中国建筑史——奴隶社会建筑（公元前21世纪~前476）

夏（公元前21世纪~前16世纪）

商（公元前16世纪~前11世纪）

西周（公元前11世纪~前771）

春秋（公元前770~前476）

中国建筑史——原始社会建筑——宗教祭祀

浙江余杭祭坛遗址

内蒙古大青山祭坛遗址

 

辽宁建平县牛河梁女神庙遗址

中国建筑史——原始社会建筑——居住

浙江余姚河姆渡的干阑木构建筑（干栏式建筑）,距今6000年~7000年

姜寨遗址，中国黄河中游新石器时代以仰韶文化为主的遗址。位于陕西省临潼县城北，距今约4000年

郑州大河村遗址

西安半坡 半穴居建筑遗址

龙山文化——窑洞式住所遗址

A depth detector and a camera might make the computer see better than human eyes

As the Kinect for Xbox360 has been released to the market recently, I saw from a geek computer web site discussing how this thing works. It has a built-in depth detector and it produces a particular kind of image with depth data from the detector.

This gives me this idea that a computer might see the world better by using the combination of this kind of depth detector and a digital camera.

We human beings and most of the large animals on this planet use two eyes to see the world. That means two eyes endlessly send images of the same scene from two angles of views to the brain where the images would be translated into 3D object information, so we can know how far away an object is from us beside the other information about colours and shapes etc. This is very effective since our brain is very good at this through millions years of evolution and practise, but actually this very natural action requires huge amount of calculation power if we are about to realize it on a computer.

I believe we human beings and animals developed this kind of two-eye view for a reason. We usually don't have the ability to detect things spontaneously. On the contrary, most of the time we just receive information like light, sound and smell passively. So if we want to know the depth information, we need views from different angles so we can find the slight difference between the images: the more obvious the difference is, the closer the object will be. And in this way we can tell which object is near, which is far. An example is the dolphin, which lives in the sea where the eyesight is limited, especially under deep water. Dolphins have the sonar system and when they cannot see clearly, they broadcast signal sound into the water and decide if there's something ahead of them and how far that thing is away from them by judging the returned signal sound. Yes this is the depth detector!

So when we want computers to understand the 3D world, we don't need to rely on heavy duty computing to tell the difference of each two frames of enormous incoming images from two cameras at different angles. That would be a disaster and who knows in how many years could we produce so powerful computer chips to be able to do this job. Actually, we just need to develop programs to analyze the shape and colours of the objects in the images from a single camera plus the depth information from the depth detector. It's very easy for a computer to send out infrared signal to detect things ahead of it, right?

Of course this is just an assumption. We might do things differently on computers and robots because maybe there're better solutions for them, not for us. But I still believe mother nature does not evolve for no reason. Very likely at the end of the day, we'll discover that the two-eye solution is still the best choice under all circumstances. Anyway, if you send out the detecting signal, you'll expose yourself to your enemy! HAHA

Zombie idea sucks

I've watched the first two episodes of this new TV play called "The Walking Dead". The first episode is the opening introduction to this whole play so it grabbed some of my interest, but the second one fell to the same level of those normal TV plays which aim only at making complicated stories, telling unnecessary details, extending the plays as long as possible so they can get as many commercials as possible. This is boring and the whole zombie idea sucks.

Why I say this zombie idea sucks? Because first of all, these zombies are dead people, right? Their brains are damaged, right? How come they lost their humanity but they can still smell, listen and see? Okay, you might say they have degraded to only having basic animal functions, just having the desire to hunt for flesh. But why they have rotting organs, like the rotting skins, falling jaws, and even if their lower parts of the bodies are missing, they could still be crawling?Okay here's the idea, if they're rotting, it means their immune systems are not working, which means their eyes, brains, hearts, lungs, ears are failing rapidly. They won't be able to see, smell, or listen at all, not to say with their loss of blood, their hearts would not be pumping blood, so they won't be able to move their muscles at all, so they won't be walking at all. The only result for these zombies: they'll be eaten by germs and decay to ashes.

That's why I say: "This zombie idea sucks".

Arrogant Mac users

I've installed Mac OS X on one of my PCs. I'm glad I did it successfully because this kind of Hackintosh requires strictly compatible hardwares. Then I started reading this dummy book for Mac OS X. I guess I cannot call myself a computer expert until I can use a Mac and a Linux PC.

But in this book I'm reading, I've found the way they look at PC users extremely wrong. In those old days when we were using Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98 or Millennium, it was true that PCs crashed, lost response often because of the not-so-stable, not-so-strong core of the operating systems. But after so many years, since the advent of Windows NT, all major Windows releases like Windows 2000, XP, Vista and the most recent Windows 7 are stale operating systems. We're experiencing far less blue screens of death or crashes than before, not to say the fact that PCs have to deal with so many kinds of hardwares, much much more than Mac.

So if a Mac user still regards Windows as sloppy system, he is wrong.

The bottom line is: if you can do something on a Mac, we can do it on a PC too, and often more efficiently. And most of the time, we're using the programs, not the OS itself.

Test

This is a test posting only.