ctrl.altered.mind

rs6 sent me a link to this guy’s album, where a few pictures of the 2008 Audi R8 reside. This beauty was apparently waiting for the press kit shoot in Beverly Hills, CA.

For the uninitiated, the R8 is a road car that will be launched in 2007, and shares its name with the famous Audi R8 race car that won the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2005 (Audi took 3rd place in 2003, when  the Bentley Speed 8 broke the R8’s six consecutive win streak).

The Audi R8 will be available in mid-2007 with a 4.2 L V8 making 420 hp, as seen in the Audi RS4. Pricing for the 420 bhp model starts from $140,000 USD. A  520 hp version is rumored to be in the making, although Audi has not yet confirmed this.

More pictures of the 2008 Audi R8

Consistency of performance is a primary basis for any sport. If you’ve wondered why it isn’t possible for the human brain to tune itself such that it can repeatedly perform a task with near-perfect consistency, the explanation to that is now out. There would perhaps be a minimal competitive advantage in sport if our brains could learn to perform consistently - for mere practice would help achieve a perfect strike each time we bowl, or hit the bulls-eye at every game of darts (assuming external factors remain constant).

The reason for this, as a Stanford study suggests, is that the human brain has to start from scratch each time a movement is planned. Our neurons are not wired to retain and adapt to repetitive motion as was previously conceived, and muscles are to blame for less than half of the mechanical inconsistencies observed during movement.

As Krishna Shenoy, study co-author and assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, puts it, “The main reason you can’t move the same way each time, such as swinging a golf club, is that your brain can’t plan the swing the same way each time.”

According to study co-author and postdoctoral researcher Mark Churchland, “The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again. The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you’ve never done before.”

As the study results demonstrate, “effect magnitudes were such that at least half of the observed movement variability likely had its source during motor preparation. Thus, even for a highly practiced task, the ability to repeatedly plan the same movement limits our ability to repeatedly execute the same movement.”

If motion validation at the neural level were possible, I wonder if this would help eliminate the partial responsibility that muscles have on the accuracy of movement. It would be very interesting to research this aspect further, as I’m sure many research groups are. At the very least, it would be of tremendous help in alleviating motion inconsistencies in debilitating diseases.

Link: BBC Article 

Abstract, Neuron, Volume 52, Issue 6 , 21 December 2006, Pages 1085-1096

An advertisement by BMW.

An Audi response.

(I’ve not verified if these are real ads, but they are funny nevertheless!).

Update! rs6 brings up the point that Subaru joined in here as well, with this advertisement. They still look photoshopped and unofficial to me.

Link to Autoblog post

If there is space, it needs to be mapped. Everyone needs direction at some point and in some form, and needless to say, a good variety of tools exists as far as geographical mapping needs need to be satisfied. As an orientationally challenged individual, I find myself resorting to online mapping services much more than the average person, although I’m sure no one would complain as these services (online and otherwise) are constantly improved upon and expanded. While Mapquest has existed for a long time, the online maps sector was just evolving linearly until Google stepped in with a revolutionary interface and provided the thrust that has boosted efforts tremendously in this area. Everyone, be it Microsoft, Yahoo, and a slew of others, are investing heavily in the field.

While Google added most desirable features like fluid drag and zoom abilities to their map interface, they also went a step further and enhanced maps with ideas like satellite and hybrid views. The innovation does not stop here, of course. Microsoft’s Live Search has added 3D capability to their online map feature, which gets lets you view regions at a fly-by angle, eerily close enough to be able to accurately identify the make and model of each car on any road in the US (if not the license plate, not yet). Live Search has definitely seen a great deal of innovation in its interface since its launch around September this year, and the current interface is slick and functional without compromising on ease of use.

The most important benefit that has yet to be tapped, however, is the ability to map just about any spatial expanse and region, not just sections of the Earth’s surface. For example, real-estate businesses might be interested in online solutions to create highly interactive maps of their houses and locales for sale. Neurologists would like an easy way to create a map of a section of the brain. K-12 School teachers and educationists most definitely would like to create maps too, such as one for a tree or the human body. I was pleased to hear about a free, community-based service called MapLib.net (thanks, rs6) that lets anyone create an online, interactive custom map based on Google’s mapping API.

According to MapLib.net’s introduction:

” [the service] turns any image you uploaded as large as 6000*6000 into a custom Google Map and makes it zoomable & draggable with fantastic viewing experience, in really simple two steps. You can make annotations for it by adding markers, as well as embed it in your own web pages or blog.”

MapLib.net is a bilingual website currently operating in English and Chinese. It is currently in beta, but I definitely would like to see it being polished and upgraded soon. This would be a very good candidate for Google to incorporate under their flag.

I get tons of email alerts as forwards from well-wishing friends, most of which are easy to recognize as hoaxes. I believe these are passed on with the hope that there might be an iota of truth in them, although I’d wish people did some basic research before accepting notions as facts. One such email that I just received seemed quite interesting, so I thought I’d try and find out more, but a quick search immediately classified this as a hoax.

The email goes as follows:

PIN NUMBER REVERSAL (GOOD TO KNOW) If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse.

For example if your pin number is 1234 then you would put in 4321. The ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the
machine. The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to
the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to help you. This information was recently broadcasted on TV and it states that it is seldom used because people don’t know it exists.

There is some history behind such a system - such an idea was patented by Joseph Zingher, a Chicago businessman, in 1998. Banks have never adopted the system despite multiple sales pitches to implement panic code alert systems into ATMs, and for valid  debatable reasons. Mental acuity is greatly compromised when a gun is held to one’s head. Besides, the number reversal system would not work with palindromes (e.g. 7447, 3883) and would require an alternate system anyway.

More info about this urban legend

An article on the Bhopal campaign written by AID Boston volunteer Somnath Mukherji appeared in the Statesman, December 1 2006. The full-text is reproduced below.

The author is an electrical engineer based in Boston.

(Click here if you’re wondering what this is about)

On 26 July, 2006, 34-year-old Sunil Verma hung himself from the ceiling of his room. He was wearing a T-shirt which said: “No more Bhopals”. It was 22 years ago on the intervening night of 2-3 December that a cloud of lethal gas from Union Carbide’s (UC) pesticide factory took the life of his parents and five of his siblings. Sunil was one of many victims that the world’s worst industrial disaster continues to claim after more than two decades. Today, 150,000 people continue to live with mental and physiological damage besides the 20,000 who have succumbed to them.

Was Sunil’s death a tragedy? The editor of a local newspaper in Boston had objected to my usage of the phrase “Bhopal gas tragedy”. Tragedy, he had said, connotes a sense of inevitability, a mysterious hand of destiny and fate. I stood corrected. There was nothing inevitable about either the gas leak of 1984, or Sunil’s death. The seeds of the disaster were sown the day the site of UC’s plant was chosen in the midst of a densely populated poor neighbourhood despite the large amounts of lethal chemicals needed during the manufacture of Sevin. Storing inordinately large amounts of methylisocyanate (MIC) in the plant, cutting corners in safety mechanisms, importing unproven technologies and a general neglect due to less than desired profits, precipitated the disaster on that wintry night…

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