Monthly Archives: August 2005

The Tears of Saint Lawrence

This weekend marks the annual return of the Tears of Saint Lawrence: better known to those of us in the amateur astronomy community as the Perseid Meteor shower. If you haven’t trekked out somewhere dark recently to gaze at the annual shower, try reading Sky and Telescope magazine’s coverage.

The sky will be moonless, so the view should be pretty good. Rates often hit one a minute. I’ve seen some amazing fireballs in the predawn hours of this shower, so get out and have a peek at one of the cool sights available from our small terrestrial vantage point.

Paul Phillips on evolution vs. ID

I began reading Paul Phillips’ blog when Wil Wheaton mentioned that he was a poker player and a regular blogger. I’ve since found out that he seems to share one of my hot button topics: “evolution versus creationism intelligent design”.

Intelligent design is creationism dressed for court: no more, no less. It attempts to circumvent the findings of the Supreme Court in cases such as Edwards v. Aguillard and to gut the so-called Lemon test, established in the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman. This would be clear, even without the published admissions of some of its principal proponents. Intelligent design is merely an attempt to blur the separation between church and state, and the line between science and religion.

The fact that it seems to enjoy some measure of success should give us all pause.

It’s worth reviewing the decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, including audio of the oral arguments before the court.

Digital Black and White

Courtesy of the Make blog, here is a nice article on using Photoshop to make better digital black and white photographs. The tutorial is written from a Photoshop perspective. I’ve tried to use GIMP (since I’m too cheap to buy real photoshop) but the lack of adjustment layers in GIMP really make for a less than perfect workflow. Perhaps I’ll give Photoshop Elements at home…

Apologies for the downtime..

While I was off at SIGGRAPH, I had a problem with Comcast which unfortunately took a few days to resolve and resulted in some downtime. I’m back, and will undoubtably begin boring both my readers with my usual mix of topics soon. Sorry for that, I’m really going to have to shift this site from my home box to a more reliable server sometime in the future.

Dragon

As a quick catchup, I had a pretty nice time at SIGGRAPH. After a relatively slow beginning, I had some good conversations with people who computer graphics who don’t work at Pixar, and have come to realize that even among topics where I think I know everything, I still have a lot to learn. After a brief chat with some of the people there, I spent a couple of hours making minor tweaks to my toy raytracer, and doubled its speed. I think that given a few more hours of work, I could probably double it again. The picture I did at the right takes nine seconds to generate on my machine at work. I think with some of the ideas I came away with, I should be able to get two or three frames per second on the same machine.

So, I’m thinking about that.

Hot Damn! Go A’s

Back on May 29th, I bitched about it being tough to be an A’s fan. On that day, they were 17-32, and looking at a pace of winning 54 games for the season. They had lost their last 8 in a row. 20 of 24. I saw no reason to be optimistic.

Since then, they’ve gone 43-14. They now are half a game back of the Angels, and have won their last six games. Crosby’s return has something to do with it, but there are lots of kudos for everyone.

The A’s are back in it, and I have been left with pie on my face. I’m back to wearing my jersey. Curse my fickle nature. I’ve learned my lesson.