Ransen's Blog

 When I was at school in the 1970s there was a program on the BBC for pupils called "Use Your Head" with Tony Buzan. It was about how to improve your memory and learning skills and went beyond the "write the same thing down 100 times" type of technique. Buzan gave more interesting and fun memory techniques. I bought the book: I did use the techniques in the book and it did help me learn. And I got interested in memory techniques. Decades later I bought a book by Frances Yates... Frances Yates University College London 1924  ..."The Art of Memory": (Yates confessed that she was not interested in learning and using the memory techniques, which I found strange) I cannot remember exactly why I bought the book, but it got me interested in Giordano Bruno.   On the 17th of February 1600 Bruno was killed by the Catholic Church because of his beliefs .  Killed because of his beliefs . He certainly had some (what we would consider now) strange beliefs, as well as s...

I'm sort of investigating an idea of primitive vision (as in: "how did it evolve?"), artificial neural networks and the Arduino . I'm making a primitive eye, deliberately avoiding video cameras. Here it is partially constructed: It is all very hand made and I was experimenting with the positioning of the sensors (LDRs). I struck me that the drawing on the piece of hardware looked very like one of Giordano Bruno's strange diagrams, for example: Bruno's diagram is called Campus Martis. There are 7 sensors. I could have chosen 9 7 5 or 3. But I chose 7 because, believe it or not, I thought to myself, Newton would have liked 7. He chose 7 as the number of colors in the rainbow, but the choice is arbitrary, unless you consider the magical powers assigned to the number 7. And Newton did.