Monthly Archives: July 2009

Hum

I woke up at the crack of dawn yesterday (okay, 6:45) to attend a 7 AM online meeting. The meeting, actually being held in Sweden where it was a more reasonable 1 PM, was the IETF75 Internet Wideband Audio Codec … Continue reading

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Sustainability

I went out for about 7 hours to judge papers for RSI’s annual compendium. It was kind of fun, a chance to sample some papers in many different fields. I came back home to find 120 e-mails in my inbox. … Continue reading

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Fusion

I recently met two people who work at the MIT Plasma Science Fusion Center (PSFC). One works on Alcator C-Mod, the world’s most powerful tokamak. The other works on the Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX), a new approach to fusion that … Continue reading

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Halvah

I’d recently acquired a craving for Halvah, but couldn’t find any in Boston. When some friends invited me for Shabbat dinner, I looked on the web, and sure enough, I found this recipe. It’s dead simple: honey, tahini, and powdered … Continue reading

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Completion

Tonight I closed the loop in my target tracking system for the first time. I knew it would take all evening, so I brought dinner with me in the morning. I spent most of the day fighting with Microsoft. I’d … Continue reading

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Beauty

This afternoon I took a stroll around Harvard with some friends. I can recommend without reservation Harvard Square on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon and Herrell’s Mudpie flavor. I spent much of the weekend building a generic monoid-annotated self-balancing binary … Continue reading

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Science!

I am having, I think, a classic scientist moment. I just demonstrated that I can take an MRI pulse sequence, producing perfectly good, clear images, and introduce errors of the sort you would see if the target (perhaps an organ) … Continue reading

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bemasc.net

My car got towed yesterday, because of street cleaning. It cost me $140 to get it back. I was not happy. To cheer myself up, I bought myself a domain name! You can now reach this page just by typing … Continue reading

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To fix the network

(for context, see a review of OLPC’s networking troubles) A group of OLPC engineers, especially C. Scott Ananian and Michael Stone, were dissatisfied with the the behavior of the current collaboration stack, and decided to start from scratch, laying out … Continue reading

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A very brief and extremely selective history of OLPC and collaboration technology, performed entirely from memory

OLPC’s founders wanted to improve education, and in their vision, education requires communication. They envisioned a computer system in which students, and teachers, could easily work together on projects, and share all kinds of documents and media. To describe this … Continue reading

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