CS: Around the blogs in 80 hours.

Andrew Hensley who now works at SpaceX just let me know to watch out for today's first launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The webcast is here:

http://spacex.com/webcast.php

The launch is NET (No Earlier Than) 11:00 EST and the launch window will last for four hours. Go Falcon 9!

Also of cosmic interest is the asteroid hit on Jupiter 2 days ago:

In the meantime, here some other exciting blog entries, a melting of sorts:

Alex Gittens:

• Planning a talk on random matrix inequalities

Terry Tao:

• An inverse theorem for the Gowers norm U^{s+1}[N] (announcement)

Andrew McGregor:

• Search for the Random Graal: Day 3

Meena Mani:

• Differential geometry in 10 slides

Bob Sturm:

• Paper of the Day (Po'D): Consensus matching pursuit for multi-trial EEG signals Edition
• Paper of the Olden Days (Po'OD): Hierarchical and Parallel Matching Pursuit Edition
• Paper of the Day (Po'D): Speech Recognition by Sparse Approximation Edition, No. 2

Djalil Chafai:

• Localization of eigenvectors: heavy tailed random matrices
• Test Problems
• Large deviations for random matrices

David Brady:

• 0.4 gigapixel laboratory image

Image Sensor Worl blog:

• Aptina History on Youtube
• Aptina Announces 1.9um Pixel HD Video Sensor from that entry some words from Eric Fossum, the inventor of CMOS imagers:
  

  ....At the time, in the early 1990's, CCDs were the indisputable king of imaging technology. The power dissipation of CCDs and associated electronics were enormous, and for space missions, CCD cameras were very bulky, power hungry, and prone to all kinds of failures. But their performance was/is extraordinary.
  
  Our goal was to come up with a miniaturized scientific-quality image sensor technology that would maintain the performance but allow miniaturization. At that time, almost everyone (and I refer to the establishment of CCD guys) thought putting an ADC on chip was a BAD idea, much less integrating timing and control circuits, drivers, or digital processing. So, a CMOS based camera-on-a-chip (meaning camera electronics) was a radical idea. I did not know at that time of the notable work going on in Edinburgh or Sweden - but those efforts were definitely not geared towards image quality - they were geared towards low cost and minimal imaging quality (and in Linkoping, speed). They all used what I subsequently termed passive pixels to distinquish them from APS. (This was also what VVL and Omnivision used when they went into business. The Edinburgh and Linkoping teams definitely were part of making this whole camera-on-a-chip technology become ubiquitous today....

• Panasonic Announces D-IMager, a 3D ToF Imager

As an aside you really want to take a look at Eric Fossum's presentations including this one

• CMOS Active Pixel Image Sensors: Past, Present, and Future

Finally, we have a new on-going discussion on the Compressive Sensing group on LinkedIn (we are now at 428 members:

• Incoherence, RIP and Spark

Credit: Photo: SpaceX. Video: Anthony Wesley