But behind the back in the air – sick!
Amazon.com has done far more for me than any politician currently prancing around Capitol Hill or in the White House.
Don Boudreaux marveling about his new Kindle.
My family has three of them. Each day I see the orders my kids place as they scarf down new knowledge via their Kindle.
My own Christmas miracle was that I wasn’t sick this Christmas, making this Christmas markedly different from the past 40 or so Christmases. But on to a truly amazing story and actual Christmas Miracle…
A woman dies of cardiac arrest during labor. An emergency C-section, with no anesthesia, brings out a dead baby as well. At this point:
"Half of my family was laying there in front of me, there’s no other way to say it, but dead," said Mike.
But then the miracles happened, his wife revived after being dead for minutes, and:
After the delivery, doctors rushed Tracey to the operating room to complete the surgery. In the meantime, Coltyn’s tiny, lifeless, body was handed to his father Mike. Doctors still worked to get the baby breathing. "They actually got him started right in my hands. That is an amazing feeling," said Mike.
Pretty scary but a great result. I’m glad for their family.
Alas the comment sections descend into rants about if God is real or not, proving that even the stupid can figure out how to get on the internet these days.
3D filter that goes in front of projector
My daughter wondered how 3-D movies worked. I explained the early ones used colored lenses and two different projectors sending different colors to slightly different spots on the screen, but that recent ones used polarization (orienting light in a common direction, so one lens of your glasses gets one view, the other another view, and the brain merges them to 3-D) and just one projector.
But Wired explains it better:
RealD cinema, currently the most widely used 3-D movie system in theaters, uses circular polarization — produced by a filter in front of the projector — to beam the film onto a silver screen. It does not require two projectors shooting out images in separate colors. The benefit of polarization is you can more naturally move your head without losing perception of the 3-D image.
In the case of Avatar, I felt the 3-D stuff helped the movie immensely and I recommend paying the extra few dollars and seeing it in 3-D.
