boingboing advocated this watch last december. it wasn't until I bought one and googled for the product manual that I found out that it was an al-qaeda favorite.

Anyone knows how this is any different from (or better than) using a regular CCD and adaptive optics?

From the article I linked: "Curved electro-optical detectors will enable the development of new optical design configurations that can be smaller than conventional flat-field designs, thereby benefiting many aerospace applications." In other words, with curved detectors, you can use lighter, simpler optics. because they don't have to adapt to (correct for) a flat sensor surface.

Here's an interesting 2003 article on curved focal surfaces, including CCDs.

http://www.ptbmagazine.com/content/040103_ora.html

I don't know what happened to fractals (in landscape image generation). I remember the "the Genesis effect" from back before the turn of the century. There's a wikipedia artcile on factal landscapes, but I don't know what's up with that these days.

This person is generating nice repeating patterns (like pleated curtains) with random alterations, using a small number of small image files and a small amount of computation to generate random numbers which guide the placement of those image files. Doing this with fractals would require computation that is orders of magnitude more costly.

Ya me too, cycling sine wave frequencies with different odd/prime values in x and y to generate wobble patterns. I probably learned about this idea when I was a kid playing with a Spirograph. I still like this tiling hack though.

I'm a hacker, over 50. If your uncle is 53, he got his undergraduate degree roundabout 1980. By 1980, C was already in full bloom, and UNIX had been around for 10 years and was becoming widespread in academia. By 1985, while he was still young, personal computing was rampant, with a choice of Apple, Sun, Microsoft, and many other flavors like Apollo, PERQ, SGI, Symbolics/LMI, etc. The choice of commercial OS technologies was much richer then than it is today. If he's still using Fortran 66 or 77 (there was no Fortran 70), it's because he hasn't progressed since those days. I don't pretend to be right on top of all the latest software technologies and fads, because I keep busy with other things, but I see no reason why even an old nerd can't use a modern Linux (or Apple or Win) PC with a language like C and/or a scripting language like Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl etc. And if your uncle is telling you to loop instead of recurse, you should refer him to Jon Bentley's "Writing Efficient Programs" (1982), where he said that you must measure before you optimize. Just blindly saying that you should use arrays as stacks is silly.

All have half-lives measured in hours or days, with the exception of cesium-137

which has a half-life of 30 years.

Maybe you are thinking of Zork?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork

Truly sir, 20 mils == 508 microns. Make sure you're protected.

The Plymouth Satellite came a bit after tail fins. It is still cool classic.

I imagine that FDA medical device directives would have rules for data security and for RF emissions as well. I am a bit more familiar with CE medical device directives, where there are different classes of compliance - a device that filters your blood has stricter rules than an exercise machine - but besides protecting patient data, I assume a computer or network device in a medical environment would have to have have low RF emissions, so that it doesn't interfere with other medical devices. When your microwave oven interferes with your cordless phone or your wifi network at home, it might be annoying, but a similar situation in a hospital would be a bigger problem.

Problems of an aging and stroke-prone population cross international boundaries. "Who can afford this?" and "Will insurance pay for this?" are good questions, and the answers are different from country to country, and from year to year. Note also that hospitals and insurance companies are slow-moving organizations. If robotic science was a clearly safe magic pill that cured strokes, I assume we would find someone to pay for that cure. But with cures that provide only some degree of improvement, the treatments go through the normal course of medical research, and if the treatments are found to have sufficient and lasting efficacy, the medical and insurance fields eventually adjust to incorporate the new treatments.

As it is, I've seen research that shows repeatable quality-of-life improvements from our robotic therapy, and I've been at clinics and hospitals where patients and their families have given me heartfelt thanks for my work, which, while very gratifying, does not count as a controlled repeatable verifiable research result.

then you are saying that exercising stroke vitcim's affected limbs doesn't improve their mobility. Which is kind of a dumb thing to say.

Yes, that's almost what I'm saying - that it doesn't necessarily improve mobility. I work on stroke therapy robots that can move people's limbs around in whatever way we feel makes a difference. Through long research, we have found that some ways make a difference, and other ways do not make a difference.

Our researchers have been working on the problem for 25 years - that is, we have research published back to the mid-1980s, for example:

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/7/1688

This is a seminal paper by one of our researchers, that spawned the field of rehab robotics. I have already posted other links to research earlier in this thread.

Note well, I'm not a researcher, I write software to control rehab robots. But I know that in our researchers' papers, they do experiments where one group of patients gets beneficial rehabilitative exercises on our robots, and a control group gets non-beneficial "fake" exercises on our robots, where the patient's limbs are moved by the robots, but not in a beneficial way.

So be careful when you use phrases like "It's so obviously likely to be useful."

You imply that I might have a problem with successful results from a competing method, but it's not so. I'm saying there's a difference between "shows promise" and research results, especially from research that has been going on for 25 years, and going on in earnest (it took a while to create and refine the robots) for more than 10 years.

I agree, show me the research. I work in the field of rehabilitation robotics for stroke, and I am not aware of science that says that simply assisting someone's movement will improve their neural/muscular function.

I've been working on this problem for 10 years (as a software designer, not a neuroscience researcher) and researchers who use our robots have many studies that show patient improvement, but this comes from providing controlled rehabilitation exercises, not just by driving their limbs with an exoskeleton. I think research indicates that the rehab benefit comes from having the patients work to control their own limbs (with assistance and guidance if necessary from a robot or therapist) rather than by just driving the limbs without the patient working the neural paths.

refs:
N Engl J Med 2010; 362:1772-1783 May 13, 2010
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0911341
http://www.interactive-motion.com/clinical_research.htm