Wednesday, December 05, 2007

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Sunday, October 14, 2007

This is an unusual photo which my daughter-in-law sent me recently (thanks Sarah!). It was taken from the International Space Station in September 2007 and shows the shuttle launch which will resupply the station. To have the ISS just above the Cape at the time of the launch is very very rare. There are maybe 6 people who have seen this sight out of the 9 or so Billion people who have lived on the planet since people as we know them arrived (genetically) on our little ball.

[UPDATE: I have recently learned this photo was NOT taken from the ISS but rather from a high altitude NASA jet. Here’s a link to Snopes for the details: http://www.snopes.com/photos/space/shuttlelaunch.asp#photo. This doesn’t change my main message ... just a clarification.]

I am a self-confessed geek when it comes to rockets and space. Sputnik was first orbited on my 7th birthday in 1957. I remember building model rockets as a kid and at age of 11 and sitting on the floor of my parents living room watching the Mercury missions. What was I doing while I watched? I was using a slide rule to calculate how high my rockets would fly ... no personal computers or pocket calculators then, you see.

I believe in space. I believe we need to aggressively explore space. We’ve learned a lot there, but there’s much much more to learn.

I believe we need to use remotes and robots to do it, but that seems too stale to me. There is no romance in bots. There is no adventure in bots. But there is data, and analysis, and real science in bots. So do it!!!

But I also believe we need to put people back in space. Not the brain-dead ISS. But a real mission with real risk, tremendous emotional payloads, and real people in harm’s way. This is the best alternative to war I can think of, to advance the technology of the human species. It will be frightfully expensive ... but worth twice the price. Back to the moon? Yes, and more or less permanently. To Mars? We will pay for this with money and dead souls, but in my view it will be worth it! Not only twice, but a million times over.

So join me! Call or write your congressmen and senators. Encourage them to sieze the momentum of adventure. Demand we return to space!

And yes, we must pay for it. If it costs $100 per person per year in the US ... collect it and spend it. End pork barrel spending which accomplishes nothing. End ear marks to legislation because it is only political favoritism to contributors. Send all these wasted dollars to NASA.

Let’s go exploring!

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Friday, September 14, 2007

I spend about 20 hours a week in front of Photoshop. Really! I take 15,000 to 20,000 photos a year and I use it to “develop” them. I have a PC powerful enough to meet the needs of a small country and it puts out enough heat to heat the house in winter. 1,000 watts = about 1 1/3 horsepower … a one and a third horsepower PC? The mind boggles! But it makes Photoshop ... well, zippy ... especially when editing photos of horses!

Sorry for the digression. Anyway, I want them to look like what I “saw” when I tripped the shutter and I want to present them in their best light, to make the world beautiful, if I can.  Here’s an example using one of my own photos:

I remember very well taking this photo. I was in Italy. Nancy had returned home and I was alone and in a dark mood. But this sight made me feel better. I “saw” the second image because my eye is better than the sensor in my camera, and because my camera’s sensor has no emotion chip. I can make this similar to what I saw and felt!

I added nothing … but I did manipulate the image data captured by the camera. I think the original is “okay” but the edit is much much better.
So okay, if I use Photoshop to make a picture look like reality, I feel okay about that. How do you feel if an editor uses Photoshop to present an image that diverges from “reality?”

What is “reality” after all? Plato anyone?

This happens all-the-time. If you view a photo in a magazine, it’s been Photoshopped. Here are a few links showing before and after (Photoshop) images. This is fascinating to me. I think you will find it interesting. Click below:

And finally, another one of my photos. The original is of my son-in-law’s bike at Mt. St. Helens. In the edit I put it in a fictional Ducati Showroom.

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Sunday, June 17, 2007

When I was in grade school in the 50’s ... that’s the 1950’s for you Y2K whiners ... the number to beat was a Million. We could not imagine living for a million hours. We could imagine living on the interest on a million dollars. We lived in fear of megaton yielding nuclear bombs. Commercially viable computers had barely been invented, but the first diskettes held less than a million bytes. The term “megabyte” hadn’t been invented, yet. Fast forward ...

When I started working in the mid-70’s a Million still loomed large in my psyche. I once programed a giant mainframe computer to print a million digits on 30 some sheets of microfiche, just so I could hold a million of something in my hand. Ever the uber-geek, I would carry the microfiche around and show people I could hold a “Mega-digit” in my hand. Cool! Fast forward ...

I’m not here to tell you a million is mega-passe. Our PCs have thousand megabyte (1 gigabyte) memories, store 100 gigabytes on their disks.

In fact, a billion is giga-passe.

The new number to beat is a million million (a.k.a. thousand billion, a.k.a. trillion) and we’re in Tera country now 12 zeros after the first significant digit. I often ask people who would be smarter if they didn’t know they were smart, “What is the speed of light in furlongs/fortnight?” Turns out the answer is a little more than 1.8 terafurlongs/fortnight. Really fast forward ...

In the March issue of Wired magazine, there was a piece focusing on tera numbers ... terabyte, teradollar, terawatt, and teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second - measures the speed of a computer). If you’re a numbers person, you’ll like this. How many teradollars is the Iraq war costing the US? How many hours of Internet porn can be stored in a terabyte? How many years would a terawatt power the electricity needs of New York City? How many pocket calculators equal 1 teraflop? How many Xbox 360s? Enquiring minds want to know.

Click on the image to see a readable version ...
And check out Wired Magazine

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