29 July 2007

Today went to the beach instead of the hills. The Badham tide pools, just north
of the El Moro / Crystal Cove beach zone. We found some caves, with zillion
dollar views, and I reflected on the origins of tafoni. Got some shells and stuff.
Hung out in the caverous shade. This near Arch Rock. Look it up; see also
the california coastal website

http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=200603089&mode=big&lastmode=sequential&flags=0&year=2006

16 July 2007

I read this from Bruce http://www.schneier.com/:

Ridiculous "age verification" for online movie trailers: "It seems like 'We want to protect children' really means, We want to give the appearance that we've made an effort to protect children. If they really wanted to protect children, they wouldn't use the honor system as the sole safeguard standing between previews filled with sex and violence and Internet-savvy kids who can, in a matter of seconds, beat the impotent little system."

If we really cared about the "children", we'd ban Catholics

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed Saturday to a $660-million settlement with 508 people who have accused priests of sexual abuse, by far the biggest payout in the child molestation scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church nationwide.


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-priests15jul15,0,7511378.story?coll=la-home-center

15 July 2007

The Great Park's balloon opened yesterday, actually for local Elites, Friday. This AM the kid & I tried to find it. We eventually did, but had to pull some sneakiness to visit. And visit we did. I got pictures (submitted to http://news.ocregister.com/?page=0&qs=xdefault) and some video, posted to http://youtube.com/results?search_query=revtkatt
If you had N USB-webcams attached, and started them at random times,
would you often get a high-speed camera sampled at a conventional rate?
Eg, two cameras 10 uSec apart, sampling every 33,000 usec. I will have to
do some back of the envelope modelling, ie, math. Later I'll figure out the keywords to search for, this being the 21st century and all.
You could easily have a digital camera record stop-frame animation.
All you'd have to do would be:
  1. set it in that mode
  2. capture a frame 1 sec *after* motion stops
  3. wait until there's motion, then go to step 2
  4. have a way to exit the mode, and probably trim the last frame(s) which would be due to the user moving the camera to change the mode

I once wrote a program to do this, it worked. This was back when you needed a $500 video acquisition card to capture video.

05 July 2007

Symbiosis

Some cultures need cows and their cows could not survive without their
shepharding. Same with sheep. Speaking of which, Amerikans too.

Cats needs people to live to e.g., the 17 years that my domestic shorthair has lived. People need cats if people are to accumulate wealth in the form of grains (before they get industrial tech). That is in fact how folks got friendly with cats: the grain guards got friendly, and gave the Prez. some nice friendly specimens.

Who didn't poop or pee on their Pharoah's clothes, unlike mine.

Symbiosis: lichen: algae (primitive plant) + fungi (plant or animal that's lost its ability to eat by itself). They could colonize Mars.

Humans are also symbiotic with gut bacteria (Est. coli), skin flora & fauna, and their various domesticated animals, cats dogs sheep pigs cows llamas etc. Read
Guns Germs and Steel, and then read Collapse or any of Chalmers Johnsons' books on the specific collapse of US civ.