Neelix (cat) Fetching, Flash Video Quality Again, and Human (Technological) Evolution and Computers

One of our kittens consistently fetches toys. Geordi (one of our other cats) and Katie (my father's cat) will do this also, but they get sick of it quickly and they were more into it as kittens.

Neelix will do it over and over for long periods, and will even drop it when told to. His brother picked up on what he was doing, by watching a few times and did the same, but rarely will most of the time. Their sister has no interest in fetching whatsoever, only playing with what I throw.

See video below (excuse the slight mess, we're still cleaning up after the remodel of the other room so we still have a few things scattered around).





The more you play and work with a cat (or any animal) the more and quicker they seem to be able to learn. Hmmm, just like humans.

This morning we saw a story on chimps that could consistently remember numbers flashed on a screen much better then an adult human (the researchers mentioned that children would probably be able to do it better then adults). Makes you think.

But I do think that a possibility is that this may have to do with a more specialized part of their evolution, possibly survival-related, that makes them better at this particular thing then the sign of a larger ability and intelligence. Just playing devil's advocate.

Flash Video Quality

As mentioned in a previous post, video quality suffers when converting to Flash video and the high compression involved in it.

The original high-res video the size was around twenty-three megs, conversion to mono audio with a medium bitrate, and medium quality video in Windows Media Video format knocked it down to about 1.32 meg.

After uploading here using Blogger's video upload and hosting the quality suffered immensely.

Again, I still prefer to host a video directly, instead of via YouTube, Google Video or (as I did here) Blogger's video storage. But it's quick and convenient to do so when the video doesn't have to be high quality.

Human (Technological) Evolution and Computers

I sometimes wonder though - are complex and moderately complex things like recording a video, connecting the camcorder, camera, or phone to a computer, and then uploading and hosting it on the Internet increasing the intelligence of humankind?

I'm a history buff, and it seems to me that some simple advances in primitive technology were so ludicrously basic that any modern kid would be able to have figured out better ways of doing things. Maybe it's just hindsight, it's easy to say that. But I suspect not.

Gene Roddenberry took this idea to a new level in a way that maybe some SF and Star Trek fans may not notice or realize and critics passed off as "bad science" or just a story vehicle.

If you watched the episodes at all you might notice that a number of his characters; adults and children alike, in various episodes of the all of the series - were able to almost intuitively use both alien instruments as well as those they weren't familiar with in general, or from the past or future. It always bothered me a bit.

But, even on a small scale, I'm able to sit down at unfamiliar software, computers, and other devices and figure them out in a short while; almost without thinking and on a intuitive and subconscious level. I've always been able to do that with machines and electronics, and I know others do also. And you see kids doing it all the time.

Can you imagine human evolution and affinity for technology evolving over hundreds of years? There's really no imagining what the species will be like or what it can do, maybe ol' Gene had something figured out there.

If you look at modern kids, even very young ones, they are able to make leaps of logic (when it comes to technology) that I wouldn't have been able to at their age, nor most of my peers. Yet some of the other life decisions of young people might be more questionable to those older then them.

I often wonder though, if the giant strides we've made in computer technology have meant that we haven't made consistent advances in other fields of human evolution, as well as other areas of technological evolution in general.

Where's our space habitats, our space-base manufacturing and zero gee medicine. Why are we still using internal combustion and burning fossil fuels when we have massive amounts of more energy available - solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogen, etc - to power the US without using a drop of oil (except in the manufacture of the plastics and polymers for doing this)?

I wonder also, in some fields of computer-related items - why are some still very behind? Is it because something like artificial intelligence really is hard to achieve, or because money and immediate demand drives research and innovation?

Think of personal aircraft. What's needed to make this happen? I believe that computer control, both of the individual aircraft as well as a network of traffic control would have to be in place for this to even begin to happen. Computer controls both in using the network (able to make automated decisions outside of what the network is telling it to do - like an uncontrolled aircraft heading in it's direction, or emergency procedures) as well as when the personal aircraft must be under the individuals own control. Big uphill battle to make any of this happen.

Busy, Finished the Dining Room, Theresa Birdfeeder Webcam, Black Friday, Logitech Orbit Webcam, Voice Thing from Vozme, Firefox 3 Alpha, XNView

Busy

It's been kinda a hectic couple weeks, as mentioned in a previous post. Hell, a hectic month come to think of it. With Xmas coming and I'm getting ready for that, then there was Thanksgiving, Black Friday (we never miss it), and all this month and next customers will be getting ready for Xmas and gearing up their businesses for it. Throw in the remodeling of our dining room... yea, I haven't had much time for blogging or much of interest to blog about.

Dining Room Remodel

Our house is OLD. Yea, OLD in capitals.

It's so old that even the historical department of the Watertown Daily Times and library couldn't find the original date that the house was built, or any references to when it was built or who built it (they did do a story on it many years ago).

Some say that War of 1812 soldiers were served in the serving window downstairs, and that their food was made in the very large cellar fireplace and dutch oven. Newspapers were found many years ago in the walls, from the 1812 period. The construction and how the stones are cut is certainly more primitive looking then the other stone houses I have examined, including my friend's up the road.

So who knows exactly how old it is. BTW, the pic at right is an old picture from a remodel that was done and before the house was in any kind of livable condition; well before I was born, it shows the dutch oven. I don't have a recent pic because it's hard to take one, as the modern furnace I put in a few years ago is right in front of it.

It has great character; people say. I'd love to own an old house, other's quip.

But it's also a lot of pain-in-the-ass trouble.

Like when we're remodeling the stone and original wood part. Nothing's straight.

And before you say that's true of many houses, including new ones, this is beyond that. Oh believe me - it's not your run-of-the-mill f'ew degrees off' or 'few inches off'. Very hard to make anything come even close to being right. It's so nice to work in the new addition that we put in - like night-and-day.

We've remodeled all the rooms in the house (except the third bedroom which is going to be a storage/craft room) and the dining room was last. We went with a bit of a rustic look, to cover the problems that would have taken major demo and reconstruction to fix. It's just a dining room after all, we walk through it and that's it.

The Pergo floor looks the best of anything we've done, I think - it was extremely easy to do, just as I suspected, but time-consuming due to all the cuts. The walls had to be patched, completely skim-coated and redone, and I had to rip off years of stucco and concrete and plaster from the fireplace, and cover and seal up everything. Then we built a closest, trimmed doors, leveled floors, added new support legs in the cellar, and a host of other things. Long, time-consuming.

But it's finally almost done, except for a little trim, a little touch-up, some tweaking, and such.

Theresa Birdfeeder Webcam

If you like webcams from around the area, or like birds or like to keep track of the weather - I have a webcam up.

There's a couple webcams in the area like the one overlooking Public Square in Watertown.

But I just ran across another birdfeeder webcam in the region, right in Theresa. You can find it here. It's hosted by a company called Wildbirds.net and even has a streaming webcam. Nice. The owner tells me that they are starting a new website up called NNYNow that may compete with Newzjunky. Should be interesting.

For more local webcams go to the webcam page Courtesy of Northern-NYS.com.

Black Friday

Black Friday is crazy. Crazy and exciting. You have to have a certain stomach for it, sure; and a certain attitude toward the whole thing.

There's certainly some good deals. If you don't mind waiting in line, the crowds, pushing, shoving, and such. And if you don't mind doing the same sometimes. Despite what some people say it's not junk or cheap crap (well, some is), you can get some great deals.

And it's a great way to observe human interactions at some of their most primitive (shopping ;).



Logitech Orbit Webcam

One of the things I picked up was a Logitech Orbit webcam for $19 (though I suspect the price will continue to drop on this, the whole face-following part didn't seem to catch on). The things sell for way over $100 normally.

This is not your normal cheapo webcam, the video and still quality is excellent (go to my webcam page and click the fav pictures link to compare the quality of the current pic with that of previous ones).

Plus it has a long cord, an optional stalk the head can be mounted on, is zoomable, has a built-in USB mike, high-quality optics, high resolution, and does pretty good in the dark (like my old Connectix/Logitech Quickcam). But perhaps the most interesting features is that it is motorized with servos and will follow your face as you videoconference and use a messenger program with video capabilities.

I only needed a new and better webcam to repalce my outdoor one, though I do videoconference with a group of web-designers and computer dudes once a week, so it'll be used for this also.

The face-following works well, though a bit jerky and the motors are loud (the cats are alternately scared and fascinated). The software that comes with it plugs into various messenger programs to allow you to use the face-following feature (say that five times real fast), and has some other okay options. Including using avatars instead of your real face. The avatars are freaky (see the one at left), their lip movements and expressions follow your's. Creeptastic.

I've been playing around with some third-party software that allows extra things to be done with it, and some examples of hacks. Like following the color red instead of a face. Lot of potential for interesting experiments and hacking with it.

Voice Thing from Vozme

Interesting little audio/voice applets from vozme.com that allows you to add the ability for a visitor to your website or blog to hear the text spoken in a a fairly good synthesized voice. The applet below allows you to swipe some text and hear it, but there's other options available like voice greetings and such when you enter a page.

Firefox 3 Alpha

Still evaluating Firefox 3 Alpha occasionally, and keeping up on some of the nightly builds when possible. The memory usage seems to be getting better, but there's still some leakage I think.

My ongoing thought is that many people who will update when the final version of the release comes out will be disappointed that it doesn't visually look different. It will probably be a letdown for some people, but rest-assured under the hood there seems to be some differences.

I've yet to test the malware, anti-virus integration, and better phishing filter with anything substantial. But the speed with the new rendering engine may be faster. It's so subjective sometimes with net-lag.

XnView

I do a lot with graphics and photos, sometimes hundreds a week. Displaying, editing, evaluating for websites, etc. The Windows XP graphics viewer is nice, and M$'s add-ons for it greatly enhance it. And when something heavy-duty is needed I got to something like Paint Shop Pro, Gimp2, etc.

But many times you just want to quickly look at something, or maybe just as quickly fix a red-eye, do a little editing, resizing, or such. I ran across XnView
and after trying out various other display programs I am happily using this. Previously I used Irfanview and frankly this is very similar, but with many more options.

At the top of alternatives I tried was Fast Stone Viewer, a close second when it came to this sort of program. It's downfall for me was the program allowing only once instance of itself to run. Many times I want to compare pics side-by-side, I couldn't seem to do that with this program. Otherwise, the interface was nicer and it may have have had a few more tertiary options. But it read only about twenty file formats.

At the other end of the spectrum was programs like Picasa from Google. Gahk, nothing like making a program tailored to the lowest common denominator when it comes to computer users, though it's excellent for cataloging your photos.

Xnview can use Adobe Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro plugins, can do four hundred file formats, does lots of conversions, has many specific plugins and addons for doing various things, can edit EXIF, has lossless rotating and cropping and all the regular basic photo and graphic manipulation, simple editing, ability to load other programs of your specification, has batch conversions, imports TWAIN and clipboard items, is drag'n'drop of course, and generally does a good job of replacing the standard Windows graphics and fax viewer.

And it's free, can't beat that. Give it a try if you need a graphics viewer.

Kittens Playing

Finally got around to trying the blogger's video upload. Let's see how it works, with this video of the kittens taking turns playing with a toy.