Category: Uncategorized

Eyjafjallajökull in time lapse

My nephew Ben sent me this nifty video of the Keyboard Volcano (you know, EyjafjallajökulljalfjakofeyjaKABOOM!). I love the time lapse, but I was especially struck by the camera’s motion. Something about moving the camera during the image capture process completely changes the character of the movie. With a normal time lapse image, I can see, in my mind’s eye, a camera bolted to a tripod for the hours or days required. But when the camera translates through space, it feels like the dreamy vision of a slow moving creature.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11673745&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

I first saw this technique on the recent Life series that Oprah Winfrey made in her spare time. The Filming Plants short video on the Life site gives you an idea what I’m talking about. The camera doesn’t so much record the plant as dance with it as it grows.

In the way of all things technical, this high-end trend is being made available to hobbyists. In the notes under the volcano video, filmmaker Sean Stiegemeier thanks MILapse for his motorized dolly. MILapse turns out to be Jay Burlage, and he’ll help you build an open source hardware motion control system for your high dynamic range time lapse video system. God bless the hobbyists! Amazing stuff.

Arrested development or pedomorphic edge?

It’s remarkable how much a baby ape resembles a small human. The similarity decreases quickly with age, but it does help explain how we can share so much DNA with them. In many ways we’re just slowed down versions of them. We carry that flat forehead and big brain cavity (relative to skull size) right into adulthood. I’ve often thought that chimps must look at us and shake their heads at how absurdly childish we look. Geez! These researchers, I swear they get younger every year.

In biological terms, this physical retardation goes by the name pedomorphosis or neoteny. And despite the insane length of time we have to spend sheltered by adults, we humans like to think that our childishness has treated us well. That big fat brain doesn’t blossom overnight, but when it finally pops, watch out!

A neuroscientist once explained to me that some fairly dramatic changes in brain physiology occur in late adolescence. Regions that were more plastic become more hardwired, or “burned in”. This is a reasonable biological response — your brain is saying “Hey, now that you know how things work, I can save us both a lot of time and energy by just looking up the answer on these note cards.” It’s also obvious: anyone can see that learning changes as you age, the best example of this being language acquisition. When you come to be old person, you canna learn to speaka da language… but never like a native.

On the other hand, maybe it’s time for us to let that brain be plastic a little longer. Call it Pedomorphism 2.0. After all, there’s a lot to learn these days, and it’s changing all the time. And right on cue, there is a rise in pedomorphic behavior. The average age of entry into adulthood is rising. Living at home as long as you can is a pretty sound strategy. And those extra graduate degrees may well come in handy some day.

That 28 year-old slob who plays video games all day in the basement of his parents’ house (a.k.a. Area Man)? He may well represent the future of the species. But only if he can be induced to get a girlfriend.

Come Out, Virginia

Come out Virginia, don’t let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
But sooner or later it comes down to fate…
-Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young

A friend very close to this situation sent me this and wondered if I might post a link to it: Come Out, Virginia. It’s a blog written by a woman who experienced more at parochial school than a religious education. It starts like this:

Beginning when I was seven, the pastor of my Catholic school and parish sexually abused me just as he did a large number of children, mostly girls, during the 60’s and 70’s. I testified at a grand jury hearing in 1992 bringing charges against him that culminated in his guilty plea in 1993, just days before his criminal trial. I was scheduled to testify at that trial, and the fact that I had to cut short a Carribean vacation for nothing is one of the many, many reasons I wish him ill to this day.

Stories like this are anything but rare these days, but the writing here is very good, and it gnaws at the Great Riddle. The Great Riddle concerns anyone who has weathered evil or suffered grave misfortune. Whether that evil comes by parochial school or a thousand other paths is not the point. Here is the problem: in passing to the other side of that evil, blinking in the daylight as it were, most of us want to put the shadows away. Let them not be named, both now and forever. But… we have eaten what we have experienced; we are what we have endured.

One cannot be whole and reject a part of oneself. To love oneself is to accept the intrusion of the horrible. There’s no getting around it. This is the Great Riddle. With or without the help of religion, it is a life’s work to sort it out.

As the anonymous blogger closes one post after rattling off a list of (since departed) problems:

Were all these problems caused by what Monsignor did to me so long ago? It’s a question I have been asked in legal settings and have asked in therapeutic settings, and the answer is pretty much the same: Of course. Maybe. Probably. Who knows? But it for sure didn’t help.

Boston’s Dirty Water

Speaking of raw, stable video, here are two different views of our recent water-related unpleasantness here in Boston. First is this surveillance video of what it looked like on the scene as it happened. So that’s what it looks like when an 8 million gallons per hour geyser can’t get to the bathroom in time. I need a clean up on aisle three please!

This next video provides a slow aerial survey to the mess. Why it makes me feel just like Governor Patrick. Incidentally, that muddy water made it all the way downstream to me in Watertown. I understand we’ll have clean water again soon, but in the meantime this order that we drink only boiled water is scalding the hell out of my tongue.

Your artificially aged Earth

You know those pictures of missing kids that have been artificially aged with computer graphics? Well, suppose the earth went missing for 250 million years, and you needed to find it. Walking across a city park, you stumble across an old planet sleeping under a dirty blanket. It might be your earth, but is it? Here’s a video that I found on Kevin Kelly’s site that might help. It shows tectonic plate activity from the remote past (400 million years) and well into the distant future. I can’t vouch for the legitimacy of the geology, but it’s fun to watch south Asia take it in the shorts from the Indian subcontinent at around 30 seconds in. India comes smashing in from the south with the irresponsible speed and driving skills of a teenager texting his girlfriend.

BAM! “Yow! Right in my Himalayan flat lands!”

“Oh… sorry about those mountains, dude. That swelling will probably go down in a few million years.”

Say, now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder if the Onion has anything tasteful to say about computer-assisted age progression? Age-Progression Technology Indicates Missing Child a Prostitute By Now.

Mindful videos and slow rocket launches

Videos these days are edited for a microscopic attention span. I’d love to see some statistics on the average time between cuts, but it must be getting shorter. A good example of this is videos of rock concerts. There are so many cameras for the video editor to draw from: cameras on stage, cameras on booms, cameras in the rafters, walking steadicams, crowdcams, guitar cams. As a result, we get whipped from camera to camera with neck-snapping speed. If you have, let us say, a particular interest in Eric Clapton’s finger work during the solo, you’re out of luck. You might get a few precious seconds of guitar closeup, but then it’s time for the Dramamine again.

I don’t object to kaleidoscopic spectacle on principle, but there are times when it’s really nice to sit and focus on exactly one thing. Here’s a spectacular example of that. This is a slow-motion film (500 frames/second!) of the very bottom of the Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket as it takes off on July 16, 1969. I’m betting that on multiple occasions you’ve seen one or two seconds of this video. But you’ve never seen the whole thing. Watch it. It features some high quality commentary from Mark Gray of Spacecraft Films.

That’s the real damn deal right there. Those massive hold-down arms clamp the rocket to the ground, and when they let go, they’re the last earthly object to kiss it goodbye. I’m a certified space geek, but I learned a lot watching this. I didn’t know about the flammable ablative paint on the pad equipment, and I had always wondered about the dark skirt of flame that stretches several yards below the nozzle’s yawning bell. Now I know. Mindful, stable video with expert commentary. Yum.

Since I’m on the topic, here’s your Apollo bonus link: Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, tells us something new about Apollo 13. Which do you prefer for your corpse: a cold eternal orbit or the fiery dispatch of a collision with your home planet?

Unseen beauty

At lunch today I saw a TED talk by Jonathan Drori on pollen. He mentioned that pollen has become extremely useful in forensics because we’re now assembling the pollen thumbprint of every part of the plant-inhabited world. One look at the pollen grains in your shirt reveals volumes about where you’ve been. But really, the thing about the talk is that these giant electron micrographs of pollen grains from various species are displayed behind the speaker throughout the talk and you can’t help but be amazed at how beautiful they are. And they’re floating around us all the time. That thing on the right is a pollen grain for Greater Stitchwort.

Tonight I came home and read about the new Solar Dynamics Observatory, a NASA satellite that specializes in looking at, as you might guess, the sun. But what pictures she sends us, this orbiting eyeball! That image on the left, that’s the sun (sporting a wicked cowlick of a prominence) as seen in far ultraviolet. And there’s lots more good stuff like this on the site. It’s the same sun we see every day, but we’re not equipped to take in the beauty.

Later still, I saw that the xkcd web comic had taken up the same theme. It’s a good thing to remember as a general principle: this beauty that you speak of, it’s everywhere. Sometimes you have to take it on faith. And there’s a good chance it’ll make you sneeze. But still! Crikey!

Capture those stories!

StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.” They have professional recording equipment, and they encourage you to book some time at one of their studios so you can come down and interview a friend or family member. It’s all free, including the CD that you get at the end of the process. It’s a great idea, and they’ve been so successful that by now they have a podcast and a couple of books.

The catch, of course, is that you have to be near one of their StoryBooth studios if you want to take advantage of their service. Fortunately, these days it’s not hard to do the same thing yourself. I’ve bought a few cheap digital recorders over the years, and it was always a pain to get the data off the device. Smart phones have changed all that. I have an iPhone, and it’s now trivially easy to get a high quality recording (or a pretty good recording, anyway) of you interviewing someone or just sitting back and listening to that old story that dad tells. You can keep the recording easily enough, but even better, it’s also easy these days to get a good transcription of the recording.

Here’s what I did. You should do it too, or you’ll wish you did some day. First, use your smart phone to record that story. This is absolutely the hardest part in the whole process: going out of your way to say please please sit here where it’s quiet and tell this whole story from beginning to end without interruption. After that, it’s easy. Take the sound file and send it to CastingWords. These guys are awesome and darned cheap. They’ll send you a text version of the story. It’s like magic.

Here’s my dad talking about hitchhiking his way up to the 1939 World’s Fair.

On 220 I didn’t get much leverage, not many rides. Ended up out in the middle of the country. Night was coming on and no place to lay your head. And fine, just about dark, a couple of guys picked me up in an old car.

They had been to South Carolina to buy liquor. North Carolina was dry. They had been enjoying the fruit of the vine. I was sitting in the back seat and they kept passing the bottle to me. No thank you, I am in training for football season. But they weren’t feeling any pain.

On the way to Roanoke, back then the roads were not four lane highways. These were two lane roads through the mountains. A lot of the places you could look over the side and see where you would go if things didn’t go right.

He drove pretty casually and it began to rain; dark, slippery roads at night. He didn’t keep his eye on the road much and I was biting donut holes out of the seat. Soon as I saw the first lights of Roanoke, I said this is where I am going thank you very much for the ride.

It’s easier than you think. Be your own StoryCorps, and your kids will thank you.

Headline copy-editing crash blossoms

Suppose you saw a headline like “Maine harbors concern over Bangor landing.” The story is about an airplane that lands in Bangor and ultimately causes distress among Maine politicians. But you might get four words into the headline with the mistaken impression that someone is concerned about the harbors of Maine. Then you hit the word “over” and stop short… Maine harbors concern over… huh?. You might get all the way to the last word before you fully realize a verb/noun parse error with the ambiguous word “harbors”.

Some headlines are so spectacularly ambiguous that you might read them through three or four times and still have no idea what they mean. As you might expect, the wordheads over at the Language Log have come up with name for this kind of headline parsing problem: crash blossoms. Why? Here is the story behind the name.

At Testy Copy Editors.com, a worthy colleague, Nessie3, posted this headline:

Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms

(If this seems a bit opaque, and it should, the story is about a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.)

It’s just a new name for an old problem, of course, but it’s still fun to collect them. Two more from the Language Log.

McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers. Yum! said Sir Galahad as he licked the ketchup and grail grease from his lips.

This one is not so much amusing as truly vexing to fully unwind: Scottish National Party signals debate legal threat.

Can you add any?