brainwagon

I woke up at 5:30 this morning to let the cat out (he has me trained really well) and thought that I might have felt a minor tremor. Just now, I thought to look back and see if there was one. Yep! 2.8 on the Richter at 5:37 AM, same location as the earlier ones, [...]

Major League Baseball : News : Major League Baseball News Left-handed pitcher Barry Zito has agreed to a seven-year, $126 million contract, according to The Associated Press and other sources. I’m gonna have to start measuring my salary in millizitos. Seriously though, I’m not sure whether this was a reasonable choice. Zito is on record [...]

Today I was goofing around with hooking a firewire cable to the Motorola DCT-6412 DVR that Comcast provides, and seeing if I could capture HD content onto my MacBook. I could, with some caveats. (Click on the image below to get the full resolution png file of a frame from the capture.) The problem is [...]

I was rereading Tsai’s paper on camera calibration, and was reminded of this more recent work by Zhang at Microsoft. I thought I’d dump a link here for later consumption. A Flexible New Technique for Camera Calibration: Zhengyou Zhang

I admit to a fascination with most methods of print making, so it’s nice to see a rather nifty treatise on wood block printing in the Japanese style make it into Project Gutenberg. It covers the basics (at least from a technical if not artistic side) and is pretty well illustrated. Wood-Block Printing by F. [...]

I found John Baez’s stuff because he mentioned Poundstone’s book Fortunes Formula, which is about the relationship between mathematics, information theory and gambling, topics which continue to interest me, at least in an academic sense. But he has pointers to a lot of stuff that seems pretty interesting, so I’m adding him to my bookmark [...]

I’m curious: some of you are undoubtably unboxing and firing up you new gadgets, like computers, Wii systems (you lucky bums) and cell phones. How ’bout dropping a quick comment here and letting me know what new gadgets you are using? Oh, and hope you are having a Merry Christmas!

On this Christmas holiday, I’d like to extend my best wishes to all my readers and their families. Hope you all have a safe and happy holiday!

Wow, three in three four days. This was pretty minor. I heard a door in our house rattle in a stacatto, but felt no rolling or other shaking. Nearly the same epicenter, measuring 3.5. Recent Earthquakes – Info for event nc51177121

A twin to the one we had a couple of days ago. Preliminary report say 3.6 (the other one was a 3.7) and it occurred very close to the same place that the other one did. Recent Earthquakes – Info for event nc51177103 Technorati Tags: Earthquake

Here’s a pointer to a cool technique for scanning 3D objects. It’s cool in that it uses very simple equipment: a cheap webcam, a corner bracket (just a backing plate that forms a 90 degree angle and has a calibration target on it) and a handheld laser modified to cast a line. I’ll look at [...]

Just a couple of seconds ago, I was cutting some salmon and we had a bit of a quake. Very little ground shaking, but all the windows rattled pretty well. Usually, I access the finger server to get real time updates when such a thing happens, but I found out that the USGS has discontinued [...]

Boing Boing links to this CNN story about the Open Content Alliance: a group which is trying to scan and make available books of considerable historic and cultural value on the Internet. They are receiving a one million dollar grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize collections at the Boston Public Library, the [...]

The fromoldbooks blog had this nice engraving of the Nativity available for download (it’s from a book old enough to be in the public domain, so is free to use as you see fit). Someone might have a nice craft project that could use such source material. Nativity of Christ Technorati Tags: Public Domain, FromOldBooks, [...]

Mount St. Helens woke up with a bit of a rumble today. Here’s the seismograph. It’s not exactly unprecedented, but kind of cool. Technorati Tags: Volcanic Eruption, Mount St. Helens