| I met up with an old friend who now lives in Portland |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|12:24 am] |
 
Stanford does in fact have its own Andy Goldsworthy installation. It goes well with Aikido training.
She informed me that this amazingly cool flower is called Lantana.
You gardening people should grow it so I can come over and look at it. :-)
And, just because it's there, a ladybug polka-dot microtrailer:
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| Ant problem |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|09:21 pm] |
Suppose your house (say, the one I'm living in now) has an ant problem. Suppose you toss some food out and the ants get to it. The ants take your food back and turn it in to more ants. How many more ants?
Energy conversion across trophic levels in the food chain is around 10%, an ant in this part of the world weighs around 0.2mg, and a typical apple weighs around 300g.
So... if the ants eat the whole apple, they can use it to make 150,000 more ants. Fucking ants. |
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| Southwest airlines circa 1972 |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|05:50 pm] |
Remember what it was like before Southwest Airlines? You didn't have hostesses in hot pants. Remember?
And here I thought Southwest was famous for having no frills, low low fares, a simple web interface, happy employees who dress as casually as they want, and clever logistics to keep turnaround times low.
Frills are clearly evident in this video, and yeah, the casual dress doesn't appear to be part of the original plan. I didn't even know the airline was that old.
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| Cheapest ergonomics solutions are the best, apparently |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|10:47 pm] |
I'm one of those people who needs a good desk setup where the keyboard is at exactly the right height or my wrists get unhappy very fast.
As it turns out, the best ergonomics solution I've ever found for typing is also the cheapest. Because I couldn't get my adjustable desk out of my storage locker without a moving truck, I improvised a very simple solution. I got a 18"x30" sheet of 1/8" smooth fiberboard and then used double-sided tape to secure the keyboard, mouse cord, and mouse pad to it. Then I put the fiberboard on my lap.
Because the fiberboard and keyboard are both very thin, I can let my shoulders rest and hang my upper arms straight down with my lower arms horizontal, something I was not able to do before. It turns out that the extra two inches I've gained by using this thin board instead of a desk is enough to let my shoulders be totally at rest instead of having upward pressure on them. My back, shoulders, and wrists are all remarkably happy.
Now I just have to refine this so that I don't have to put down the board every time I get up to do something. :-) |
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| Virtual reality time travel |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|03:11 pm] |
Back in 2003 I took several hundred pictures of my apartment, covering every corner of it from multiple angles. I figured that within a decade, it would be possible to use software tools to reconstruct the whole place in 3D. As it turns out they're of the way there already:
This service requires 5-15 photos of an object to reconstruct it in 3D, and probably can't handle shiny surfaces very well. However, it's progress.
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| Samples of photo pairings |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|12:37 am] |
In an effort to determine the feasibility of my world-spanning photo-pairing idea, I've started playing around with the photos I have sorted and tagged so far, doing searches by tag cloud similarity and looking for good candidate matches. So far I only have marked photos from Singapore, India, the Czech Republic, and part of Vietnam, which together constitute about 12% of my trip photos.
I have found that the pairs are much more aesthetically pleasing to look at when the images have similar structure as well as content. I may want to look in to using methods of extracting quantitative compositional data from the images in order to help people locate good pairs. Here are some examples of what I've found so far.
Riverfronts: Singapore vs Saigon
Religious statues: Ellora, India vs Prague, Czech Rep
Temples: Vietnam vs India vs Prague
Indians in Singapore vs Indians in India.
More on Flickr here:
I have found that I can get similarly good matches around a theme by doing two two-word queries on Flickr consisting of "location1 theme" and "location2 theme". So I could create a lightweight version of the idea that just used a stock list of locations and a stock list of common items to find interesting candidate matches. This would save me from having to sort and tag all my photos by a tight deadline.
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| Photo project update |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|01:08 pm] |
Yesterday I blew through another 800 photos. My plan is to process a few hundred from each part of the world instead of the entire set. That way, I can more quickly get a sense for the feasibility of the photo-pairing program I'm considering creating.
I'm getting faster but not nearly fast enough. Yesterday's first 400 (India) took 280 minutes, the next 400 (Czech) took 175 minutes.
( Workflow... )
I continue to be stunned by Adobe Lightroom. There are so many methods for refining a photo, and they make a very versatile toolbox as a group. I can brighten up a face to make it pop, de-emphasize some distracting object on the side, fix the lens vignetting issue that my relatively cheap camera has at wide angles... I have to focus these efforts on the best photos though, or I'll sink in way too much time.
Working on photos gets me into a flow state that's reminiscent of coding, though it's a much more emotional state as I'm going through powerful memories from my trip. It gets draining after a while though. If I had to do this with a bunch of strangers' wedding photos, I'd drive myself insane in under a week.
Now I really miss India. Seeing the photos again brought back a lot of the intensity of my few days there.
Road to Ajanta:
Indian Photoshop...
( +2 more )
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| The science of retail placement |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|01:02 pm] |
If you do a google maps search for "trader joe's 94306" you will notice a string of five of them lined up more or less equidistant along the Peninsula as well as another string of three down in San Jose.
A lot of thought surely goes into the precise placement of stores, as the investment per store is huge and mistakes will lead to millions of dollars in lost sales.
Many factors likely go into it -- socioeconomic status and population density of surrounding neighborhoods, placement of competition, proximity to major roads, shopping patterns around the goods being sold etc. These factors are of course different for different types of retailers. It might be fun to see how different chains put up their constellations of stores in major cities.
In retrospect, it's a bit unusual that the Trader Joes are so precisely spaced. It means the population density across the peninsula is fiarly constant, the SES doesn't vary that much, and the development is narrow enough to concentrate the stores along a single line instead of a more spread-out structure. |
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| Pyrotechnic Choreography |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|12:11 am] |
San Francisco runs two identical fireworks shows a little over a mile apart. It's an easy solution to ensuring that lots of people can get a good seaside view.
I have always wondered about the choreography of high-end fireworks shows and how precisely the designers can anticipate the experience. I'm sure the imprecise nature of mortar shells, as well as wind and air resistance, add some inconsistency. Tonight we got to find out. We stood at the top of Coit Tower, one of the few public areas of the city with a sweeping enough view to let you see both shows at once. In addition to seeing everything in stereo, we were able to see how much variation there was between the two shows.
Heights seemed fairly consistent, with about 10% variation. Side-by side launches were also quite consistently spaced horizontally. Either someone down there must precisely setting the angles or the side-by-side fireworks are launched from separate barges. I'm impressed. It seemed like maybe 2-3% of the fireworks didn't fire, and it was usually a whole group missing as opposed to just one.
Orientations on the smiley face fireworks and other "shape" ones seemed fairly random. They had some nice new directional ones this year that looked like strawberries with oversized leaves and stems attached.
So basically, the pyrotechnic choreographers have fairly tight control over their shows, and could be doing some really wild innovative things. If I had a huge budget, I'd ask them to create some intricate 3D abstract art in the sky for me.
On a separate note, unless there's some technical issue I don't know about, it shouldn't be too hard to make some fractal fireworks. Cluster tiny shells into clusters that blow apart when heated, then cluster THOSE shells into clusters that blow apart when heated, then cluster... |
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| Photographic magic |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|11:13 am] |
Thanks for your suggestions on photo processing programs. I ended up going with Adobe Lightroom 2.
After a friday-night binge with the software, in which I culled through, tagged, described, and refined about 800 photos in about 5 hours, I can say that it's totally addictive. The "develop" feature is amazing. I can take shitty pictures of interesting things I took under less than ideal conditions and refine the hell out of them until they're quite good. If they're good to begin with, you can make them really sizzle.
You have to be careful with focus though or you'll start to feel like an overworked superhero, surrounded by a massive crowd full of people whose lives need saving. I'm trying to focus my retouching efforts on the photos that get me the most value for doing so. Otherwise I'll never get through.
5 hours * 11000 photos / 800 photos = 68.75 hours, which sounds like an extremely long time to be in front of the computer. Hopefully once I'm more proficient with the program, it will go significantly faster. |
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| [personaldev] Big monitors save you time |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|05:34 pm] |
I was at Fry's the other day, and I was amazed at how cheap big monitors have become. They had some 28-inch monstrosity for $400. A 24-inch monitor was a little over $250.
If you don't have a lot of space on your computer screen (either at home or at work), you should get more. The jump in productivity you get from having 2-3 full sized windows open side by side is huge. It more than repays the cost of the monitor within a few weeks or even a few days.
While I was traveling I had a 9-inch screen on my little eee pc travel laptop. I can say that tasks like putting together a blog post with pictures can be done like four times faster now that I'm back in front of a couple of larger screens.
If your computer supports it, you can get two screens instead of one, and use the second screen as a "side" screen. You can leave open email or some other thing you frequently switch to on the side screen. |
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| [personaldev] Rebuilding the Machine |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|05:14 pm] |
While traveling, I had relatively few things to worry about, and a very tight system for organizing my interactions with the world. Everything I needed was organized into a small backpack, some pictures on my camera, and a few computer files. The system was fast, nimble, and flexible enough to meet the needs of everything from the Sahara desert to a big European city.
The Sci-fi author Greg Egan refers to this sort of system as an exoself in his far-future stories. (In the stories, the exoself consists of hardware/software modules that plug directly into the brain. We're not there yet. For now I envision the exoself as the physical, software, and procedural tools that we have chosen to use to interact with the world. Quite literally, I imagine these things floating in a kind of orbit around each person.
Now that I'm back, I'm realizing that I need to resurrect my system for making things happen as a person with lots of ambitious goals and project ideas as well as an ongoing social life. The transition is harder than I realize, though I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to basically re-think a lot of how I used to do things. I was starting to think about reshaping my exoself back before I left for the trip, but now is the chance to do it right.
It does seem like the full exoself I need is dauntingly huge. Most people have big exoselves -- houses full of stuff and computers full of files. I think the key to successfully handling a large exoself is to figure out an information flow that will work well to keep top priority tasks easy and clear while letting me think long term about what projects are important. The ideas from Getting Things Done are really good for this.
I'll be reporting more about what is/isn't working well as things progress. |
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| [personaldev] Getting Things Done, applied to your emotional life |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|05:10 pm] |
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I recently read this article and thought you all might find this interesting:
It’s a theory of mine that the way you manage your emotions is critical to managing the rest of your life. If you are confused and/or distracted by something emotional - ie. not tangible and in your head - it will negatively affect your work and the people around you. So why not apply GTD methods of organization to your feelings and everything icky? It may sound stupid to some of you, but I know people who would immediately benefit from this kind of thought process. If we can manage our emotional relationships like we do business relationships, maybe we’d have less trouble. If we could organize all personal stuff like you do your work stuff, could we become emotionally productive
Read more at http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/gtd-your-emotional-life.html
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| Last minute burningman art project |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|12:00 am] |
I thought I'd allocate a lot of my copious free time this year to doing a huge burningman art project. Instead I ended up traveling for a long time. I'm back, it's now July, and there isn't much time. A friend told me today that I have one more day to submit an art project for placement in the open playa.
There's an idea I've been kicking around for a bit. It could work as part of a well-attended theme camp or as open playa art.
If you're interested in helping me on the project or if you think it would work well as part of your theme camp, please let me know. I haven't chosen a place to camp yet.
Here's the idea:
CONVERGENT EVOLUTION:
I have noticed during my travels around the world that there are certain similarities that show up across widely varying cultures. I have a huge number of pictures documenting this, and they often make interesting side-by-side comparisons -- eg beachgoers in England vs beachgoers in Vietnam, a temple in Vietnam vs a church in London, kids playing in India vs kids playing in Amsterdam etc. They are signs of how ideas have spread across our world yet evolved to suit the local environment. Since I have a large number of photos that I plan on tagging, I could fairly easily write a program that picks potentially good compare-and-contrast photo pairs based on the tags, and presents them to a user. The user can vote yes or no based on whether the photo pairing is interesting. As more and more photos are voted on by users, the pairings will get better and better. (I will be using the user input as the "natural selection" fitness function in an algorithm that will basically evolve better pairings)*
The user experience will consist of sitting in front of a big projected screen and pressing buttons to vote on the image pairs as they show up. People could run through the pairs as fast or as slow as they want, and known (or evolved) good pairings would be mixed in to keep people entertained.
*My backup plan is that if the awesome algorithm doesn't produce interesting results, I'll turn it into a photographic version of "hot or not" where people repeatedly vote on the best photo of a random pair, and the photos that show up will start getting better and better.
The overall contraption would likely consist of a 8x8x8ft cube made by stretching fabric over a pipe skeleton. Since projectors suck power, I'd need to have (or have access to) a generator. It could work well as part of the inside of a theme camp's dome (provided the theme jives with this project).
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Anyway, if this could be of interest to your camp or is something you might want to help with (even if it's just contributing photos), please let me know your thoughts. ( more... )
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| Content aware scaling is commercial |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|05:39 pm] |
It turns out that one of the most impressive tech demos from Siggraph 2007 is already in Photoshop CS4.
Content-aware scaling lets you resize photos without cropping or stretching. Instead, It just compresses the least interesting parts of the image.
Confused?
Check out this video (skipping the first minute if you don't want the backstory)
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| How to quickly tear through piles of photos? |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|05:10 pm] |
I'm starting to take a look at my volumes of photos from the trip.
I have 11500 of them to go through. I want to quickly find the best ones, make minor adjustments (cropping, rotating, brightness/color balance etc), and then add titles, descriptions, and tags. It's got to be quick because I'm going to be doing it over and over and over and over again.
My ultimate goal is to have my photos as a big searchable database both on my desktop and online (flickr or equivalent). I'm going to create a few slideshows for people to check out.
I watched the demo videos of iPhoto '09, which appears to be a big jump over my current iphoto ('07), but I have to buy it as an $80 software package included in iLife. Before I do that, I thought I'd put the call out to see what you photomongers recommend. How does the newest version of Picasa compare? Also, is there a better place than flickr at this point for navigating large photo collections online?
I also am planning a project of interesting photo pairs, showing two images from different parts of the world that either have a lot in common or provide interesting contrast. I'll likely have to assemble the pairs somewhat more manually. |
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| Stonewall |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|01:29 am] |
Wikipedia has a fascinating (and rather long) depiction of the Stonewall riots, which happened 40 years ago. It's worth a read.
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