Schierer Space

This is a gratuitous shout-out style plug for Bill over at Talking Traffic. I owe him one for covering my roundabout topic request.

Thanks Bill! Looking forward to future podcasts (hopefully with shorter gaps in between)!

We’re zeroing in on most of the people who we have any real chance of recognizing… there are a couple of folks that we can see clearly that I don’t have any info on. I’ve grabbed some of them from the images where we have almost everyone (some of the massive group shots are pretty much S.O.L).

So as some of you know, K & I are in the process of getting all of our photographs organized. We started with the digital images from the last 6 years, and now we’ve begun scanning in prints from about 1993 on.

I’ve just uploaded 10 Pep Band group shots from 1995 which I’d like some help with. Those of you who know me well know that remembering names is not my strong suit, so you can help me remember! There’s just a couple of thumbnails below one from the first of the 10 shots, and one from the last.

We’ve already identified most of the people in these images, but any assistance would be appreciated so assume we have nothing. Either comment here, or in the gallery itself. Although you usually have to be registered to comment in the gallery, or see the larger images, I’ve opened up this album to all users… if the spammers find it, I’ll have to shut the comments down to unregistered users… we will see.

If you need to see just a bit more resolution to make a final call, let me know… I have scanned these at much higher res than they are on the website.

Thanks for helping!

158 through 163 are obviously from a roadtrip. Probably early 1995.
173 through 185 I’m pretty sure are from the 1995 Freakout party and game.

Thanks to my Sis for putting up a link to this video. It is an interesting problem that technology has presented to us and our children.

Enjoy.

Alternate link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q

Summary: Various things are progressing at an exponential rate such that the capability of education or any other system to cope with the amount of information that will be produced SOON exceeds the capacity of any possible institution.

I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this sooner! Go outside as soon as you can an participate. Instructions are available at the Great Worldwide Star Count website (which I might add has a rather obnoxious colored website).

Thanks to SpaceWeather for bringing this to my attention.

Before we talk about image quality, we need to talk a bit about resolution. Resolution in the general sense is the number of digital samples per unit. In imaging, the dimensions of an image are often defined by the number of individual picture elements (pixels) that are arranged in a 2-D array to form your image. Marketing a camera by the number of “megapixels” in the image is common, but don’t be mislead. More doesn’t necessarily mean better image quality. The number of megapixels (Mp) is calculated by multiplying the height and width of the image (in pixels) and dividing by one million* (10⁶). Each pixel is represented by a series of values for red, green and blue (or various other models) that identifies what color it should be. Cameras are sometimes identified as having a particular color depth, or number of values each pixel can represent for red, blue and green.
When printing, resolution is used to describe the density at which the image pixels are printed on the output medium (e.g. paper). PPI (pixels per inch) and/or DPI (dots per inch) are used to represent pixel density. A typical computer monitor has a resolution of about 100 PPI. A photo printer will have an output resolution of 600 DPI or more (modern photo printers advertise numbers in excess of 1200 DPI). Obviously, the more pixels crammed into a single inch of printing, the more faithfully the colors and textures of the image will be represented.
The second general topic is: always shoot in maximum resolution. I make rare exceptions to this rule for documentary shots (e.g. capturing a sign, or grabbing a listing out of a phone book**). Storage media (flash for the camera or hard disks on your PC) is so cheap compared to your camera purchase and it lasts essentially forever (you will wear out the mechanical parts in your camera long before the flash memory fails). Figure out how many pictures you’ve ever taken in a day, triple it and make sure your memory card is twice that big at full resolution. Buy a big card (or two they’re lighter and easier to carry than film!). You’ll thank me.

I am often poking fun at CSI when they extract the face of someone hiding in the shadows from a reflection on a brass lamp in the corner of a grainy photograph. There are too many variables to do the extrapolations that they are talking about.

However, there are certain predictable data types where simply blurring/obscuring the data can leave you with something that is recoverable.

Here’s an interesting article on how it can be done. This would apply to license plates, signs or anything with a predictable pattern.

Thanks to this SlashDot article for bringing a similar concept to my attention.

As most of you fine readers are aware, I’ve been playing video games since pretty much the term was invented. I’ve pretty much exclusively played PC games, as I’ve always found consoles to be a bit to impractical. Despite this, I’d like to share this item found on digg. I’ve been commenting for years in both movie computer graphics and home PCs that the visible limit of human perception is quickly being reached. Video games on my PC today have far better computer animation then movies made 10 years ago. Still shots are particularly hard to distinguish. Of course if you look at details like image grain, background and lighting you can usually ferret out the truth.

The PlayStation 3 game Grand Tourismo 5 has blurred the boundary between photos and photo-realistic graphics. Follow the link for the quiz and see how you do.

Honestly, I did quite badly, with a whopping 8 out of 14. Pretty much means I couldn’t tell the difference.

Answers (yes I clicked and clicked until I got them) after the break….
(more…)