Vincent Laforet, who is shooting the Olympics for Newsweek, is running a blog documenting his experiences. I’m not sure if I will follow this throughout the games, but his post about packing for the trip is pretty interesting.
If you can’t be bothered to read the post, at least flip through the image gallery of his packing.
All I can say is: “Mmmmm….. gear.”
Some of you may have heard about a related study on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, but for those that haven’t, here’s a brief overview.
Some people are neurologically tone-deaf (and these people are generally known as flute players*), such that they can not distinguish between one musical phrase and a different slightly altered one.
I know I have a particularly musical audience, so check out an online tone deafness ‘test’.
For the record I was 80.6% correct. It seems I’m pretty accurate on positively identifying the errors, but I seem to have a high false alarm rate also (this was true in the rhythm test also.).
Check out the other tests too:
It would seem that I’m musically above average. Maybe that trombone playing did do something permanent to my brain.
I will carefully dodge the blog taboo by blogging about someone else’s cat. Bad Astronomer has broadcast the social inadequacy of his cat on www.icanhascheezburger.com. I had never heard of this site, and once again I am relieved to discover that despite what TV writers would have you think, there are still funny people in the world.
I browsed through a few pages and found the following which I very much enjoyed:
As seen on SlashDot:
If this doesn’t give you little chills in your cerebellum, well, then I just feel sorry about your childhood.
A couple of months ago, I read a blog post about gDiapers, the disposable diaper you can flush or compost. I thought they were an excellent idea, so I looked into trying them out. I could order them online, but the closest store that actually carried them was in Ithaca. I didn’t really want to get into a situation where I had to drive an hour and a half, or pay outrageous shipping and handling to get diapers.
Fast forward to last week when I went grocery shopping. I walked thru the new expanded health food section at Wegmans, and what did I spot? gDiapers. I made an impulsive decision to buy the starter kit and try them out. So far I’m really liking the idea. Nate and I haven’t completely figured out the finer details yet (we’ve had a lot of leaks), but we’re getting better with them. The downside: a)Our toilet isn’t quite powerful enough to flush them. b)Wegmans seems to always be out of the M/L refills. Tomorrow I’ll try the other store that has recently started carrying them. If they have them and we can continue our experiment, I’ll have to set up a system for composting the wet ones.
I am excited about doing something better for the environment. I really hated throwing out all those disposable diapers.
Most of you also read the Bad Astronomer, but this was so fun to watch I have to plug it also.
Although somewhat visually reminiscent of the Brady Bunch theme song, this is a very nicely choreographed video.
I’ve mentioned this to some of you before, but if you’re into photography or just really impressive landscape images, you should check out the Gigapixl project.
This project constructed a process to generate images with a resolution of over 1 billion* pixels. What this means is that sweeping wide angle landscapes can provide stunning detail. Check out this fantastic example of the Bixby Bridge on the California coast.
For the image geeks, the site goes through a rather nice analysis of how to do design an imaging process (not just the camera itself) with what is essentially a functional decomposition and allocation. Note that this is not a digital camera, but an extremely large format film camera and high resolution scanning equipment.
Try Lemmings for some nostalgia… in your browser using Java. I don’t seem to be getting any sound, though (the author seems to think it should work in most browsers… probably a plug in thing.
Date: 12/15/2006
