On My Mind

There are a bunch of things on my mind these days. I put ten grand through my checking account last month: $10,000 in and a like amount out. Granted the bigger half of it was just transfers from college funds to colleges, but still, it was a stink load of money.

I got a very nice Canon digital camera for Christmas. It's a 10 mega-pixel Elf. Ten mega-pixels is huge. With the default memory card (32 mega-bytes) it would only hold 11 pictures. 10 mega-pixels give a picture that is over 3,000 pixels square. My fancy schmancy desktop LCD is only 1280 by 1024. It would take nine of these screens to show one 10 mega-pixel picture.

So I got to wondering how many pixels is enough? Display screens are going up in pixels and resolution, but how far will they go before the market is satisfied? How many pixels can the eye see? I know the center of your field of vision has a higher resolution than the periphery, but just how good is it?

I remember a printer ad I saw some years ago that had three pictures of a woman in a red, white and blue bathing suit. The text went something like this: At 100 dots per inch, you can see that the woman is wearing a bathing suit. At 300 dots per inch you can see that it is wet. At 1000 dots per inch you can see that it is painted on. The accompanying pictures, printed at the three resolutions, demonstrated this.

Anyway, I wanted to study up on this whole business of what we can see, and how we see it.

Then there is carbon dioxide. Never mind the climate change mongers, I was more interested in when does carbon dioxide become toxic. How long can you survive in a closed room? How much fresh air do you need? I started looking into this a few weeks ago but got sidetracked. One thing I did learn was the CO2 makes up less than one percent of the atmosphere. Oxygen is about 20%, and Nitrogen is about 70% and the rest is lost in a haze.

Of course, once I've got this all sorted out there is the whole climate change business. The one thing I have been looking for, and have not seen, is a good one page summary of where CO2 is coming from and where it's going. Some people like to point fingers at the automobile, but without a good overview of the situation I am not sure they should.

Then there's the Ackermann function. I came across it recently in Stu Savory's blog, and I've been playing with it on my computer. Using it to learn how to use Eclipse, a software development program for Linux. Also learning how to use a math library for doing arbitrary precision (numbers as big as you want to make them).

Don't forget Betrand, a "functional programming language". I've been messing about with it also. It has an option to display it's output graphically, but the program is so old, I am not sure the graphics package still exists, or if it does, if it works. There should be some way to adapt it to work with a web browser, but that is going to take some study, or luck.

The kids were home from college this weekend. It was nice to see them. Oldest son brought home a cold and a cough which he very kindly passed on to me. I still had a low grade sinus thing going on, so when you add this new thing, I was pretty miserable, so I have resumed a course of antibiotics that I started last month and then abandoned for reasons that are not really clear.

I'm also working on re-reading a book ("Drown All The Dogs" by Thomas Adcock) I read last month. After I put it down I couldn't remember what I read, so after a couple of weeks I picked it up and started over. So far, everything I read, I remember reading before, but it's not like it's boring, it's like reading it for the first time. Weird. Anyway, this time I am making a bunch of notes and I hope to have something intelligent to say when I finally do finish it.