Aaron Hertzmann

@aaronhertzmann.com

3723 Followers 283 Following

www.dgp.toronto.edu/~hertzman

Probabilistic weather simulation
Nordsieck's Differential Analyzer from 1950
The five freedoms for animals from the Humane Society. The Five Freedoms ensure that we meet the mental and physical needs of animals in our care: Freedom from hunger and thirst by ready access to fresh water and diet to maintain health and vigor. This must be specific to the animal. For example, puppies, adult dogs, pregnant cats, and senior cats all need different types of food provided on different schedules. Freedom from discomfort by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area. This means you should provide soft bedding and an area with appropriate temperature, noise levels, and access to natural light. If an animal is outside, it must have shelter from the elements as well as appropriate food and water bowls that will not freeze or tip over. Freedom from pain, injury, or disease by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment. This includes vaccinating animals, monitoring animals, physical health, treating any injuries and providing appropriate medications. Freedom to express normal behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities, and company of the animal's own kind. Animals need to be able to interact with — or avoid — others of their own kind as desired. They must be able to stretch every part of their body (from nose to tail), and run, jump, and play. This can be particularly challenging when animals are housed in individual kennels. Freedom from fear and distress by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering. The mental health of an animal is just as important as its physical health — as psychological stress can quickly transition into physical illness. These conditions can be achieved by preventing overcrowding and providing sufficient enrichment and safe hiding spaces.
Mac laptop
Book cover: _Don't Shoot the Dog_ by Karen Pryor
Bernardo: sun's out, tongue's out
Shelter dog Xochi sits while being commanded to sit, with a big excited smile on her face.
Excerpt from Brooks article: Marvin Minsky called words that carry a variety of meanings “suitcase words.” “Learning” is a powerful suitcase word; it can refer to so many different types of experience. Learning to use chopsticks is a very different experience from learning the tune of a new song. And learning to write code is a very different experience from learning your way around a city. When people hear that machine learning is making great strides in some new domain, they tend to use as a mental model the way in which a person would learn that new domain. However, machine learning is very brittle, and it requires lots of preparation by human researchers or engineers, special-purpose coding, special-purpose sets of training data, and a custom learning structure for each new problem domain. Today’s machine learning is not at all the sponge-like learning that humans engage in, making rapid progress in a new domain without having to be surgically altered or purpose-built. Likewise, when people hear that a computer can beat the world chess champion (in 1997) or one of the world’s best Go players (in 2016), they tend to think that it is “playing” the game just as a human would. Of course, in reality those programs had no idea what a game actually was, or even that they were playing. They were also much less adaptable. When humans play a game, a small change in rules does not throw them off. Not so for AlphaGo or Deep Blue. Suitcase words mislead people about how well machines are doing at tasks that people can do. That is partly because AI researchers—and, worse, their institutional press offices—are eager to claim progress in an instance of a suitcase concept. The important phrase here is “an instance.” That detail soon gets lost. Headlines trumpet the suitcase word, and warp the general understanding of where AI is and how close it is to accomplishing more.
Quick cartoon I drew of a person. Eyes are too high up in the head for a realistic drawing. For a cartoon this is great, but not if this were an initial sketch for a realistic drawing or painting.
A houseplant with several branches and several leaves per branch
Flowchart from source copy to a mental representation produced by perception, to a copy of the drawing made by motor control.
The author sketching a church altar on an iPad
A 1969 artwork by John Baldessari, one of his "Commissioned Paintings," painted by a hired worker
Still from "Creature Comforts" short film by Aardman Animation, of a turtle being interviewed
Review instructions that say: "Be Professional Belittling or sarcastic comments, or comments on authors’ personalities, have no place in the reviewing process. Please evaluate the work, not the authors. The most valuable comments in a review are those that help the authors understand the shortcomings of their work and how they might improve it. Be respectful and carefully explain what you consider strengths and weaknesses of a submission, and how you weigh these relative to each other, so the authors can learn from your expertise."
Pearblossom Highway #2, photomontage by David Hockney, creating a composition of many different, smaller photographs
First picture: a wide-angle projection of a scene with marginal distortion in the corners.
Two renderings, one with wide-angle linear perspective and a volleyball in the corner (with marginal distortion), and one where the volleyball has its own local linear perspective, and the text "Which one looks more like a volleyball?"
Anonymous 12th Century Chinese painting using parallel projection
Smartphone photo of Plaza del Pilar, showing marginal distortion: a sphere and a face in the corners of the photo are stretched
Diagram of linear perspective projection, by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, 1583