Old Japanese Man Creates Amazing Art Using Excel (Wait, Excel?)

Old Japanese Man Creates Amazing Art Using Excel (Wait, Excel?), post.

He is not doing it mathematically as some commenters apparently first believed. But it's still pretty amazing what some people will get out of a tool which was never meant for the purpose. (I barely ever use Excel, I didn't know it had any drawing tools beyond making graphs.)

Focus stacking again

Bert found this cool article about macro focus stacking.
(That is, the use of several exposures with slightly varying focus being combined in the computer for greater depth of field. The super-narrow depth of field has always been the bane of macro photography, so it's very welcome there.)

The Conan of frogs on his horned mythological steed.

... We are not here, you are having a dream...

"Who, me, officer?!"

Lime light

Photo by my pal Jimmy, I think it's nice on the desktop.

Jimmy tells me: "I thought that limes were supposed to be green, but that's just the way they're shipped and sold in stores.  A tree-ripened lime is yellow, but they don't last very long for commercial purposes, according to my friend Bob who grows them."
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Surreal Black-And-White Photos

[Thanks to TCG]

Surreal Black-And-White Photos, post.

dangerous nests

Have you heard the rumor that Stieg Larsson's estate has allowed a third-party writer to write a sequel to 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' and 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest'?
The working title is 'The Girl Who Messed With Something Dangerous Again'.

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Talking about hornets' nests, I would say one would have to be quite desperate to have sex with one. But he probably didn't predict that the act was actually suicidal! (Durn, it's even a Swedish man, one more brick in the seque.
... If you're like me and skip the links to other stories while reading one, it takes a while to discover that this story was actually a hoax. Dishonest journalism, I'd call that. Totally different from what I'm doing, for I actually didn't know it while writing the post.     :-)
Well, good to know nobody has yet been that stupid.

Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

[Thanks to Aniko]

I've been from the minority saying just this, since the nineties. But seldom has it been said so convincingly.




"Don't make people pay, let them pay."

Public Opinion

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
-- Bertrand Russell

More from Sony RX100

Congratulations to TCGirl for getting the Sony RX100!
This tiny camera continues to be one of my favorites. It's a real pocketcamera, breast-pocket-sized, but the speed and the quality, and the low-light results do not look like it. It's a dang good camera, not just a dang good compact-camera.
This is an indoor hand-held shot from it. What amazing quality.
If it would have been me, I'd have used auto-ISO or maybe ISO 800, but despite the low setting which gave a 1/10th second shutter speed, the anti-shake of the camera coped with it perfectly.
(Here's a full-sized file, direct from camera.)

The camera is priced according to the quality, about $650... you can get a very good compact for half that. But I consider it worth it.
Two of the "secrets" to its performance are the fast lens, and the large sensor, the largest in a camera of that size. It's even larger than the sensor in the Fuji X10, which has a considerably larger body.

It looks bigger here, "folded out", when "folded in" it's a true pocket camera, hardly bigger than the Canon S100, just a bit thicker.

British place names

I live near a town named Ramsbottom. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness

[Thanks to Aniko]

So many people have promised us Happiness, that one starts to ignore it, like promises of more hair or longer dicks. But this lecture has some very interesting points. Not the least the chart at the end.

Sunrise from above

Talking about the space station, here's a sunrise as seen from there. You don't often see the air space like that!
Full image.

Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model

"Image is powerful. But image is superficial." — Cameron Russell



"Models have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair, and they are probably the most physically insecure people on the planet." — Cameron Russell, supermodel