Monism bruit

monism (n.): the metaphysical and theological view that all is one, that there are no fundamental divisions and a unified set of laws underlie nature.

bruit(n.): 1. a rumor or report; 2. (Medicine) any generally abnormal sound or murmur heard on auscultation (using a stethoscope).

Hmm, it gave two nouns this time - usually it gives an adjective then noun. Oh well. Monism sounds strange but it's just like dualism (in fact it's the exact analogy of dualism).

In any case, this is my last post before I leave to Winter Camp and I won't be back until the 8th/9th. Onto things:

My parents know the founders of Wowee, so we got a RoboQuad from them yesterday:

Of course, it works about as well as our Roomba does - that is to say, not at all. That shouldn't be too much of a surprise to you if you've kept up with these things - even the most advanced 'robot's by Sony and all the other Japanese companies/universities work really clumsily - and this one (and the Roomba, too, probably) retails for only $200 in comparison. Silly people should stop trying to work on "AI" and set their minds to less lofty goals.

Of course, it still moves, albeit horribly. It comes with a remote control and you can set it to do random actions. Really, they should have improved the walking though - it can't walk at all on our wooden floors and inches forward (more like millimeters forward) on carpet. The video above is it in "Guard Mode".

Little kids must find it okay though, which is probably why Wowwee is doing okay/well.

Talking about little kids, I also got a pez dispenser yesterday, for the first time in a long time. Oddly enough I recalled pez tablets as tasting a bit better than they did...

Also, Penny Arcade recently linked to Amulet. Usually I don't read much of comics (or graphic novels, whatever you like to call them), but the art in Amulet looks really good (take a look at their desktop wallpaper. Maybe I just like the style of art, but I'll probably end up picking it up anyway just for it (and if the storyline is good as well, hurray).

Also, I just noticed how amazing 3GPP compression was today. I knew they'd been parotting the virtues of quick mobile transmission, etc., etc., but I noticed that the 164 KB .3GP version of the movie above turned into an 8.82 MB raw API. "raw" being the key word, but still, compression by such a large factor is impressive.

Aaron, you should take a look at this.

My friend showed me this yesterday- why intuition doesn't work in 10 dimensions:

First, let's look at 2 dimensions. Consider a square of side length 4, with four radius 1 circles inscribed in each of the corners, and a central circle inscribed between the four circles, as below:

You'll find that the central circle has radius . This is pretty easily seen since the distance from the center of any red circle to the corner of the square is , the distance from the center of the green circle (which is the same as the center of the square) to the corner is , and the radius of the red circle is 1. Similarly, if you have a 4 by 4 by 4 cube instead, the radius of the green sphere will be. And if you have an n-dimensional cube of side length 4, the radius of the green n-sphere will be .

Now, what happens when - the radius of the green 10-sphere is - so the green sphere, which is inscribed inside the box, reaches outside the box =).

That's all for now. Maybe when I come back I'll finally post Artefactual coattail #4 or fix up Artefactual coattail #3.