Stable CDs and laser light

Bert sort of made fun of this amazing CD Stabilizer found for only $172. But I dunno, I always felt that unstable CDs were probably affecting my life in a negative way.

It reminds me of twenny years ago when CDs were new, an audiofile friend of mine bought a "special pen" with which you painted the edge of CDs green. It stopped the laser light from being reflected back and messing up the playing. Problem is that even if we assume that that would really be a problem, then painting on the edge would not have any effect, since it would not stop light being reflected. The light is reflected by the phase change and won't care if it's a plastic/air surface or a plastic/paint surface.

Oooh, reminds me of a logical error in an otherwise very enjoyable SF novel, Consider Phlebas. The protagonists are shooting with laser guns at enemies hiding in an old ruin which is overgrown with moss. And they are being shot back at with lasers, at a furious rate. But then they discover that there is nobody in there, only the ruin is built from crystal, and the lasers are their own shots, bouncing around inside all the crystal and then being sent back.

Sounds neat, almost a pity to ruin it with logic: if the laser shot had the power to break through the moss the first time, why did it stop doing it on the other side? Why not just go straight through? Also, not being mirror, the crystal would only reflect less than ten percent of the light, so after a couple of bounces it would have been reduced to nothing. And finally, after bouncing about in there, what would happen to make the beam suddenly decide not to do it anymore, but to burn through the moss suddenly and escape? If it could, wouldn't it have done it the first time?

Apart from that, a romping good action space opera book.

Quick download

I got my cable modem upgraded a few weeks back. The overall speed is limited by many things on the Internet, so generally I've been pleased, but not impressed. But five minutes ago somebody sent me a 94MB file via yousendit.com, and it was downloaded in 45 seconds! Over 2MB per second. When I think back to modem days, if you even cared to attempt such a file and succeeded, that would be more like 12 hours.

by Thom

Thom Hogan has some interesting speculation.

To wit that the upcoming Nikon D80 replacement, called the D90, will be an evolutionary upgrade, but will be the first SLR to have video recording.

And: what if one of the "APS" makers (of cameras which have sensors smaller than 35mm format, which is the bulk of them) where to do what Olympus/Panasonic are doing now with the Four Thirds format (which is smaller yet) and eliminate the mirror box? Could the Micro Four Thirds format compete?

Angel Of The North

Angel Of The North, in Gateshead, Northern England. The wingspan is wider than the height of the Statue of Liberty. Each wing weighs 50 tonnes.


[BTW, does anybody know how to make Blogger add images to where the cursor is instead of at the top?]

This video of the Angel has a nice ending, visually.

Bill Sienkiewicz

How I miss* Bill Sienkiewicz, and how sad I am that Big Numbers was never finished. Both from the writer (Alan Moore) and the artist, it was a work so original that it goes beyond "seminal" because I don't think anybody could ever have emulated it.

Like most powerful artists, it seems that both Moore and Sienkiewicz have strong egos, and like often happens, they came in conflict somehow, and the series ended after two issues out of twelve planned.


* He's not dead, but for many years it seems he has produced very little, and what I've seen looks like he's coasting on skills learned earlier.
Here's an audio interview.

Not Without My Handbag

Alex pointed to Not Without My Handbag, a seminal piece of animation.

It's an Aardman production, which would normally mean claymation. But it does not look like claymation. And it's from 1993, which makes it unlikely to be CG.

I think it's regular stop-motion animation. The characters may have been made in clay, but I think they have been burned and varnished, they look hard and glossy. And the sets have a wonderful abstract quality. I think that is the way they are lit and filmed, they were probably made from paper, then painted.

More on Micro Four Thirds

A good article about the promise/problems of the Micro Four Thirds system I mentioned a couple of days ago.
And another one.

The upshot of the whole thing is that if this thing pans out as it should, we might in a year or two be looking at cameras with about the image quality of, say, the Nikon D80 (top notch), but half the size and half the weight. They may not be cheaper though, and they may be a little slower, we'll see.

PhotoIcon

[Gee, this is turning out to be one of those abundant-posts days.]

There's a new up-and-coming photo magazine, Photo Icon. It turns out it's from the mind of our ole pal Petter Hegre.

I haven't read any of the paper issues yet, but from browsing a little on their site, it seems slick, professional, and dedicated. Perhaps a little on the slick and flash side for my taste, I sort of get the feeling that it's made by and for young professionals who, while they care a lot about art, are very strongly into their career and therefore into presenting the biggest possible impact all the time.

The same goes for the galleries (you can find list of pages/galleries on the lower left side of the page). Many nice pictures though. Petter himself has a nice art nude gallery.



The dog and the fence I like, fine art that:



While these below are more of the "career" type pictures, if you understand me. (Not that they are bad, maybe I just don't really get them.)

No Name, No Slogan

Our new slogan was inspired by a song by Ministry/Acid Horse, No Name, No Slogan. Old favorite. Sample on iTunes.

Lonely robot

I am watching Wallace And Gromit: A Grand Day Out, apparently for the first time, and I think I know what inspired Wall-E. That lonely moon robot is just ab fab.

Amazingly hard to find a good picture of, though. Does anybody know an image search which works better than Google's?
(I see Google is trying a system which awards people for labelling lots of images on the web. I wonder how that is going.)

BTW, I suddenly realized that (Wallace and Gromit creator) Nick Park is from these parts. Wallace keeps calling Gromit "lad", which normally means "boy", but is used in Lancashire for grown men too (and apparently anthropomorphic dogs). And in A Close Shave, the love interest Gwendolin has the last name of Ramsbottom, which apart from being funny is the name of a town not far from where I live. And her dog is named Preston, also a town close by, where Nick Park was born.

PPS: A Close Shave is just fantastic. Especially the last third, with the little airplane, the sheep balancing on the motorcycle, and the big shearing machine. I'm on the floor. (It took a little while, by the way, before I got the pun in Shaun The Sheep.)

Convenient Parking

And a cover version, weirdly set to a slide show of thin girls.

New Coolpix cameras

We can feel we are nearing the biannual Photokina exhibition (late September), the camera announcements are coming thicker.

Nikon has announced several new Coolpix (compacts) cameras. Most interesting for serious users (heavy addiction) would be the P6000 and possibly the s710. The former for sure looks very pro for a compact.

And they have very ambitious high-sensitivity ISO settings, but let's see how they perform in practice.