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June 22,
2003 ........ ok, so i guess it was a fuse. just on a different circuit.... somehow the headlights ended up on the backup light circuit?! anyway... the new driving light "ganging" switch is a raging success. so much easier to drive at night with good visibility when i can work both the driving lights and the hi-beams with the same foot switch.... and still remove the driving lights from the equation when i really don't want them. also, as the fuse situation demonstrated last night... it's nice to have the driving lights able to be switched back to their native circuit. all the lights... lo-beams, hi-beams and driving lights are all run off relays up in the front of the car, so now high-current wires run behind the firewall. makes a huge difference in brightness of the lights... also makes it easy to implement things like the ganging switch when you're only playing with low-current circuits. dinner with lumilda... a cuban dance instructor that's staying over at aida's english school (and who had the spanish edition of hawking's "a brief history of time" by her bedside (might be a good read next) ... so i guess the theory of relativity is mainstream when a dance instructor in costa rica is reading it in order to find out how to change her own "personal sense of time" when she dances more effectively. holy doppler-shift, batman! it used to be that only 5 people on earth could "really understand" the theory of relativity. now my friend bruce's son is taking algebra in the 4th grade and a latin dance instructor is warping her own local event horizon for the purposes of a more graceful dance performance. YEEEOOOOWWWW..... well dinner was nice. we communicated with limited english and spanish and with a heavy dose of the franklin translating widget. (gets 5-stars for cool factor). only product improvement suggestion i have is to add a back-light button.... hard to see in candlelight. she invited me in for cafe back at her pad but i passed. what is wrong with me? i am seriously getting old. prediction: voice-based language translation will be able to be done by computer, on the fly, by an electronic 'babelfish' widget within 15 years. make that 10. all the pieces are already there really... its getting so close.... its just the last piece of the context-independent, speaker-independent software glue that's needed.... even a rough-translation would be golden to travelers... question: would that inhibit more people from learning other languages? what about the benefit in broadening your perspective that comes from learning another tongue? perhaps it would make it easier to learn by making the "in-between" stage less frustrating... more credence to the idea that if you can imagine something, it can be done... when was the concept of the babelfish first mentioned in historical texts? biblical times? before even i think... its just taken 2000 years to implement, that's all. arthur c. clark's satellite concept on the other hand, only took about 40 years. my how quickly imagination is turning to reality. |