Most look impractical and/or expensive to make, but still.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Article on gear
Under the influence of a home-made cappuccino and a little licorice candy, I've just written a new article:
Photography Gear For Portraits And Nudes
This was a lot of fun to do. I hope people will gain from it too.
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There is also the old Domai article about photographing girls.
Photography Gear For Portraits And Nudes
This was a lot of fun to do. I hope people will gain from it too.
---
There is also the old Domai article about photographing girls.
3D DSLR Setup Spotted at the Olympics, post.
I'm a bit amazed he's using zoom lenses. That has to be tricky to synchronize precisely, at anything but the end settings. Though it seems he has made a jury-rigged band which turns them both at once, ingenious if it works well.
I'm a bit amazed he's using zoom lenses. That has to be tricky to synchronize precisely, at anything but the end settings. Though it seems he has made a jury-rigged band which turns them both at once, ingenious if it works well.
Bert, our resident multi-engineer, sez:
Not as "jury-rigged" as it appears, methinks. The link between the lenses appears to be using Posi-drive (tm) elements which, along with the machined bracket coupling the two bodies, imply careful design, precision machining, etc. Might yield surprisingly accurate results, who knows...
The twin-core variety he's using is composed of two highly flexible stranded steel cables encased in polyurethane (PU), with PU "ladder rungs" molded at regular intervals. The corresponding pulley has a smooth race on either side for the cables and a string of teeth in the center meshing with the "ladder".
The end result is something indeed very similar in principle to a chain drive, except that the resulting motion doesn't have the velocity wobble associated with rigid-link chain drives (humm, I don't know how I could easily explain this one... sorry).
Bottom line: excellent load capability and outstanding performance, stability and wear resistance, and also self-lubricating in a lightweight assembly. Probably wouldn't be tough enough for a bicycle (would be pointless anyway, don't need the precision there), but is pretty good in small precision assemblies. Downside is that you have to get the belts made to size, you cannot adjust the length as you can do with a chain (by adding/removing links). I myself would consider it more like a very rugged timing belt (which I probably would have used in his setup, the choice of posi-drive is a bit odd to me).
Thanks, friend. Hmmm, quite interesting. The comments do show that this guy, David Klutho, is a pro who has written books about 3D photography and so on.
F117 Nighthawk
Interestingly, this plane reportedly would have been impossible to fly before computers, it's far too nimble and unstable.
I think the Nighthawk, despite having been built to reflect radar waves off to the sides, has a certain stark beauty to it, yes?
Ray said:
It's flight instabilities aside, it reminds me of an ancient aboriginal spear point. I don't find it particularly beautiful. If our American cousins put as many bucks into making the world a better place as they do in developing cutting edge killing machines, we might all live less stressful lives. We already have enough nukes on both sides of a possible conflict to wipe out the world's population about seven times over, the experts tell us.
Eolake said...
I think the Nighthawk, despite having been built to reflect radar waves off to the sides, has a certain stark beauty to it, yes?
Ray said:
It's flight instabilities aside, it reminds me of an ancient aboriginal spear point. I don't find it particularly beautiful. If our American cousins put as many bucks into making the world a better place as they do in developing cutting edge killing machines, we might all live less stressful lives. We already have enough nukes on both sides of a possible conflict to wipe out the world's population about seven times over, the experts tell us.
Eolake said...
No need to single out the US, almost every country in the world has a military, and indeed if all that money was used on, say, education, holy cow! Any bigger country which did that would virtually take over the world, and without losing their young men to war.
Essential Leonard Cohen
Finnegans Wake new edition
Now you can be confabbled at at a deluxe rate, Finnegans Wake is being published in a new edition, including a calf-skin one at €900.
Danis Rose said yesterday: "Although it seems like a long time to be editing a single work, in many ways I'm astonished that it only took 30 years when you consider that the typesetting alone took 10."
I did think that all those made-up words had to be mistakes!
More seriously, I guess I should not be so dismissive of the book, it seems many people take it seriously and is getting something out of it. It's just that my own reaction to the book is that of somebody trying to talk to me and deliberately babbling and making up words and jumping all over the place. It just grates my nerves far more than I can go beyond just to read a book.
Here's a random page from the book.
I read once the sensible advice that the more complicated your content/message, the simpler your language has to be. And it seems that the story/content of Finnegans Wake (apparently it's not "Finnegan's Wake") is quite complex indeed. So coupled with the most opaque language in publishing history, it does not make for light holiday reading.
Danis Rose said yesterday: "Although it seems like a long time to be editing a single work, in many ways I'm astonished that it only took 30 years when you consider that the typesetting alone took 10."
I did think that all those made-up words had to be mistakes!
More seriously, I guess I should not be so dismissive of the book, it seems many people take it seriously and is getting something out of it. It's just that my own reaction to the book is that of somebody trying to talk to me and deliberately babbling and making up words and jumping all over the place. It just grates my nerves far more than I can go beyond just to read a book.
Here's a random page from the book.
I read once the sensible advice that the more complicated your content/message, the simpler your language has to be. And it seems that the story/content of Finnegans Wake (apparently it's not "Finnegan's Wake") is quite complex indeed. So coupled with the most opaque language in publishing history, it does not make for light holiday reading.
Juicy Jabber busy
Five thousand mails/messages per day! Holy frig. The price of Net fame. Gawd.
It takes her a full day to do one Vlog? I'm not sure if that means she's ineffective or that she's a lot more conscientious than I'd be.
She has very nice hands. That's actually surprisingly rare, even on pretty people.
It's interesting, you could hardly find anybody further removed from my reality than Blair here. She's seen Twilight five times for krise sakes! :-) But I find that I respect her a lot, and her work too, and I think she's very funny.
It takes her a full day to do one Vlog? I'm not sure if that means she's ineffective or that she's a lot more conscientious than I'd be.
She has very nice hands. That's actually surprisingly rare, even on pretty people.
It's interesting, you could hardly find anybody further removed from my reality than Blair here. She's seen Twilight five times for krise sakes! :-) But I find that I respect her a lot, and her work too, and I think she's very funny.
Friday, March 05, 2010
Aimee Mullins: Running on high-tech legs
"Pamela Anderson has more prosthetics in her body than I do, and nobody calls her disabled."
It's amazing: this woman is more able than 98% of the people I know, I see no evidence that she's suffering more than anybody "normal", and yet it's just hard to shake that inherited feeling deep inside of "oh that poor soul, see what a brave face she is putting on her disability, how admirable". It's weird. She is not disabled, she can certainly run a hell of a lot longer and faster than I can with my meat feet.
_2b.jpg)
I was hoping to find a video showing those "cheetah legs" demonstrated in use... Ah, found a brief one:
... I think she should try to be more forgiving of people calling her an "inspiration". It's a good thing to inspire after all, even if part of it comes from misconceptions of disability. She might for example inspire "disabled" people to not think of themselves as disabled. And maybe "normal" people get inspired to overcome their own obstacles. That's hardly a bad thing.
Here's a video, unfortunately of horrible quality, showing her showing the legs.
It's amazing: this woman is more able than 98% of the people I know, I see no evidence that she's suffering more than anybody "normal", and yet it's just hard to shake that inherited feeling deep inside of "oh that poor soul, see what a brave face she is putting on her disability, how admirable". It's weird. She is not disabled, she can certainly run a hell of a lot longer and faster than I can with my meat feet.
_2b.jpg)
I was hoping to find a video showing those "cheetah legs" demonstrated in use... Ah, found a brief one:
... I think she should try to be more forgiving of people calling her an "inspiration". It's a good thing to inspire after all, even if part of it comes from misconceptions of disability. She might for example inspire "disabled" people to not think of themselves as disabled. And maybe "normal" people get inspired to overcome their own obstacles. That's hardly a bad thing.
Here's a video, unfortunately of horrible quality, showing her showing the legs.
Update on Duffy's face
There's an essential comment added to my controversial post about dimple surgery.
TED talk on autism
TED talk on autism.
Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.
They seem to have listened to us, and removed that big bang of noise which used to open the TED videos. Good.
Seems there's a movie about Temple, starring Claire Danes.
She talks for instance about sensory sensitivity. I have a lot of that, every sensory input, touch and sound especially, are very intense for me, and often a problem.
She touches on something I've long considered important: that children should not be kept from working. Sure, they should not slave for 18 hours for others' profit, but to keep them from work totally may damage their life, because then they can't handle it when they are suddenly dropped into it as adults, and additionally if they work they will have a great boost in self-worth when they produce something and earn their own money.
To work and study til 20 and work for the rest is nuts, I think we should play and study and work all the way from childhood til death or incapability.
Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.
They seem to have listened to us, and removed that big bang of noise which used to open the TED videos. Good.
Seems there's a movie about Temple, starring Claire Danes.
She talks for instance about sensory sensitivity. I have a lot of that, every sensory input, touch and sound especially, are very intense for me, and often a problem.
She touches on something I've long considered important: that children should not be kept from working. Sure, they should not slave for 18 hours for others' profit, but to keep them from work totally may damage their life, because then they can't handle it when they are suddenly dropped into it as adults, and additionally if they work they will have a great boost in self-worth when they produce something and earn their own money.
To work and study til 20 and work for the rest is nuts, I think we should play and study and work all the way from childhood til death or incapability.
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