What would you choose

What would you choose
a winning ticket in the lottery
or your house on fire

That's not too difficult

But is this a free choice
or a mechanical path of a think-feel body
that we observe through the senses
of that same think-feel body

It is amazing to see
how the mind
pretends to make the choices
to search for happiness
and to avoid pain

But happiness
is not in the finding
but in the not-searching

And suffering
is not in the pain
but in the avoidance

No Escape

Sometimes we feel imprisoned and limited by our thoughts and views on ourselves and the world. Wouldn't it be nice to take a view outside of our mental framework and conditioning?



Actually, it is the other way round. We are outside our mental framework all the time! Because we are focusing and identifying with the personality so strongly it seems that we are imprisoned. This is a false perception of what we really are. We are the viewer of our mental activities, not the prisoner within. There is no escape because there is no prisoner and nothing to escape from!

Self Organizing Information

Every day we are overwhelmed by the amount of e-mails, documents, photos and other stuff that we receive on our computer. Most popular software tools such as Outlook and Windows Explorer expect us to handle incoming traffic ourselves and categorize them into maps or folders. As the incoming flow of information is growing, this processing by hand becomes a real burden. It is also often unclear how to categorize items because the item (for example, an e-mail) could be assigned to several categories. This makes it hard to retrieve the correct information when we need it, even using today's search functions. Although categorizing information definitely has its use, we need another approach to make our information really findable and usable.

I suggest that information should organize itself dynamically.



Each information item has content (e.g. text, image, sound) that can be expressed as a set of features (words, color, texture, frequencies etc.) and for each feature we can determine a small-sized signature. We can extract the 'essence' of each information item and use pattern recognition algorithms to calculate the similarity of information items such as e-mails, photos and documents. In my proposed self-organizing environment, e-mails and documents on the same subject will automatically cluster, and so will pictures with similar visual content.



In my Elastic Vision project I am developing algorithms to calculate the similarity of information items and also an algorithm to present information in an organic way to the end-user. In this approach items are not split up and put into buckets (categories), but dynamically shown within a relevant context. Much work is still required to build this approach into a product. For now, you can have a look at the Elastic Vision website for a demonstration of this technique in an image search tool.

Elastic Vision version 2.0 release

I have just uploaded a new version of my smart image searcher on the Elastic Vision website.

Now you will be able to load images from your desktop or network servers and match them against web search results.

I have added a new feature to specifically search for images on the web that are similar to the images you have selected in the tool. This enables you to search for better quality images than the one you already have found on the web or on your desktop.



For more details visit the site:

Goto Elastic Vision site

Elastic Vision

I have created a new site where you can download my smart image search tool, called 'Elastic Vision'.

Goto Elastic Vision site

It shows each retrieved image in an 'organic' visual network. The images are clustered based on their visual content, enabling you to pick the best from a set of similar images of varying quality.

Here's a small demo of the tool in action. You can find a higher-resolution version on the site itself (just click 'demo').

In Search of Van Gogh

Besides my 'normal daily duties' for my customers I've spent quite some time on the visual gadget I talked to you about before. The tool provides you an overview of all current news items by showing a picture with a caption above it. The pictures are retrieved from a predefined set of web pages on the web. Clicking the picture leads you to the original web page, scrolling automatically to the right article. By the way, I call it "Elastic Vision" because of the way all pictures are interconnected in an elastic net.

This time I've added an extra function to perform a search for pictures on the web. Of course we know Google and Yahoo provide such services with their search engine, but the Elastic Vision gadget also clusters the retrieved images based on their visual content. Using the Crazy Diamonds pattern recognition algorithm, similar pictures end up next to each other in the net. For example, searching for "Van Gogh" comes up with this:

Click the image to enlarge it.

I'll show you some zoomed-in parts of the net. First, the part with his sunflower paintings:


Again, the clustering is based on visual (color) content, not on tags or keywords. As you see the software detects enough similarities between the flower paintings to cluster them together.

I've added a feature to show the size of the picture as a caption, so that you can pick the resolution you want.


Oh, I forget to tell you that I'm using Yahoo's excellent image search API to retrieve the url's of all relevant pictures. It is very easy to use and for free.

I'm about to finish the first release of the Elastic Vision gadget. It will be downloadable later on from one of my websites (for free). I'm looking for people that would like to give it a go and play around with it, so if you're interested send me a note at the address below and I'll get you a copy.

Perpetuum immobile

Yesterday I went to a session of the dutch Advaita Vedanta 'missionary' Jan van Delden at Haarlem Central Station. He uses a whole set of attributes to deliver his message in a very funny and visual way. I have attended more Advaita sessions from other teachers, but this guy is also a great stand-up comedian. Check him out if you have the chance!

Basically Advaita tells you that permanent happiness cannot be found 'out there'. Nothing in the world will make you happy forever, period. The cause of our unhappiness lies in the fact that we identify with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts. We think there is an entity in our head that is controlling our life, and we call it 'I'. Jan uses the metaphor of our thoughts as a scrolling text display that is claiming out attention all the time.


LED Text Generator

Advaita invites you to enquire into this assumption that has never been doubted before. In the end you will find out that you are not your thoughts and feelings but the observer of these thoughts and feelings. We are watching the messages on the text display, we are not creating thoughts and feelings.

We can speak of a First Cause behind everything. Some people call it consciousness or awareness. It is the stage for all good and bad things to happen. Without the First Cause there is nothing. This First Cause is not affected by the things happening, like space cannot be 'damaged' by its content. We are that First Cause, not the content. Our general assumption that we are that entity behind our eyeballs is just plain wrong. This First Cause is indestructible and timeless and therefore I came up with the term "perpetuum immobile".