St. Patrick's day logo on Google

(At least on Google UK. I think I heard they do this more than Google USA.)

Melanistic (All Black) Animals

Melanistic (All Black) Animals, post.
Kewl.
Notice the interesting site it's on, TwistedSifter.com. (Thanks to Henry.)

"Melanism is an undue development of dark-colored pigment in the skin or its appendages and is the opposite of albinism."

How creativity is being strangled by the law

The $8 billion iPod

V. funny.
Do you know what "copyright math" is? Find out!

A Shot At Love 2 With Tila Tequila

Wow, I think we are breaking new ground for how fake and bad TV can be.
"I just want love!" Urgh. This is just shockingly bad.

Lenses and sensors

From this post:
You would think that either the lens or the sensor has the highest resolution, and only improving the other one would improve the results. But that is not so, improving either one will improve detail, unless the gap is really huge.

This means for example that upgrading to a 22MP camera from a 12MP one may get you more detail even if you don't have the very best lenses.

Robin Wong pics

Robin Wong, who states he is just having fun with it, comes out with some cool images while just testing a camera.

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By the way, he says that for the first time ever, with the E-M5 he can take sharp pictures at one half second, due to the new "5-axis" stabilization. Impressive.

Why not M4/3?

I wonder why basically only Panasonic and Olympus, still, have joined Micro Four Thirds. Why not Sigma, Pentax, Sony, and Fuji (I don't even include Nikon and Canon, they are ultra-separatist)? Is it a kind of ego thing, they have to "be their own man" as a corporation? If they joined M4/3, they could immediately sell camera bodies to people who have the lenses. And if they make good lenses as time goes on, these may be bought by people who have bodies from other manufacturers.

For example, the otherwise very interesting Fuji X1-Pro (or maybe X-Pro1, sigh*.) is hampered by only having three lenses so far, and no zooms. It takes tonnes of money and time to develop a good lens line. Why not join up to an already strong lens line? And the sensor size is almost the same anyway. Why all this super-pride.


*As said in a review of the new Canon G1X: 

Just a few months ago when I reviewed the Panasonic GX1 I joked about the number of new cameras with X in their names. This then included the Leica X1, Canon 1DX, Samsung NX200, Fujifilm X-10, Ricoh GXR, Casio EX15, Olympus XZ1, Sigma DP2X, Sony HX9V – and that's with just one model from each company. Since then, in addition to the Panasonic GX1 and the new Panasonic X series lenses we have had the Fuji X1 Pro and now the Canon G1X. 
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Olympus 75mm F:1.8, and portraits

[Thanks to Bert]

Olympus is planning to release a 75mm F:1.8 lens. A bit long for a portrait lens, equivalent of 150mm in 35mm terms, but could be used for that and might be an interesting multi-purpose tele, and it's fast. And surely it'll be of the same excellent quality as the other prime (non-zoom) lenses Olympus has released recently.

And here is where the Micro Four Thirds format is really beginning to show its strength: much smaller lenses. This lens is not far from 200mm-equivalent in reach, and it is slightly faster than Nikon's famous monster of a 200mm F:2.0 lens. And compare the size! (The Olympus E-M5 body is even smaller than the Nikon body, so the Oly lens must be around a quarter of the size.) And the Nikon lens weighs almost three kilos! (and costs over five grand.) That's not a great lens for hand-holding, whereas the Olympus lens clearly is.

By the way, I once took some portraits with a 135mm lens (it was on film so I used a tripod even in pretty good light. What a blessing ISO 1600 is.), and one of the models (Memo, top) made an interesting comment: that with the greater distance the tele lens made for, the camera's presence was far less imposing and intruding than with a shorter lens.

I had to be over five meters away to get these half-body portraits, so such a lens is a bit long for constrained spaces.

Below, this was the kit I used, Pentax ME Super. A wonderfully compact and useful kit, I loved it. A classic camera. (Came out late seventies, clearly inspired by the Olympus OM cameras (like the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 is), and the same size almost to the millimeter.)

Update, Bruce found this site to compare sizes. Here's another good comparison between a DSLR and a M4/3. Nikon D90 with 85mm 1.4, and Olympus E-M5 with 45mm 1.8. The Nikon lens is a bit faster, but only half a stop (they didn't have the 1.8 version):

Scale of the Universe

[Thanks to TidBITS]

Scale of the Universe, interactive demonstration on NASA. (Requires Flash.) That is fun.

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses, article.

244 years in continual publication!! And the digital age has ended it. If that doesn't illustrate the power and pervasiveness of digital publication...

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a Chicago-based company, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

You can't argue with that, a paper book is a bitch to update! Especially one the size of EB. Whereas any bit of a web site can be updated in minutes. And these days, data and knowledge changes so fast, that nothing is too fast.

A mobile studio

It seems Cali Lewis is moonlighting with some outside gigs (Her normal one is at geekbeat.tv). The web may, historically viewed, still be in the Gold Rush age, but people still have to work hard.

I think this is an interesting look at how a lean and mean mobile video studio can be run.

Now, at first I had imbedded the video, but it has the irritating trait that it starts playing automatically every time you load the page. This would be particular irritating when it's lower on the page, and you have no clue where the sound is coming from. So I'll make do now with a link, watch it here.