Fourteen Years Later
Published:
Personal daily events
2026
Cells That Grip
Published:
The Cellular Potts Model already had filopodia — Gaussian-shaped membrane protrusions that extend, retract, and sense the local environment. But they were floating. They could push into the substrate, detect chemical gradients, and influence the Hamiltonian, but they had no concept of gripping. A real filopodium that contacts a stiff substrate forms focal adhesion complexes — clusters of integrin receptors that physically anchor the cell to the extracellular matrix. And those adhesions are not passive anchors. They are mechanosensors.
Light at Every Wavelength
Published:
The original dual photography transport matrix treats light as a single channel — or at most three channels for RGB. You project white patterns, capture color images, and the transport matrix T maps projector pixels to camera pixels as if all wavelengths behave the same way through the scene. For many materials, this is a reasonable approximation. For many others, it is not even close.
The Robot Learns Cursive
Published:
The original robotic writer picks up letter blocks and places them one at a time. It is a pick-and-place operation — move to the letter, grasp, move to the writing line, place, return. Each letter is a discrete event with its own approach, grasp, and retract cycle. For printed text, this works. For cursive, it is fundamentally wrong. Cursive means the pen never leaves the paper between letters. The trajectory is one continuous, flowing curve.