amarbledesk.com 

Fascinating image-processing technique

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/. A group at Stanford has developed a fascinating technique to create a picture which switches the POV of a camera with its light source. Think about that one for a sec

In particular, they show an example where they have camera take the picture of the BACK of a playing card (slightly canted diagonally, but you can’t see the face). The card is illuminated by a light source off to the side. They then digitally manipulate the pixels in the camera image using their technique. This results in a second image where you can now see the FRONT of the playing card…which was not visible to the camera, but which was “visible” to the light source. Very hard to explain in words, but they have pictures and a video which are very impressive. Check it out.

There are issues with more general “real-world” applications of this … notably, the current technology requires the light source to be a scanning light source with the scanning of a known pattern … but I imagine that some of those obstacles may be feasible to overcome. For example, one possibly could rely on existing ambient sources of light such as ubiquitous computer monitors, or even flourescent lighting in a stretch. In which case this technology could truly be used to “see around corners” with interesting implications for intelligence gathering, military operations, and privacy.

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Scrabble stories

This is an interesting (if over-long) Flash video telling one woman’s (Liz Dubelman’s) story of Scrabble awakening and eventual obsession. There are some Scrabble arcana included, notably the Triple-Triple “Craziest” and the “Sweet 16″ U-less Q-words.

For computer Scrabble, I highly recommend Gamehouse’s licensed Scrabble from Funkitron. The “Maven” artificial intelligence you play against is quite good, as are the graphics and gameplay.

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(Still-misnamed) Quantum Encryption

Some interesting (if high-end) practical applications are beginning to grow out of “Quantum Encryption”. Not a silver bullet, of course; and not a replacement for various other security things that you need to do to keep data secret; but nonetheless it is really cool to see practical applications of any kind for Quantum Physics…

http://www2.csoonline.com/go/index.html?ID=3842&PMID=16452304&s=1&f=1

That said, the term “Quantum Encryption” is a misnomer, really. Encryption should be construed to provide data confidentiality. The “quantum” portion of this technique does not provide confidentiality; rather, it provides integrity and a means for detecting whether confidentiality has been broken; it does not protect confidential data from disclosure. So really, it’s “Quantum Key Exchange” or “Quantum One-time Pad Transmission”, but I guess those aren’t as snappy.

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