I generally post a new thread here only when I encounter something technology and/or science related that I believe people on PD will enjoy.
Additionally, I created the
Privacy Thread,
Security Thread (and to a lesser extent, the
Unlimited Shitting On Google Thread) for specific topics that I really care about and think are important to share (or in the case of Security Thread also sometimes are simply cool to know about).
I also really enjoy the
Python thread and would generally like to encourage more computer programming-related discussion here. Except that's of course limited by the amount of members able to understand and discuss such topics. Still, there are a great many ways in which all sorts of code can be used for Discordian-related purposes (I should probably write a post about what I mean, some time, it's off-topic ITT, however).
As you may notice, the above posts are mainly about
technology, not so much
science. That's because most advances in science that I read about are Computer Science and Computational Science. And as long as there aren't any more advanced programming discussions and I'm the only one who occasionally posts a LaTeX formula (usually in a bad attempt at humour), I don't really see news about those fields eliciting much more than a "huh, cool". Machine Learning algorithms, faster Fourier transforms, novel hash functions, some obscure crypto function got a few bits less secure ...
For instance, I got a PDF open right now called
Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World which describes a Computer Vision algorithm that amplifies subtle changes in a video feed. Apparently it works so well that you can record your face with a cheap webcam and it'll change your skin colour between yellowish and red
with the frequency of your heartbeat because it can amplify the subtle changes in colour due to blood flow in your face. Pretty cool huh? I thought so too, but also for me it's just "huh, cool" until I've studied the PDF and figure out HOW they do this (broadly they build a spatial decomposition pyramid for the image, then apply a temporal filter to those elements--in this case a bandpass centred on plausible heartbeat frequencies--and then recompose the image using for each element of the pyramid a weighted sum of the original and filtered element. seems pretty simple actually, but there are some subtleties and formulas to chew on) and hopefully manage to code something to get my webcam to do something similar
Also, I'd like to propose to unsticky the "Hacks & Kludges" thread since nobody ever posts in it and it never really took off and seems mostly to be a collection of links to thereifixedit.com.
On the same note, but mostly to make space for other better stickies, I don't really see the use for the "The Tech Forum" thread to be stickied on top, either. It's supposed to be a description of this subforum, but it's not really, also I think this forum is pretty self-explanatory.
For new stickies, I'd like to nominate the Privacy and Security Threads
Also it would be really cool if we could put a general computer programming related thread on top there maybe. Uhm, AND of course some other things on non-computer related topics, but I'm not the best person to suggest those.
