Yesterday I set my webcam grabbing images from television. I made some modifications to the frame grabber to archive time stamped versions of each image. The net result: a big directory of image files. I got it in my head to try to use these images to make image mosaics. These are images which are made up of small subimages, but when viewed from a distance display another picture. After an hour of programming, I produced
this (highly shrunken) result. The final fullsize image is 6144×8640.
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Monthly Archives: August 2002
My Webcam
I decided to dust off some of the old webcam software I wrote years ago and merge it into my home page. Right now it merely grabs a frame off of channel 45 once a minute, and stashes it at a standard URL. There is a teensy bit of JavaScript in my home page that causes the image to be refreshed once a minute. It really is just that simple.
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Why, Oh Why Aren’t Web Standards Standard?
I think that creating content for the web is incredibly tedious. Sometimes it is hard because you don’t have anything good to write about. Sometimes it is hard because you want to write about something, but you are sure nobody else is really interested. But mostly it is hard because you cannot rely on anything having actually working to deliver the content that you wish to send through to the viewers of your website.
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Founding of Brain Wagon University
I was goofing around with PostScript some more, and the idea of making some fancy certificates or diplomas got into my head. But what good is a diploma if there is no school to back it up? Hence, as of this date, I hereby found Brain Wagon University. It is dedicated to the pursuit of something or other, and has really high standards.
We will only give out diplomas to those who really, really deserve them. Honestly.
We will be glad to name buildings on our campus after anyone who sets up a tidy endowment however.
Trans-Atlantic Model Airplane
National Geographic reports that a group of model airplane builders are about to attempt the first transatlantic crossing with a true model airplane. A model airplane must weigh less than 11 lbs, and displace no more than 10cc.
Pretty damned amazing feat if they can pull it off. They have built four copies of their plane, and were supposed to launch beginning on August 7, but have delayed due to fog. You can watch the progress reports as they come in. The plane should transmit position and speed information every minute using an onboard GPS and transmitter.
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Office Toys
I like to have toys in my office. I like puzzles and gadgets, cool lights and just weird stuff in general. I’ve got got a mechanical singing Christmas tree named "Douglas Fir", a Big Mouth Billy Bass, a plasma globe, a Miguel Tehada bobble head, a Hoberman sphere, some fossil trilobites, a stuffed Marvin the Martian, and various Tick action figures. Still, I’m always looking for more.
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Primality Testing is in P
RSA encryption relies on being able to find large primes. For quite some time, the Miller-Rabin test has been known to be able to determine whether a given number is prime with as great a likelihood as you wish (say, with likelihood of error much lower than the chances that your computer made a mistake). Thus the claim was that primality testing was very likely in P, although no algorithm for primality testing in P was known. Until now.
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Amateur CCD Imaging
I’ve been interested in CCD imaging for quite some time, but haven’t had the scope + budget to really get involved. Nonetheless, I monitor a couple of CCD imaging mailing lists, and there are occasionally excellent pictures, pictures every bit as detailed as classic Sky Survey images such as those done at Palomar.
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Gert’s Astronomy Page
Often I donate my Friday evenings to teach telescope making at the Chabot Science Center. Gert Gottschalk often shows up to participate, and he reminded me that he has a
very nice webpage of his own, which has many nice astrophotos, done with film, digital cameras and CCD imaging. Take a browse, they are quite nice.
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The Amateur Scientist
When I was a young, I used to spend a great deal of time at our local library, which was within two blocks of my grade school. They frequently gave away old books and magazines that were no longer determined to be valuable to the community. On one particular day, I scored several dozen copies of Scientific American, and being the geeky child I was, I carted them dutifully home in my book bag.
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