is computer vision like common sense?

Why No Vision?, from Push Singh's blog (he is a student of Marvin Minsky)

Why is it that computer vision has proven to be such a difficult problem? The strange thing is that computer graphics, which one might regard as the inverse problem, is rapidly closing in on achieving photorealistic rendering of scenes. I'm also puzzled because recognition problems are typically simpler than generation problems. It's certainly true that computer graphics has benefited from much commercial development and Moore's law, but faster computers should help recognition tasks as well.

One idea is that vision suffers from the same kind of problem as does commonsense reasoning, namely, the lack of large scale knowledge bases about the kinds of objects and materials in the world, what they look like from different angles and under different lighting, and so forth. But if this is the case, and computer graphics has advanced so far, it should not be difficult to generate a suitable such corpus with a moderate investment -- a corpus of images, ground truths in terms of 3d and other types of surface models, and connections to more general commonsense knowledge.

(no subject)

Today there was no hot water in the shower, so I warmed up 3 full pots of water, borrowed the sponge from the kitchen, and thoroughly washed myself, which was quite a slow process.

It's kinda paradoxical how you get cold when there's just a little hot water on you: it evaporates quickly, taking your heat with it. A constant stream of hot water keeps you wet though.