• I was looking for a way to perform OCR on nutritional facts and I came across this handheld spectroscopy tool that gives you the content of food by measuring the chemical composition. Basically a tricorder?

  • Moravec's paradox

    "[I]t is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."

  • I was thinking about the nargout feature of MATLAB and wondering that was possible to do the same in Perl. Well, with the Want module, you can.

  • As part of my interest in mathematical expression recoginition from the previous linkdump, I came across this scan of the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables that can be used as data for scientific document analysis.

    It's always fun to see names you recognise from elsewhere on the Internet as I did here

    Thanks to Bruce Miller of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who sent me a clean new copy of the book for scanning.

    I recognise Bruce Miller from the LaTeXML project.

  • This is a neat book about OpenGL that spans many different techniques for visualisation with OpenGL. Code from the book is available here.

  • Using a Möbius strip as a track for a superconductor is brilliant idea:

  • GitHub released a view for looking at GeoJSON sometime last year, but now you can look at the history of a map: Diffable, more customizable maps.

  • The retinal implants used to address retinitis pigmentosa have passed FDA approval and now two surgeries have been performed on patients. I first heard about these when I was starting my biomedical engineering degree and I've found these kinds of prostheses really inspiring.

  • On a related note, I read this interview with Woz about innovation and here gives the example of about wearable computing:

    There are about 30 companies that seem to be doing the same thing. But nothing seems to be pointing to the right way," Woznak says. One reason is simple: "You tend to deal with the past," replicating what you know in a new form. Consider the notion of computing eyeware like Google Glass: "People have been marrying eyewear with TV inputs for 20 years."

    I later came across this article about how early developments in camera technology created new kinds of uses for the camera in society. Apparently Google Glass' photography is not that new. Instead of saying "OK, Glass", you would activate the camera with a cough :-P

    As Jarche recalled, bowlers and ‘Blocknotes' were indeed so common on the press benches that 'those of us in the know used to watch the hats rise slightly when anything happened'. 'At the same minute, there was certain to be a cough. Then we knew that some one had shot'. Yet this strategy could bring its own problems, for at one point during the Crippen trial in 1910 there was so much coughing from the press benches that the judge threatened to have them cleared.