Four short links: 7 July 2016
Building Blocks, Mental Models, Pose Data Set, and Parsing Data Formats
- Digital Reality — EDGE conversation with Neil Gershenfeld. It’s all top-shelf thinking. There are 20 amino acids. With those 20 amino acids, you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the 20 amino acids don’t encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those 20 properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about 20 building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology.
- Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful — as Maciej said: Gabriel Weinberg has published a Dictionary of Received Ideas for our time and place. This is modern nerdthink.
- MPII Human Pose Data Set — around 25K images containing more than 40K people with annotated body joints. The images were systematically collected using an established taxonomy of every day human activities. Overall, the data set covers 410 human activities and each image is provided with an activity label. Each image was extracted from a YouTube video and provided with preceding and following un-annotated frames. In addition, for the test set we obtained richer annotations, including body part occlusions and 3D torso and head orientations.
- NAIL (PDF) — A practical tool for parsing and generating data formats.
