When Canadians have no topic to talk about they will talk about the weather. In some regions of the world the weather can be pretty extreme and complicated to describe. For example, the Inuit have many words in their language to describe
snow. If you go to the differential equations, the butterfly effect etc. weather can become even interesting. OK, I admit it is a boring subject, but having written so much about the winter I have to be fair to the summer.
Spring starts here when the temperature is above 0. Then you can start see people with short sleeves. And expect a lot of rain (it cannot rain in the winter). Summer starts when the temperature is above 10 degrees. Then you can see people in short pants. On my first year here in the winter I once saw a poster on one wall at the university about the disastrous implication of global warming, and I was thinking: why do they care about global warming? They are the first to benefit from global warming. A rise of 5 degrees will melt the snow and save them millions spent on heating. Apparently I was wrong. Believe it or not, there is summer also in Canada, and it is hot. Even though the temperature seldom reaches 30 degrees, the sun radiation is burning. You can even see people walking with open umbrellas in the sun. Many houses, especially old ones, don’t have air-condition, and are built to be very heat-preserving.
In that conditions people had to improvise to survive.
Speaking of technology, I attended an interesting vision conference at York University. On the more applicable side of the conference, Peter Burt from Sarnoff Corporation presented work on video processing operations such as automatic mosaicking, stabilizations and tracking.
Many people today are excited about Google Earth.
This technology is not new. For example, Skyline
provided complete 3D flight simulation over a network for several years. However, in Sarnoff they overlaid live video over maps. They can also overlay video over a 3D terrain and allow the viewer to change the viewpoint (this processing is done in special hardware).
You can see samples here.
So what’s the next step? Imagine a world covered with satellite internet cameras, in which you can get a live video from anywhere you want to your PC. But that can work only in the summer. So to make it happen people will have to abolish the winter. That could be done by tilting the earth. The hard part will be to reprogram the genome of all the animals whose lifecycle depends on the seasons. But all this work will still pay off. Sounds crazy? I hope I made my point that it is really hot here now. Have a nice summer,
