DaVinci and the Splendor of Poland


Carmen and I went to the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco today to get away from the war news coming out of Iraq and to get a chance to view a real DaVinci, his famous Woman with an Ermine, which is on loan from the Czartorski Museum in Krakow. There were also a number of very fine paintings, including some very nice views of Warsaw painted by Bernardo Bellotto which astounded both Carmen and I with their fine detail. It was a splendid display of Polish art, and well worth attending.


Scanning and Archival

I have a bunch of papers that are not valuable, but are rare and hard to find. Some I have only as faded Xeroxes, such as a copy of Anton Kutter’s treatise on Schiefspiegler telescopes, and Arnold Leonard’s work on Yolo telescopes. Others are in collections which are out of print, such as Tom Duff’s Polygon scan conversion by exact convolution. I’ve recently decided that I should scan papers that I think are interesting and preserve them in some digital form.

At the Hacker’s conference, Brewster Kahle touted the DjVu format as an alternative to pdf. For fun I decided to try to use my available tools to try to convert my bad xerox of Tom’s paper (15 pages) into a compact, reasonable form. I slopped all 15 pages into my super budget Canon scanner, and quickly converted them into 300dpi bilevel TIFF files. Each file was an 1,053,264 byte file.

The DjVu tools are open source, I got them by installing the djvulibre package in FreeBSD. The program cjb2 provides bilevel image compression of PBM files, so I made a little script that converted each page into a pbm, and then to a .djvu file. I specified that the compression could be lossy and that it should remove flecks, and then assembled them together using the djvm program.

The resulting file was 279,530, for all 15 pages.

That wasn’t quite good enough though, I decided to go ahead and use the online any2djvu server to perform OCR on the djvu file and stash it back inside. The resulting file with OCR is 313,192 bytes, and can be searched.

I then tried to make a pdf file out of it. I converted the djvu file into PostScript (using the djvups program) and then used ghostscript to convert it to a pdf file. The result wasn’t pretty: the PostScript file was 4,268,709 bytes and the resulting PDF file was 3,184,680 bytes, a 10 increase over the DjVu file. I have no doubt that Adobe Distiller could do a better job, but then, I don’t have Adobe Distiller.

Anyway, I thought it was a fun experiment. You can have a peek at the resulting DjVu file if you like. You can either install the viewer or if you have a Windows machine, install the plugin.

Seven Signs of Bogus Science


I recently spotted this article
on the subject of spotting bogus science. It’s enormously easy to be hoodwinked by science, and these seven rules can help you spot the quacks from real science.

  1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.

  2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.

  3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.

  4. Evidence for the discovery is anectdotal.

  5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.

  6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.

  7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

A nice concise ruleset, one which matches various Internet loons with a high degree of accuracy.

But then I’m just part of the scientific establishment working to keep ’em down.

Shockwave

Just for kicks, I tried creating a simple shockwave animation.

I generated this with ming via php. Bindings are
also available for Python and Ruby.

Okay, it’s pretty boring. But if it works, perhaps something better will be forthcoming.

FPGA Miscelleny

This is just a potpourri of FPGA related items.
I’m fairly interested in hardware design (although have not really done very much of it). I’ve been looking for some cheap programmable hardware, and found out about Digilent. They have boards based upon the Xilinx Spartan II FPGAs for around $100, and the Coolrunner CPLD for only $39. Xess Corporation has more boards, for a bit more buckage. You can also find cheap board layouts for a Spartan II evaluation board if you are more comfortable having boards fabbed (this one is only a 2 layer board, should be fairly economical to have manufactured). Some people are interested in using FPGAs for audio applications or for central processing units of your own design.

OLED displays…

oled-johncody2.jpg
The new up and coming display technology is Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLED displays. OLEDs will be cheaper to manufacture, have a much faster response time, don’t need to be backlit, draw less power, are brighter, and can be viewed over a much larger viewing angle. In short, they are very nearly the ideal display device. We’ve had a prototype here at Pixar for a while, and it is impressive. Kodak is the first vendor I know to announce a product with an OLED display, although I suspect that every cell phone in the universe will acquire these displays in the next year, with computer monitors following closely behind.

I can’t wait.


What are they teaching our children?




Allrighty, I know, if I am going to get irritated by the ignorance of human beings, I shouldn’t read Slashdot. A recent article detailed China’s desire to
mine the moon for minerals
. Never mind that it is absurd (can we name a single element so precious that it would justify the cost of rocket launches to bring it back from the moon. I would have expected someone to bring up that. But no, instead we get gems like the following.

Any of those more versed in physics than myself care to comment on what lowering the mass of the moon could do? I am sure not enough would be mined to raise the mass of the earth enough to cause problems, but wouldn’t a great enough reduction in lunar mass decrease the force of gravity between the earth and the moon, thus (possibely) destabilizing the orbit?

Sigh. Or how ’bout:

Presumably when they talk about “mining the moon” they are talking about going there to mine Helium 3. This is an isotope of helium which, if available in abundance, would be a perfect fuel for clean fusion power generation.

Except of course that nobody has built a working, controllable fusion reactor.

Economically this just doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to imagine the level of technology to make it make sense. Even the most difficult to mine natural resources of this planet will be cheaper to recover
than any resource from the moon or asteroids. Lunar mining is a pipe dream.

Bizarre Fish

oarfish.gif
I love to watch nature documentaries and the like on PBS, but most of them go over information that has been rehashed a million times. But just when you get complacent, you realize that there are still things out there which are big and yet largely unknown. One of the most unusual is the Oarfish, Regalecus glesne. Besides being huge (reported lengths of 17 meters, verified lengths of 8 meters), the oarfish has a beautiful silvery body and a long thin shape which is very odd.
It has been photographed by Jonathan Bird, and also by Navy divers (who caught it on video!).
I also recall seeing video of a barely alive specimen that washed up on the beach, but wasn’t able to find it online.

Listen to the engineers…


CNN is running a story today entitled CNN.com – Shuttle engineers warned of burning wing – Feb. 27, 2003.
It appears that serious doubts about the original analysis of wing damage to the shuttle were made right up until reentry, including a recomendation that they examine the damage
prior to reentry via an EVA and to prepare for a potential bailout.

It appears that these exchanges amongst shuttle engineers weren’t forwarded up the chain of command. Sigh.

The Music Industry

I was reading a Slashdot article this morning entitled A Music Industry Case Study, and was suddenly struck by the apparent absurdity of the term the Music Industry.

People never discuss “the Drawing Industry” or the “Sculpture Industry”. Why is music singled out in being labelled an Industry?

My online dictionary defines “industry” thusly:

in.dus.try
('in-(.)d*s-tr{e-})
Etymology: MF i[industrie] skill, employment involving skill, fr. L 
   i[industria] diligence, fr. i[industrius] diligent, fr. OL 
   i[indostruus], fr. i[indu] in + i[-struus] (akin to L 
   i[struere] to build) -- more at INDIGENOUS,  
   STRUCTURE]
1) n, diligence in an employment or pursuit
2) a) n, systematic labor esp. for the creation of value
   b) n, a department or branch of a craft, art, business, or
      manufacture; esp.: one that employs a large personnel and 
      capital esp. in manufacturing
   c) n, a distinct group of productive enterprises
   d) n, manufacturing activity as a whole

It appears that definition 2b comes the closest to an explanation.
The reason that we call the Music Industry an industry is that it employs vast amounts of capital and personnel to bring you the latest Britney Spears album. The music industry is a huge lumbering behemoth, supporting a wide array of musicians at levels far below minimum wage in an effort to find the few acts which they will promote into success.

Most of the people I know who are musicians have day jobs. Most don’t really complain that much about the lack of jobs or
money. They enjoy what they do. They’d do it for free. They’d do it if it cost them money (which it sometimes does, either directly or indirectly in the form of lost wages they could be receiving if they abandoned their musical aspirations).

People repeat the glib phrase “it’s all about the music”, but it obviously must be true, because to a first approximation, nobody makes any money at it. Frankly, I think music would be a lot better if we gave up the hope that it would be an industry, and accept it for what it is: art.

Space Object Identified!

In a previous article, I posted pictures taken by my friend Phil of the Orion Nebula and hypothesized that they were of a geosynchronous satellite. Afterwards, I posted a plea on sci.astro.satellites.visual-observe, and got a very nice response from Ed Cannon (who also took the trouble to post here, but I missed it! Doh!) identifying it as the Canadian communications satellite
Anik F1. It’s position and magnitude estimates seem right on the money to me. It’s a big sucker, with its solar cells unfurled it measures over 132 ft by 29.5 feet. .

Belated thanks to Ed Cannon!

Bird Pictures

Feb15162.JPG
Carmen noticed some interesting raptors perched on our back fence and asked me where my binoculars were. I have a pair of nice Celestron 7×50 binos that I use for astronomy, but I also have a nice tripod mounted set of WWII 10×50 spotting binoculars. We spied on the bird for a while, and I got the idea of snapping some pictures with my super cheap digicam. Since the camera is fixed focus at infinity, you can just put it up to the eyepiece and click. Here is the resulting picture (kind of dark, as it was late in the day).

There are tons of dust specks in the image. This is because the image plane is
very close to one of the surfaces of the eyepieces, so the dust on that surface
is in sharp focus. I really need to break this apart and clean them someday
when I am feeling brave.

Smoke Detector Can Save Your Life!

lifesaver!
Some things you just don’t think about until they save your life. On Valentine’s Day my wife and I were awoken at 3:30 by our smoke detector going off. Yours truly, idiot that he is, had gone to bed and left a candle burning on the mantlepiece downstairs. Some hot wax had melted off and caught a big box of maches on fire and set the wall on fire. Because our smoke alarm went off, we were able ot put out the fire, and the damage was confined to a scorched wall which a little spackle, retexturing and a quick paint job have rendered good as new.

It could have been much, much worse. I urge you all to go out and buy a fire extinguisher and to check the batteries in all your smoke detectors. The lives they save could be the yours and the ones you love. It happened to me.

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

Charles Darwin
On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born. I think a strong argument could be made that Darwin is the most influential scientist of all time. He postulated that the complex biosphere we
observe is the result of understandable physical processes that we can study and observe at work throughout the long history of life on our planet. His contributions formed the basis for all of biology, and his keen insights provided the basis for understanding the nature of life around us.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Origin of Species, 1859

Oh, and some American president
was born on the same day, but he really is of minor importance compared to Darwin.