HTML5 might helps slowness of Udacity's videos.

Recently I resumed studying programming on Udacity, starting with algorithm course.

However, the videos very often get slow and lag - I could't even recognize what was the sentence teachers said. Then I got to check what is wrong with that.

Chrome's task manager showed adobe flash player consumed many CPU capacity. I suspected that flash player, known for Steve Jobs hated it, is doing something bad while loading a youtube videos incorporated in Udacity.

And I ended up with finding HTML5 trial on Youtube. After turned off flash player and took HTML5,  the videos on Udacity got better except for occasional latency.

So, if someone has the same problem on Udacity, you might resolve it with changing flash player into HTML5 on Youtube.

bought discounted English books.

Today I got three paperback books at nearly half of ordinary prices, for the book store's closeout sale.

The first one is James Bradley and Ron Powers's real story mainly about aftermath of the historically famous picture, the rising flag on Iwo-Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers" for 600 yen.
The next is Lisa Randall's science book in the field of the cutting edge theory of modern physics, "Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions" for 900 yen.
The last is Eric Abrahamson's "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder" for 800 yen. I don't actually know even what is the main focus of the book. But the benefits of "mess" was pretty interesting for me, and the word made me take this book on the counter.

Those books are able to be bought on kindle or other tablets now, with low prices almost similar to those discounted books. But I found that real books have still advantage for browsing pages.

My short goal on Udacity in 2013.

a few days ago, means very later on this year, Udacity announced the schedule of releasing its three brand new courses. The two of them -- Intro to Parallel Programming, HTML5 Game Development -- will be released on February 4, 2013, and Interactive Rendering is coming on March 11, 2013.

I think particularly HTML5 game class is going to be attractive for many people, including me, because game-developing is one of the biggest motivation to learn code. I can't really wait it!

And Udacity blog also posted another article where they recommend setting a goal of what you will learn or achieve for 2013. So along with that, I would like to set a goal instead of for all the next year, but for the two months till new course available.

1. I will go through whole courses again which are CS212 Design of Computer Programs and CS253 Web Development so that I am going to get to understand these in depth more than now..
2. I will take the two courses(CS215 Algorithm and CS271 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence) I didn't finish even unit1 yet. And at least go to each of unit3.

Then 2012 lefts only one day. This year was nice for me to learn many thing from internet and realize how I can interact with people through the net. So I would like to give this year 80 points.

"Brazil Buts Effect" to space elevator from reading Philip Ball's "flow"

2 days ago I finished reading Philip Ball's 2nd of trilogy , "Flow: Nature's Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts". In many interesting parts of the book, I was especially fascinated with a topic.

This is about "Brazil Nuts Effect", which is also known as "Granular Convection". When you open the new cereal box and pour into the bowl for breakfast at morning, you can see many of relatively bigger cereals than average whole of the content.

The reason is described in the video below, but in summary when the box containing the different sized particles is shaken,  big particles jump and small particles flow the gap that big made while jumping then big is higher place in box than previous. After the kind of thing happen over and over again, the big particle end up with being on the top of the pile.




Ok, that's very easy to get it. it seems to be very universal. I wondered if it is a kind of stuff that if you shaken in driving or on a roller coaster, you vomit whole thing in your stomach after all!
No? that isn't kind of the thing? But I think one point is similar, how the meal go up from stomach to mouth. While the thing happen, the meals are crimbed with holding on the narrow part of the tube by moving and shrinking the tube. So isn't that said to be a kind of "Brazil Nuts Effect"?

The another thing I came up with was the applying the design of a space elevator. Imagine the very long tube stretch from ground to the sky with weltering. Like meals in the throat, the box of elevator could go up through the sky.
Oh I'm a genius!

Google's April fools 2012 in Japan: Google maps turn into old RPG mode!!

Now, the day of April fools already had come.
And Google Japan appeared the old RPG game like Google maps!

you can see below, everything in the earth have become dots. Each capitals or central cities of the countries turn into a castle. And if you look over the map carefully, you can find some special monster or figure. for example, there is an android and a model of dinosaur on the location of Google.
Further more, when you change into street view, you can see the picture of the road in 16 colors.




大きな地図で見る

Here is the pictures.

Android in Google headquarters

Buckingham

 the Sacrada Family

Area 51

street view

khan academy japanese subtitle

yes! I've just finished adding Japanese subtitles on the khan academy video "Raising money for a startup :Raising money from an angel investor. Pre-money and post-money valuation."

How can Taylor Wilson can get the materials for nucler reactor?

I watched the TED presentation by Taylor Wilson, the youngest person in the world to build a nuclear fusion reactor.  But how did he get the material to do nuclear fusion?
 in the CNN article, there is the sentence "At 11, he started mining for uranium and buying vials of plutonium on the Internet."  I wonder if a citizen like the boy can get the materials so easily? certainly, he did 'uranium mining'  and he present the site he was mining using Google maps on Taylor's website. as for plutnium? at least, I wasn't able to find person who sell plutonium on e-bey. I think that anyone who deal with plutonium need to gain a permission from the government in USA. I'm not sure How he get it.