January 2003

Hello Friend,

As you probably noticed, last week was my birthday. My mother has a habit to embarrass me every year. In some years she finds original ways to do this in public (last time on grade 10). I know it sounds like a halacha paradox, but I don’t think that every Jew has a Jewish mother. However, in my case, I certainly got one of the most worried Jewish mothers since our mother Sara. And my father is not far from that too. I hope you understand.

Last month was the Christmas break. The Canadians take the holiday very seriously, I guess because it combines spiritualism with modern capitalism. It gives a religious justification for shopping. Several weeks before the holiday you start to see Santa Claus in shopping centers, hugging small kids while their parents take pictures. Charity organizations fill the city with boxes where people can donate to poor people the toys they bought last year, so that they have room to buy new ones. The houses are decorated with small light bulbs. Radio stations play holiday songs (it seems that half of the songs in the world contain the phrase “marry Christmas”). And most important, there is a two weeks vacation (for students). Many people fly out of Toronto. On Christmas day the streets are deserted, except of baggers that wear Santa red hats. There is even a web site where you can follow the journey of Santa from the northern pole to spread gifts. For me, this was the first time that I had complete vacation since I went to the army. It ended too fast and I had to go back to the university.

Toronto has a huge university. Overall, there are over 55,000 students in three campuses (like Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv combined). It has some very old buildings (older than in Jerusalem), and some very modern ones (newer than in Tel-Aviv). In my building, the entry permissions for all doors are controlled by computer. The doors are opened with the student card. Each student has limited access to his office and several public rooms. It’s pretty sophisticated security for non-military organization. The computer science department has about 1000 undergraduate students and 230 graduate students. You can see figures like Steve Cook (from the cook-Levin theorem. He is alive and teaching complexity), or Geoffrey Hinton (the back-propagation algorithm in neural networks). In general, professors here are younger than in Israel. One of them is three years older than me. The graphics and HCI laboratory is equipped with things I never saw before. For example, they have a motion capture suit. It is a suit that you wear and when several calibrated cameras take pictures a program can resolve the 3D position of points on the suit. These positions of natural motion can be used to create graphical animations. The HCI people have a very large screen (about 10 x 2 meters), and explore how to interact with it. It works like computer connected to multiple monitors, but instead of monitors they have several projectors that project on this screen. The most fascinating is the volumetric display (a picture is attached). The display has a fast rotating 2D screen. For every position of the rotating screen, a different image is projected on it. The computer controls which image to project at what time. The result is something that you can walk around it and look at from all directions. The idea is about 20 years old, but only in recent years it became possible to build such a machine, and it will take another 20 years before you see it in your home. The graphics people here use the “Maya” software. If you have time and want to try the most professional animation software you can download it.

How is it in Israel? I heard that also general Mofaz had problem to shorten his military service. I think he deserves it.


Ady.