27 May, 2011
To-do Lists
I have under a month and a half left before I start full-time in my thesis lab. I see this time right now as incredibly valuable; it’s a period where I have an unusually large amount of time to learn whatever I want and make whatever I want, every day. I do have obligations for school, but I can make significant progress on those items with about 20 hours a week.
So, things to learn about —
* Kerr shutters for fast beam-blocking. I don’t know how much it costs to make one of these, but I need to know. I think you can build a two-photon microscope for under $10K, and I think the ingredients include: a Kerr shutter, a DMD, a little knowledge of Fourier and holographic optics, and some smart software. My next abode has to have a basement so I can at least give building this an honest shot. Maybe I should have been an engineer? Nope! Science rules!
* Compressive sensing. It’s kind of a faddish field, but it makes interesting promises. I don’t need to be an expert, but I’d like to be conversant enough to see where it would be applicable. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What if you don’t have a hammer? I don’t want to be nail-blind.
* Adaptive Appearance Models, or face recognition and gaze direction processing in general. Why? It’s neat.
* OpenGL Shader Language. I trained myself on the “old” style of OpenGL (called the "fixed-function pipeline”) a couple years ago, because shaders weren’t available on the iPhone when I was first starting out. Now that devices that lack support for shaders are in the severe minority, it’s time to transition to this way more powerful technique. I’ll be using it to add antialiasing to my iPhone apps (so they look slightly less crappy), and also do some real-time terrain generation (super-secret app idea).
* The internals of libcinder. Cinder is, in my opinion, the most powerful and flexible library for graphics and audio coding on any platform. It also has, like any open-source library, limitations that make certain projects infeasible or simply really inconvenient. However, I’ve contributed to the project in the past, and need to start up on that again. If the tools don’t suit you, reshape the tools.
* The olfactory tubercle, and subcortical olfactory structures in general. It’s what my PhD is all about, and I’m woefully behind on my reading.
* The chemistry of fragrance. Because perfume is wonderful, and why not learn how it’s made?
