The earliest reference to this problem [, approximating the projection of a set of data points onto a manifold,] is in the book of Genesis: “Let there be a firmament between the water to divide waters from waters”, that is the manifold. “Let there be lights in the firmament”, these are the points. Then, “God set them in heaven’s firmament”, i.e., a projection procedure has been used.

For example, this post.

Following Kate’s advice, I got both hosting and a domain from GoDaddy.co.uk.

And today my new domain is born: paracommunications.org.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcasero/

Photos can be uploaded and organised from the Desktop Flickr Organizer in Ubuntu. This is convenient if you have a large photo archive in a local hard drive. Although the 100 MB/month upload limit of a free account is clearly insufficient for any serious usage, upgrading to a Pro Account is only $25/year.

The photos I uploaded (to the free account) seemed to be resized to a maximum side length of 1024 pixel. I don’t know whether this would be the case with the Pro Account, that has a limit of 20 MB per photo (a 3888 x 2592 JPEG typically takes up 2.4 MB to 4.0 MB).

I could also post a photo directly to my WordPress blog from the flickr website. Unfortunately, the web interface doesn’t seem to have an option to submit a set of photos in the same post.

Flickr is integrated within facebook too. You can import the flickr URL from your facebook profile, and whenever you upload photos to your flickr account, your facebook history will show an entry with a link to the photos.

Update (15/04/2009): I got a Pro Account a few days ago, but the upload service is terrible in my experience. Whether using the web interface or an external program, the connection crashes so often that it is virtually useless.

Update (19/04/2009): Uploads using the flickr web interface seem to have improved. Still some crashes, but quite usable. Trying to upload from F-Spot or Desktop Flickr Organizer hardly ever works, though.

Update (02/07/2009): The upload problem is a known “Export to flickr” bug that has to do with the MTU. To fix it, you need to change the MTU. In Ubuntu, you can use the menu System -> Preferences -> Network Connections.  Say you are connected via an Ethernet cable. Then go to Wired, select “Auto eth0″, and click on Edit. The “Editing Auto eth0″ dialog has a tab “Wired”, where you can select the MTU. Change the size to e.g. 1450 bytes, and it should work.

This is one of those simple truths typical of Sunday school, and I think that it illustrates very well why any sane person should avoid simple truths.

First, if two people are having a conversation for 1 hour and both listen twice as much (40 min) as they talk (20 min), there’s going to be a long awkward silence (20 min).

On the other hand, if there are many people, e.g. 10, listening only twice as much as you speak would actually be quite rude. It would be nicer if you listen 9 times as much (54 min) as you speak (6 min) so that everybody can chip in the conversation.

But what is really wrong with simple truths is that they may discourage people from searching for more insightful answers.

Indeed, why 2 ears? This is not even a new question, and a lot of theory has been developed for the last 100 years. Already in 1907, Rayleigh noted that as a source of sound moves around a listener, sound waves arrive with different time and intensity to each ear. Our brains process those cues and so we are able to locate sound sources. (Besides, the spectral characteristics of interfering sound waves at the tympanum change with elevation). This is known as binaural hearing, and it also allows us to hear much fainter sounds than we would with 1 ear only.

This is accomplished by uploading and downloading the entire .mab file with the address book to a local or remote directory using FTP, HTTP or HTTPS or, more interestingly, to an IMAP folder. It’s not the most elegant solution in the world, but I’ll give it a try and see what happens.

Update (13/08/2007): After some testing, Addressbook Synchonizer seems to be corrupting my address book, adding garbage to the end of the abook.mab file, which makes it unreadable by Thunderbird.