Guadalupe Sabio lidera un proyecto para hacer frente a las enfermedades cardiacas Leer

Electric bikes come in all shapes and sizes, but few will turn heads quite like the Mod Easy SideCar Sahara. This limited-edition ebike has been inspired by the WWII-era BMW R75 motorcycle, and comes complete with sand-beige desert camouflage.

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Category: Bicycles, Transport

Tags: ebikes, Pedal-assisted, Retro, Sidecar

El Padre Nicolás predicó sobre nuestra fragilidad humana y la misericordia de Dios. Father Nicolás preached on our human frailty and God’s mercy.

El Padre Nicolás predicó sobre nuestra ocupación buscando lo eterno o lo temporal. Father Nicholas preached about our occupation looking for the eternal or the temporal.

StarLite glasses now are available with classic camouflage temples.

PMXTREME, Venture II and Brevard (shown) safety glasses feature an ultrarealistic camo pattern and have been designed for the highest impact standards and all-day comfort.

WHOLLY® GUACAMOLE Extra Chunky Restaurant Style is made with chunks of real, 100% Hass avocados, tomatoes and red onions, as well as cilantro, lime juice, jalapeño peppers and a blend of seasonings.

Annie Eye Protection, the newest addition to the Girl Power at Work line, is bold pink camo eye protection featuring a choice of clear or gray scratch-resistant coated lenses.

XpertDox has partnered with Cucamonga Valley Medical Group to integrate XpertCoding, XpertDox's automated AI medical coding platform, into CVMG's primary care operations

Todd Caccamo

Today, Frenchie Closet, a leading online provider of high-quality French Bulldog accessories and apparel, is excited to announce the launch of its new "Camo Line" collection. The collection, suitable for all breeds, is perfect for all dog owners.

In this hour, four stories about secret identities and true selves. A secular man immerses himself in a Christian world; a young woman pledges herself to a humble life of joy; a father writes in his son’s voice; and a young man from Sierra Leone is enlisted to serve in war. Hosted by The Moth’s Executive Producer, Sarah Austin Jenness. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media.

Hosted by: Sarah Austin Jenness

Storytellers:

Kevin Rose goes undercover at a Evangelical Christian university.

Sister Carolyn Martin commits herself to a love greater than any other.

Boris Timanovsky has a transatlantic pen pal adventure.

Abraham Leno has a dream of college are threatened when war breaks out in his country.

Estacionar el vehículo en doble fila supone una infracción Leer

Los mafiosos italianos llevan años escogiendo la Comunidad para pasar temporadas de descanso y ocultarse de la justicia

Escuche el programa de este jueves 26 de septiembre. La Luciérnaga, un espacio de humor y opinión de Caracol Radio que desde hace 31 años acompaña a sus oyentes en su regreso casa.

En 10AM Hoy por Hoy estuvo Peter Laugharn, presidente y CEO de la Fundación Contad N. Hilton, hablando sobre cómo impulsan el empleo formal y el desarrollo de la población migrante en Colombia.

Uno de los temas que preocupan a los ciudadanos que viven en el norte del país tiene que ver con el costo del servicio de energía, por esto, se están tomando medidas para frenar los costos

En Caracol Radio estuvo Néstor Espitia, ganadero de Cimitarra, conversando sobre la sobreproducción de la leche y la falta de compradores

En 6AM Hoy por Hoy de Caracol Radio estuvo el abogado Francisco Bernate, quien defiende a defensa de Luis Eduardo López, para hablar sobre cuáles serán los puntos con los que pedirán un “principio de oportunidad parcial”, por escándalo de la UNGRD.

The Day 6 music panel runs down the best pop music of 2022, Hamilton's music director Alex Lacamoire, Bruce Springsteen's original manager Mike Appel on getting the Boss signed to CBS and more.

[BULLETIN: Quicklisp now has the latest version of FSet.]

Sycamore, primarily by Neil Dantam, is a functional collections library that is built around the same weight-balanced binary tree data structure (with leaf vectors) that FSet uses.  While the README on that page comments briefly on the differences between Sycamore and FSet, I don't feel that it does FSet justice.  Here is my analysis.

Dantam claims that his library is 30% to 50% faster than FSet on common operations.  While I haven't done comprehensive micro-benchmarking, a couple of quick tests indicates that this claim is plausible.  A look through the internals of the implementation confirms that it is clean and tight, and I must commend him.  There may be some techniques in here that I could usefully borrow.

Most of the performance difference is necessitated by two design choices that were made differently in the two libraries.  One of these Dantam mentions in his comparison: FSet's use of a single, global ordering relation implemented as a CLOS generic function, vs. Sycamore's more standard choice of requiring a comparison function to be supplied when a collection is created.  The other one he doesn't mention: the fact that FSet supports a notion of equivalent-but-unequal values, which are values that are incomparable — there's no way, or at least no obvious way, to say which is less than the other, and yet we want to treat them as unequal.  The simplest example is the integer 1 and the single-float 1.0, which have equal numerical values (and cl:= returns true on them), but which are nonetheless not eql.  (I have a previous blog post that goes into a lot more detail about equality and comparison.)  Since Sycamore expects the user-supplied comparison function to return an integer that is negative, zero, or positive to indicate the ordering of its arguments, there's no encoding for the equivalent-but-unequal case, nor is there any of the code that would be required to handle that case.

Both of these decisions were driven by my goal for the FSet project.  I didn't just want to provide a functional collections library that could be called occasionally when one had a specific need for such a data structure.  My ambition was much grander: to make functional collections into a reasonable default choice for the vast majority of programming situations.  I wanted FSet users (including, of course, myself) to be able to use functional collections freely, with very little extra effort or thought.  While Lisp by itself reaches a little bit in this direction — lists can certainly be used functionally — lists used as functional collections run into severe time complexity problems as those collections get large.  I wanted the FSet collections to be as convenient and well-supported as lists, but without the time complexity issues.

— Or rather, I wanted them to be even more convenient than lists.  Before writing FSet, I had spent years working in a little-known proprietary language called Refine, which happened to be implemented on top of Common Lisp, so it was not unusual to switch between the two languages.  And I had noticed something.  In contrast to CL, with its several different predefined equality predicates and with its functions that take :test arguments to specify which one to use, Refine has a single notiion of equality.  The value space is cleanly divided between immutable types, which are compared by value — along with numbers, these include strings, sets, maps, and seqs — and mutable objects, which are always compared by identity.  And it worked!  I found I did not miss the ability to specify an equality predicate when performing an operation such as "union".  It was just never needed.  Get equality right at the language level, and the problem goes away.

Although FSet's compare generic function isn't just for equality — it also defines an ordering that is used by the binary trees — I thought it would probably turn out to be the case that a single global ordering, implemented as a generic function and therefore extensible, would be fine the vast majority of the time.  I think experience has borne this out.  And just as you can mix types in Lisp lists — say, numbers and symbols — without further thought, so you can have any combination of types in an FSet set, effortlessly.  (A project I'm currently working on actually takes considerable advantage of this capability.)

As for supporting equivalent-but-unequal values, this desideratum flows directly from the principle of least astonishment.  While it might not be too surprising for a set or map implementation to fail distinguish the integer 1 from the float 1.0, it certainly would be very surprising, and almost certainly a source of bugs in a compiler that used it, for it to fail to distinguish two uninterned symbols with the same name.  (I saw a macro expansion recently that contained two distinct symbols that both printed as #:NEW.  It happens.)  A compiler using Sycamore for a map on symbols would have to supply a comparison function that accounted for this; it couldn't just compare the package name and symbol name.  (You'd have to do something like keep a weak hash table mapping symbols to integers, assigned in the order in which the comparison function encountered them.  It's doable, but FSet protects you from this madness.)

Along with those deep semantic design choices, I've spent a lot of time on developing a wide and featureful API for FSet (an effort that's ongoing).  FSet has many features that Sycamore lacks, including:

• seqs, a binary-tree sequence implementation that holds arbitrary Lisp objects (Sycamore ropes hold only characters, which is certainly an important special case, but why restrict ourselves?)
• default values for maps and seqs (the value to return when the key is outside the domain is associated with the collection, not supplied at the call site; this turns out to be a significant convenience)
• generic functions that operate on both lists and FSet collections, to shadow the CL builtins
  
• the powerful map-union and map-intersection operations (I'll blog about these in the future)
• more ways to iterate over the collections (the FSet tutorial has a good summary, about 3/4 of the way down)
• speaking of the tutorial, FSet has lots more documentation

Let me digress slightly to give an example of how FSet makes programming more elegant and convenient.  Joe Marshall just put up a blog post comparing Go(lang) with Common Lisp, which is worth a read on its own; I'm just going to grab a code snippet from there to show a little bit of what programming with FSet is like.  Here's Joe's code:

 (defun collate (items &key (key #'identity) (test #'eql) (merger (merge-adjoin #'eql)) (default nil))
   (let ((table (make-hash-table :test test)))
     (dolist (item items table)
       (let ((k (funcall key item)))
         (setf (gethash k table) (funcall merger (gethash k table default) item))))))

 (defun merge-adjoin (test)
   (lambda (collection item)
     (adjoin item collection :test test)))

And here's what I would write using FSet:

(Well, I would probably move result outside the dolist form to make it clearer what the return value is, but let's go with Joe's stylistic choice here.)

For those who haven't used FSet: the form (map :default (set)) creates a map whose default is the empty set, meaning that lookups on that map will return the empty set if the key is not in the map.  This saves the includef form from having to handle that possibility.

My version makes assumptions, it's true, about how you want to collect the items with a given key; it doesn't give you other choices.  It could, but what would be the point?  It's already using a general set with better time complexity than lists, and saving you from having to write anything like merge-adjoin.  The extensible global equivalence relation means you're not going to need to supply a :test either.

I think the FSet-enhanced code is cleaner, more elegant, and therefore clearer than the plain-CL version.  Don't you agree?  Maybe you wouldn't say it's a huge improvement, okay, but it's a small example; in a larger codebase, I would argue, these small improvements add up.

* * * * *

To summarize: if you just want a library you can call in a few places for specific purposes, Sycamore might work better for you (but think hard if you're writing a comparator for symbols).  FSet can certainly be used that way, but it can be much more.  If you want to see one way in which Common Lisp can be made into a better language, without giving up anything that we love about it, I urge you to give FSet a try.

FSet has changed the way I write Lisp programs.  — an FSet user

(UPDATE: the magnitude of the performance difference between FSet and Sycamore surprised me, and inspired me to do some profiling of FSet.  It turned out that I could get a 20% speedup on one micro-benchmark simply by adding some inline declarations.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa; I should have done this years ago.   With that change, the generic function overhead appears to be the only significant cause of the remaining ~20% performance difference.  I tried creating a Sycamore set using a thin wrapper around fset:compare, and the resulting performance was very similar to that of FSet with its new inlines.)

Here we have two hardened, wild bunnies of the north! Perfectly camouflaged to blend in with their wintery world.

-Sally Squeeps

(Image source: daddyisproudofme) 

Cats, like most animals, have developed camouflage appearances so that they blend into the background in their natural habitat. But they can also blend into the background in manmade spaces, like the kitchen cabinets, so they can hide and spy on their humans. Have you found the cat in the image above yet? It took me an embarrassing amount of time to see it, but now I can't un-see it. But that's just the beginning. In the picture below, you can easily see three cats. But there are four.

(Image credit: No_Internal9345)

The subreddit Find the Sniper is full of these kinds of puzzles -and they're not all cats. Bored Panda selected 30 very hard ones for a ranked list that may drive you insane. I believe finding the owl was the hardest. There are answers in the comments, but if you want to find the hidden thing on your own, you can click the credit under each photo and go the the original reddit post, where you can enlarge the picture greatly. If you try more than a couple, it will suck up hours of your time.   

I was one of the outside readers1 for a volume in Cambridge University Press’s enormous “Elements” series, The New Witches of the West, by Ethan Doyle White. (Link is to Amazon US) To find that title, go to the main … Continue reading →

Credit: David Marshall, University of Bristol

Artist Abbot Thayer illustrated the prevalence of camouflage in the animal world and advocated using it as a military tactic

The show coincides with an initiative that will give away 49 of the tree's saplings to individuals and communities across the country

Sharks less likely to interact as LED lights get brighter

Did that rock move, or is it a squirrel crossing the road? Tracking objects that look a lot like their surroundings is a big problem for many autonomous vision systems. AI algorithms can solve this camouflage problem, but they take time and computing power. A new camera designed by researchers in South Korea provides a faster solution. The camera takes inspiration from the eyes of a cat, using two modifications that let it distinguish objects from their background, even at night.

“In the future … a variety of intelligent robots will require the development of vision systems that are best suited for their specific visual tasks,” says Young Min Song, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and one of the camera’s designers. Song’s recent research has been focused on using the “perfectly adapted” eyes of animals to enhance camera hardware, allowing for specialized cameras for different jobs. For example, fish eyes have wider fields of view as a consequence of their curved retinas. Cats may be common and easy to overlook, he says, but their eyes actually offer a lot of inspiration.

This particular camera copied two adaptations from cats’ eyes: their vertical pupils and a reflective structure behind their retinas. Combined, these allowed the camera to be 10 percent more accurate at distinguishing camouflaged objects from their backgrounds and 52 percent more efficient at absorbing incoming light.

Using a vertical pupil to narrow focus

While conventional cameras can clearly see the foreground and background of an image, the slitted pupils of a cat focus directly on a target, preventing it from blending in with its surroundings. Kim et al./Science Advances

In conventional camera systems, when there is adequate light, the aperture—the camera’s version of a pupil—is small and circular. This structure allows for a large depth of field (the distance between the closest and farthest objects in focus), clearly seeing both the foreground and the background. By contrast, cat eyes narrow to a vertical pupil during the day. This shifts the focus to a target, distinguishing it more clearly from the background.

The researchers 3D printed a vertical slit to use as an aperture for their camera. They tested the vertical slit using seven computer vision algorithms designed to track moving objects. The vertical slit increased contrast between a target object and its background, even if they were visually similar. It beat the conventional camera on five of the seven tests. For the two tests it performed worse than the conventional camera, the accuracies of the two cameras were within 10 percent of each other.

Using a reflector to gather additional light

Cats can see more clearly at night than conventional cameras due to reflectors in their eyes that bring extra light to their retinas.Kim et al./Science Advances

Cat eyes have an in-built reflector, called a tapetum lucidum, which sits behind the retina. It reflects light that passes through the retina back at it, so it can process both the incoming light and reflected light, giving felines superior night vision. You can see this biological adaptation yourself by looking at a cat’s eyes at night: they will glow.

The researchers created an artificial version of this biological structure by placing a silver reflector under each photodiode in the camera. Photodiodes without a reflector generated current when more than 1.39 watts per square meter of light fell on them, while photodiodes with a reflector activated with 0.007 W/m² of light. That means the photodiode could generate an image with about 1/200th the light.

Each photodiode was placed above a reflector and joined by metal electrodes to create a curved image sensor.Kim et al./Science Advances

To decrease visual aberrations (imperfections in the way the lens of the camera focuses light), Song and his team opted to create a curved image sensor, like the back of the human eye. In such a setup, a standard image sensor chip won’t work, because it’s rigid and flat. Instead it often relies on many individual photodiodes arranged on a curved substrate. A common problem with such curved sensors is that they require ultrathin silicon photodiodes, which inherently absorb less light than a standard imager’s pixels. But reflectors behind each photodiode in the artificial cat’s eye compensated for this, enabling the researchers to create a curved imager without sacrificing light absorption.

Together, vertical slits and reflectors led to a camera that could see more clearly in the dark and isn’t fooled by camouflage. “Applying these two characteristics to autonomous vehicles or intelligent robots could naturally improve their ability to see objects more clearly at night and to identify specific targets more accurately,” says Song. He foresees this camera being used for self-driving cars or drones in complex urban environments.

Song’s lab is continuing to work on using biological solutions to solve artificial vision problems. Currently, they are developing devices that mimic how brains process images, hoping to one day combine them with their biologically-inspired cameras. The goal, says Song, is to “mimic the neural systems of nature.”

Song and his colleague’s work was published this week in the journal Science Advances.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue.

We’re very pleased to see Barb Howard’s review of Sara Power’s Art of Camouflage in Alberta Views. Howard writes: “Sara Power’s strong debut collection, Art […]

The post Art of Camouflage reviewed in Alberta Views appeared first on Freehand Books.

Smart, flexible skins measure and adapt to ambient temperatures

Smart, flexible skins measure and adapt to ambient temperatures

Fancy your chops are a designer? Skoda Auto India has a challenge for you. Rajesh Karkera/Rediff.com brings us the lowdown.

If pet owners often resemble their pets, then by proxy does that mean squee babies often resemble their pillows?

Video: Learn about the bobtail squid and its interesting relationship with beneficial bacteria.

Can you spot all of these incognito critters?

Joseph Ford creates optical illusions with handmade knitted sweaters against real-life backdrops.

While out on a trip to photograph Arizona's latest winter storm, I came across this camouflaged Cadillac ELR.

An article of footwear with a hydroplaning-resistant outsole and camouflaged toe cap is disclosed. In one example, an article of footwear includes an outsole with a ground contacting surface including a first and second plurality of angled channels angled relative to longitudinal and lateral axes of the footwear. Each angled channel in the first plurality of angled channels extends from the toe to an outer edge of a mid-foot region of the outsole, and each angled channel in the second plurality of angled channels extends from a back portion of the heel to a front portion of the heel. The ground contacting surface also includes a plurality of lateral waved grooves intersecting the first and second plurality of angled channels, and a plurality of lateral waved sipes intersecting the plurality of lateral waved grooves and the first and second plurality of angled channels.

The stealthiness of a camouflage fabric product is enhanced by rendering the camouflage pattern in three dimensional relief. In one implementation, a treatment such as an anti-pill treatment is applied to selected portions of the pattern prior to a finishing process. In the case of a circular web fabric, the finishing process may involve fleecing the fabric. In this manner, a cost effective process is provided for constructing a three-dimensional relief camouflage fabric product.

A NSW Central Coast man has been donning camouflage to attack girls, one as young as 12, with police describing the clothing worn in one attack as a ghillie suit.

A Gosford judge describes Troy Johnson, a father of three who stalked and sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl as she walked to school, as "hideous" and "depraved" before jailing him for almost 30 years.

The British Navy knew it couldn't completely disguise a ship to protect it from attack during WWI. So they turned to 'Dazzle Painting'

American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) is a native tree that can be affected by a fungal disease known as anthracnose. Several factors such as wet weather and lower average temperatures have combined to make this a more severe year for this condition. While many of the trees in the sycamore family are showing signs of stress, experts at the Delaware Forest Service believe that the majority of these will recover and leaf out normally as temperatures warm toward summer.

Watch a remarkable clip of Heidi the octopus as she sleeps and dreams – from the new PBS series, Octopus: Making Contact.