Photos

Wolf and Bear hanging out together

Taisun crane at the Yantai Raffles shipyard in China.

The oil harbor in Novorossiysk, the southern Russian seaport town on the Black Sea [Lucie Godeau/AFP]

Felix Baumgartner of Austria gestures prior to speaking with the media after successfully jumping from a space capsule lifted by a helium balloon in Roswell, N.M., Oct. 14, 2012. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

Felix died in a  paraglider crash Thursday along the eastern coast of Italy. He was 56. Previous post about Felix.

Fuller's Coffee Shop

Fuller's Coffee Shop

We had breakfast af Fuller's Coffee Shop last weekend. Nothing spectacular, just a small joint with a counter with 28 seats (they're numbered). They serve a good solid breakfast, but this duct work over the kitchen caught my eye:

Duct work over Fuller's kitchen

Look at that thing! It's a work of art.

I didn't post this last week because I thought my one photo came out blurry and wasn't good enough to post. Then I look at it today it looks pretty sharp. Do pictures magically get sharper as they age? I don't know, maybe it wasn't getting rendered fast enough for me. I mean computers do that sometimes, they'll put up a heavily pixelated version of an image and then they'll go back over it once or twice filling in the details. Could have been a hiccup in the cloud, which is where this image is stored, so it gave a blurry preview and I wasn't patient enough to wait for it to finish loading. I mistakenly thought it was just a bad photo.

I don't know what it is with the camera in my smartphone. Sometimes the pictures are perfectly clear and other times they are terribly blurry. For instance, today I took a couple of pictures of the dresser I repaired. I took like four shots of two views, took them one after another, not changing the way I was holding it or how I was 'clicking-the-shutter' and in both cases only one of the four came out. The others were just garbage. I don't get it.

Trump

Trump Graffiti

I like this, can't say why. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to put his image on this wall. Given that Trump sees to be staring straight out of the screen and wall is at an angle, I'm wondering if this was done in Photoshop or was it actually painted on the wall. Lot of detail, dealing with the vents and equipment sticking out of the wall. I just don't know.

I used Mockover to distort the image so it appears we are looking straight in at the wall. Trump looks a little distorted here, so I suspect the top image was done on someone's computer, not in an alley. Still, very cool image.

Sunset

Sunset - Osmany

Tumblr Does Not Like CMYK

Just for grins, I opened a Tumblr account and posted a few of my pictures there. Then I tried to post one of Cedric Delsaux's photos, and Tumblr choked on it. After going back and forth with the Tumblr help desk for a while it came out that the picture was encoded using the CMYK color model instead of the more usual RGB (Red Green Blue). I was surprised, because I hadn't done anything to cause this. I did a screen capture and MSPaint to crop it, and I may have used Picasa to trim it further, and none of them complained about it being some alien artifact.

A little poking around and I find some stories that lend credence to Tumblr's claims, but no actual proof. I still don't have any first hand evidence that the photo is using CMYK. If I had some real photo editing software, like Photoshop, they might be able to tell me, but nothing I have has said boo.

Complexity Squared

Or maybe even cubed. Forty years ago the world seemed like a much more comprehensible place. An intelligent person could grasp the whole of human knowledge. You would not know everything, but you could at least understand how much knowledge there was, what the major areas of knowledge were, and figure out where to go to find out what you needed to know. Maybe it was just my naivety, but I think the total amount of human knowledge has expanded enormously since then.

Yesterday I was poking around (on the internet, where else?) and I stumbled across some photos by Cedric Delsaux. They are some of the coolest photos I have ever seen. This one in particular caught my eye.

It's a red hot strip of steel being rolled out in a mill in the Ukraine. And then it occured to me that one of causes of the increase in knowledge and the accompanying increase in complexity is that the Iron & Bamboo Curtains have collapsed. When I was a kid, the Soviet Union and Red China were big blank places on the map. All I knew is that they were the enemy, they were full of bad guys, and the Russians were sending rockets into space, same as us. Golly gee, Uncle Samizdat, I can't even remember the last time I heard somebody mention the Bamboo Curtain.

And to think it was the evil Republicans who got those barriers torn down. That criminal Nixon (whom I like because he got us out of Vietnam) opened up China, and that fool Reagan (whom I despise because the idiotic American public elected an actor as President. An actor, for crissakes! Not to mention not nuking Lebanon when we were sorely provoked) got Gorbachav to tear down the Berlin wall.

Tip of the hat to The Disco Vietnam.

I Blog, Therefore I Am

Ripped from today's comic page.

Powell's

As a reward for fixing my wife's car, I decide to treat myself to a book from Powell's. I saw a couple of interesting things while I was there.

This was on the trinket table next to the cash register.

One of the bloke's on Top Gear mentioned that Haynes has a shop manual for babies now.

Maybe I should buy this for Roberta X

This is a display in an adjacent beauty products store.
I know it's hard to see with all the reflections,
but there are several wooden models in amongst all the sprays and lotions.
I thought it a little incongruous.

Oh, yeah, I picked up Burning Chrome by William Gibson.

Photo of the Day

Steam train under Querétaro (Mexico) aquaduct

Is it real or is it photoshopped? From Burro Hall.

Update 2016 added caption to picture.

Queretaro

Pretty cool picture. Inside "La Cruz" Temple, Santiago de Queretaro, Mexico, via Burro Hall, via daring daughter.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Electron Micrographs

Steve got me started on this. The photos are from Izismile. Some of the stuff is recognizable, some of it is plausible, and some of it I've never even heard of. Forminiferia? I had to look that one up. Wikipedia has a lot of scientific gooble-de-gook, which didn't really explain anything, but then they say

"They are usually less than 1 mm in size, but some are much larger, and the largest recorded specimen reached 19 cm."

 Okay, so we may not know what they are but at least we know how big they are. Then on the aquarium site Reefkeeping I found this:

Foraminiferans have been called the "the most common group of non-bacterial organisms in the world."

Infoplease also has an article that is at least partially comprehensible.

Reflection

We have been watching The Good Wife on my computer down in the basement. We just finished the last episode last night. We get up to leave and I notice that the screen is almost perfectly reflected in the surface of the light switch. It is one of these new fangled rocker switches where each half of the rocker is about an inch square. The barely visible larger rectangle is the wallplate surrounding the rocker. The original picture is pure black, but Picasa's I'm Feeling Lucky button and cropping got us this. Yes, I know, you can't tell what's on the screen. I just wanted to see what I would get. Picasa's machinations delivered the color, but it wasn't visible until I cropped the image and it appeared at 1:1. Scaling the picture down causes the color to disappear into shades of brown.

This is the second time I've tried to find a picture in an apparently pure black image. The first time worked much better.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Pictures From The Net

Sometimes I will start looking into a subject, and I will start collecting pictures. If you find a web site that has several pictures you want, I find it is quicker to simply save the entire web page than to download each individual picture. Maybe it's just my browser, I don't know.

In any case if you do this from more than one site, you are liable to find you end up with multiple copies of the same picture. People steal pictures ruthlessly. To get rid of the duplicates, you can use two picture viewing programs, and resize the windows to share the screen and visually compare them. That can be a bit of a pain. I normally run all my Windows programs at full screen resolution. Dealing with windows that are smaller than that is a pain.

There are programs that will locate and delete duplicate files for you, but they generally cost money. I wrote one many moons ago, and it still works, but it runs in a DOS box and is slower than molasses compare to some of the new ones. If you are only looking at a few files, or you can let it run, it's fine.

The programs to delete duplicate files won't necessarily work well for images, because the same image can be encoded in different ways. You can encode the same image two different ways and the files will be completely different.

I found a free program that looks for duplicate images, shows them to you and then lets you choose which one to delete. It's a little old, and it's a little clunky, but it's free and it works fine. It's call Dup Detector and it's available from Prismatic Software via RAREWARE here.

Yosemite Firefall

Steve sent me some of these pictures. I thought they were pretty cool. I was just going to post them, but the explanation that he sent got scrambled by the email demons, so I thought I would see if I could find one that wasn't. The explanation Steve sent claimed these pictures are of a waterfall that catches the light from the setting sun and it makes it look like it's on fire. But the first explanation I find on Google claims the Yosemite Firefall was an old tradition of pushing a burning bonfire off the top of a high cliff. OK, guys, somebody is being funny.

A little more checking reveals that both stories are true. The first half dozen pictures are of the Horsetail waterfall illuminated by the setting sun and last few are of the remains of the bonfire falling down the face of a cliff. Two different events, two different locations, but both in Yosemite.

Comic Book, er, Album of the Day

Stumbled across this very cool image on a Spanish language blog. At first I thought it was a comic book cover, but it turns out to be an album cover. Electronic dance music, I think. Seems you can download the album for free, or buy it?

Hi-Tech Comes To The Farm

Went to pick up my neighbor from her horseback riding lesson this afternoon. Modest little house off the beaten track, but around the corner and behind some trees were these too large structures. The closer one is a stable and the further one is a riding arena. The arena must be 50 feet wide and about 120 feet long. Galvanized steel trusses and some sort of woven plastic fabric covering. It has got to be less than half the cost of conventional construction.

I spliced two photos by hand to get this picture, which is why there is a disconnect in the fence. Autostitch couldn't figure out what to do with it. Too much white and gray, I suspect.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Nashville Flood

I thought the colors in this photo were exceptional.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Quote/Website of the Day

Q: I can't decipher your politics. Are you left-wing? Right-wing? Conservative? Liberal? Or what? I'm confused.
A: I'm confused too. I've stopped believing in the existence of the "left/right dichotomy." And every existing political label has been rendered meaningless by endless framing, reframing, and counter-reframing by competing political factions. There is no name or category that summarizes my wide-ranging opinions -- opinions which, furthermore, are continuously evolving. The zombietime images speak for themselves, and my personal outlook should be irrelevant in any case.

From the zombietime FAQ. I couldn't have said it better myself. I got there by following a link I found on View From The Porch. Some (most? all?) of the photos at the Hall of Shame are a little disturbing. Man, there are some real wackos out there.

Recaptcha

Recaptcha

Word verification has gotten to be a common place requirement for commenting on blogs or posting on forums. That's where you are shown a distorted picture of a word and you have to type it in to show that you are a real live person and not some stupid computer program, i.e. a "bot", a minion of some evil advertising campaign (Buy Viagra now, cheap! You buy now!).

Yesterday I ran into a forum that used two forms of this torture. One was Recaptcha, which is a fairly common one, and a second one which only required entering the certain letter of a specified word. I thought Recaptcha was fairly impenetrable, at least for stupid little bots, so this second level of defense seemed superfluous. So I wrote to the webmaster and complained, and he assured me that they needed both devices in order to keep the spammers at bay. Huh.

I have to admit I've wondered how difficult if would be to write a program to defeat these word verification defenses. I imagine that image processing software has made tremendous strides in the last 30 years, so I suppose it's possible that some anti-social whiz kid has fallen into the clutches of an evil spam lord and delivered him a program that can pick the text out of those distorted images.

Or maybe they've found a weak spot in the word verification procedures that allow them to bypass it completely. We may be moving to network wide identification handles (OpenID, etc.) sooner than some of us expected.

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.

Stamps

Lebanese stamps

Wondering what Syaffolee was up to, I started poking around on her website and discovered she has a stamp page. What a cool idea!

I have a book case full of 3-ring binders that I never, well hardly ever, look at anymore. I seldom print anything. Occasionally I will print a Google map, or maybe a receipt from an on line purchase, but that's about it. I have accumulated 400+ "documents" on Google documents in the last three and a half years (I say "documents", because some of them are no more than a couple of lines).

Putting images of stamps online is a logical extension of this. I imagine a scanner would be better than a camera for imaging them. (Imaging is now a verb?) So another project to work on: taking the big envelope of stamps we have, scanning them all and putting them up on the web.

This is kind of weird. Part of dealing with stamps is handling them, examining the exquisite detail with which they are printed. But you do enough of that (picking them up (they don't like to be picked up, you have to have the right amount of moisture on your finger tips), sticking on the little cellophane hinges, sticking them in giant binders, one after another until you have book that weighs twenty pounds, hauling it to the bookcase and shelving it, not to be looked at until next year) and you begin to see the appeal of a digital stamp collection.

Update October 2016 replace missing picture.