The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. One of the most iconic SF stories ever, and yet I'm amazed how many people don't know it. It's not long, do read it.

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I was reminded of it by Pascal blogging about 2012 (I first read about this a decade ago. I can't believe how famous it's becoming. It's the new millennium bug. But maybe this one will work), and mentioning another classic, Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God. Also warmly recommended. (Spoiler warning, Pascal's blog post reveals the ending of the story.)
I love big-perspective stories, and stories which make you think.

T-2 computer music amplifier

[Thanks to Laurie J]

T-2 computer music amplifier. This is intriguing.
I have the Harman Kardon SoundSticks II on my Mac, and they sound friggin' amazing, I wonder how much better this can be. (Apart from the fact that I'd need hi-fi speakers to attach to this also, and I'm not sure where they'd sit.)

Download Your Own Robot Scientist

[Thanks to Neeraj]

Download Your Own Robot Scientist, article.
"Ever wanted to have a robot to do your research for you? If you are a scientist, you have almost certainly had this dream. Now it’s a real option: Eureqa, a program that distills scientific laws from raw data, is freely available to researchers.

The program was unveiled in April, when it used readouts of a double-pendulum to infer Newton’s second law of motion and the law of conservation of momentum. It could be an invaluable tool for revealing other, more complicated laws that have eluded humans."
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Sartre

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938) "Vendredi"

Three o'clock at night or in the day?
And why?
I think I'm loosing my capacity to hold these little human thoughts and beliefs.

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Apropos Sartre, I realized that much of the comedy I like is satire. And that I could write it if I wanted. In fact when viewed as satire, ideas for stories seem to present themselves easier.
But I dunno. Most satire also seems to have at least an undertone of bitingness or bitterness that I also seem to be loosing grasp of. Hmm.

The contest so far

I know from experience running competitions in the past that most entries will arrive in the last couple of days before closing. Still, there have already been several entries in the BW Portrait competition, and even better, the average quality is really high, which is pleasing but won't make judging any easier. :-)

Size and detail

I've long been interested in the way size and "resolution" affects art. I once asserted that bigger size (or resolution, or more detail) allows for deeper and stronger art. I got a lot of protests against that, and I think the reason for the protests is that you don't need a lot of size/detail to do pretty powerful art, but I think it's true nevertheless. For example a picture made of 4x4 pixels in two-bit mode (black or white, not even grey tones), how much art can you make with that? As soon as you expand it to 8x8 pixels, the possibilities expand greatly, and so on.

I just found a funny example of size and expression. In the big version of the picture below, it's clear that the girl is smiling. In the scaled-down version of the same picture, she no longer appears to be smiling! Just the subtleties lost by that scaling has changed such an important characteristic.

Magic:
Smile:



No smile:


... nothing has been changed at all, except scale.

Doing things cheap, stairwells...

Just now, some of my neighbors were carrying some big boxes out, and dropped them. It made a long crash which sounded like doomsday, so of course I jumped out there to see if anybody was hurt or anything.

Now, apart from some picking-up being needed, no harm had been done. But it got me thinking: every stairwell I've been in, in my whole life, has had this noise-exaggerating effect to it. Simple because it's built like a box, and with hard walls, and nothing has ever been done to dampen noise, not even a few tapestries or whatever. Why? Because it's cheaper of course.

And so, just to save a few thousand whatever, for the hundred years the building stands, everybody who ever lives there has to live with exaggerated noise in their home.

It's the same problem, just to a lesser degree, in noise insulation between apartments. I would love to live in an apartment building which was built well in this regard, but I don't even know if they exist.

And this is not the exeption, it's the rule. I think it says a lot about humanity.

Ice Age III (updated)

I'm just finishing off Ice Age III, in blu-ray version naturellement.
I liked it a lot, I think almost anybody who liked the first two will like this one too.

It also has a lot of excellent monsters in the shape of various dinos. ... I had a thought: remember when Pixar used to do "out-takes" for their films? The animated "actors" messing up their lines and such. Dead fun. I would have liked one for IA3: one of the monsters, like awesome über-monster "Rudy", going forth with an attack, and the director yelling "Cut! Try it again, man... you forgot to stop, pose, and roar before attacking!"
And the monster "actor" goes: "Oh, sorry, I tend to forget that. Tell me again, why do we always do that? It really makes no sense to stop and warn the prey and give them time to escape."


Update:
While watching it, and the new fave character, swashbucklin' Buck, I thought: you know who'd have been a great voice actor for him: Simon Pegg.
... And now I hear in the commentary that SP did indeed voice him!

Shooting with a prime

From Cameralabs.com forums:

Gordon wrote in his review:
"Shooting with the GF1 and 20mm took us back to the Seventies and Eighties when we used manual 35mm SLRs with nothing more than a 50mm lens. Back then we didn’t miss a zoom, and it’s amazing how liberating it can still be today when you’ve become used-to adjusting your focal length."

Yes!
When you have a zoom, you love it. But when you use a prime, you find out how much attention you have used, apparently, in thinking about pictures in many different focal lengths at once. One can think much quicker with a prime.

Also I found out that I can take sharp pictures at 1/15 second with the GF1 and the 20mm pancake lens, even without stabilization! It surprised me. That and F:1.7 and ISO 800 goes a long way (even if ISO 1600 really should have been better on that camera).

Loop-the-Loop Car World Record

Tommy found this video of a real car loop-the-loop.
I would have expected a necessary speed much higher than 36mph, but also much less G-force than 6 gees, that's a lot!

National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009

National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009, article and pictures.
As you might expect from a competition of this size (don't forget my little one), there are many cool pictures.

I AM WHAT I LEARN - Jordan Lederman

I AM WHAT I LEARN - video in HD by Jordan Lederman.

"Earlier this year, the 13-year-old student at Pine Lake Middle School in Sammamish entered a video contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) on the importance of getting a good education. Of the 600 entries received, staffers at DOE picked 10 finalists, including Jordan's chicken video." - article