eternity

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

-- William Blake --

Speech recognition

"Human beings' recognition of speech consists of many tasks, ranging from the detection of phonemes from speech waveforms to the high-level understanding of messages. We do not actually hear all speech elements; we realize this easily when we try to decipher foreign or uncommon utterances. Instead, we continuously relate fragmentary sensory stimuli to context familiar from various experiences, and we unconsciously test and reiterate our perceptions at different levels of abstraction. In other words, what we believe we hear, we in fact reconstruct in our minds from pieces of received information.
Even in clear speech from the same speaker, distributions of the spectral samples of different phonemes overlap. Their statistical density function are not Gaussian, so they cannot be approximated analytically. The same phonemes spoken by different persons can be confused too; for example, the /ε/ of one speaker might sound like the /n/ of another. For this reason, absolutely speaker-independent detection of phonemes is possible only with relative low accuracy."

(The Neural Phonetic Typewriter, Teuvo Kohonen - IEEE 1988)

optoelectrical speech transcriber

"In 1930 a Hungarian scientist, Tihamer Nemes, filed a patent application in Germany for the principle of making an optoelectrical system automatically transcribe speech. His idea was to use the optical sound track on a movie film as a grating to produce diffraction patterns (corresponding to speech spectra), which then could be identified and typed out. The application was turned down as “unrealistic.” Since then the problem of automatic speech recognition has occupied the minds of scientists and engineers, both amateur and professional."

(Teuvo Kohonen, IEEE March 1988)

Long hair

Long on hair, short on brains.
- French Proverb -

Balzac

Love is the poetry of the senses.
-- Honoré de Balzac --

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.
-- Honore De Balzac --

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
-- Honore De Balzac --