Author: AMH

Crazy Image Morphing

By AMH

This video of a SIGGRAPH07 demo is amazing – I really wasn’t sure when I started watching it if I was understanding what was going on. It is showing a tool that, instead of having you resize an image by cropping or scaling find the least important portions of the image to remove or expand, even if they are not in simple vertical or horizontal bands. It seems be be based on finding low-energy paths through the image, where the definition of energy can be tweaked to get good results for the image in question. But you really need to … Continue reading Crazy Image Morphing

Yummy, not purple….

By AMH

Today was a long day, so tonight I relaxed and made a couple of loaves of Rudbeckia’s Buttermilk-Lavender Bread. It is sooooo good! I never bother to bake with buttermilk, even though my dad swears that it makes better pancakes than regular milk, but I tried using it here and it was really worth it. The recipe assumes you are a bread-baking person and will recognize when the “dough holds together like it should”. I found that that took about four cups of flour for me, maybe a little more, but I’m also happy with my bread dough being a … Continue reading Yummy, not purple….

Gently prod your television with a pointy stick!

By AMH

Somehow, in the past six months, I seem to have become much less of a TV watcher. It is interesting – I always rolled my eyes at people who said “Oh, there are just too many more-valuable things to do than watch TV”. TV is fun! There is some good storytelling on it! And sometimes, I just feel like my brain is going to start oozing out of my ears if I do not sit on the couch with some knitting and some vacuous entertainment for a while. But I’m starting to see buzz about the fall TV schedule and … Continue reading Gently prod your television with a pointy stick!

T-minus 12 days

By AMH

Thoughts on the approaching semester: Syllabi – There are two philosophies here, it seems. Go bare bones – who are you, what book is being used, and when are the exams. Or go all out – detailed policies on late homeworks, attendance, academic honesty, etc. and day-by-day breakdowns of every class meeting for the entire semester. I’ve been veering more and more towards the later, but that is really not my style. I’m thinking about how I can start to streamline. For now, I think it is going to vary by courses – low-level courses predominantly taken by freshman or … Continue reading T-minus 12 days

No need for a hot glue gun either….

By AMH

If you know me, you may know that I fall pretty far on the information-privacy-over-convenience spectrum and can even be a bit paranoid. You would not be at all surprised that I liked this article on how to de-RFID your credit card. You might be interested that it involves a dremel tool and not a microwave…..

Assign yourself reading homework….

By AMH

DailyLit is an internet service that lets takes public domain or creative commons books and will email them to you a bit each day. I tried this once several months ago with a book that I was interested in reading but wasn’t sure I wanted to buy, and I really liked the enforced progress on making my way through the book. I only realized today that they provide a ton of books in a number of different genres. I am tempted to try to work my way through Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights on Woman this way, as it … Continue reading Assign yourself reading homework….

Road Trip!

By AMH

Ooooo! Oooooo! Details about the DARPA Urban Challenge are starting to come out, as the list of semifinalists has been announced along with the location: Victorville, CA. Qualifiers are the last week of October with the actual challenge on November 3rd. All of the expected teams seem to have made this cut. The photos of the site seem “urban” in only a loose sense – I pictured a site with tall buildings and less nature. I couldn’t find any indication of whether there would be a webcast of the event – I would love to go watch in person but … Continue reading Road Trip!

Internet Line Art

By AMH

There seems to be an online aesthetic of crude stick figures and line drawings, at least in my regular visits – typical would be the strip xkcd or the RPG Kingdom of Loathing. While the sketches here are significantly more artistic, the Myst-style game daymare town has a similar feel – minimalist sketches of a seemingly deserted world scattered with puzzles and items to collect [via not martha]. I haven’t played my way through the whole game (there doesn’t seem to be a save option and I unfortunately closed my browser window before finishing it) but I’m definitely going to … Continue reading Internet Line Art

Good thing they didn’t find sea monsters….

By AMH

I did a bit of a mental double-take when I saw this article about Russia planting a flag on the North Pole seabed to claim the land as Russian, because it seemed a century or two out of date. On reading it, it turns out that I am not the only one who thought so: In a record-breaking dive, the two craft planted a one metre-high titanium Russian flag on the underwater Lomonosov ridge, which Moscow claims is directly connected to its continental shelf. However, the dangerous mission prompted ridicule and scepticism among other contenders for the Arctic’s energy wealth, … Continue reading Good thing they didn’t find sea monsters….

Cover to Cover

By AMH

If you know me at all, you will not be shocked that I have a bit of a “completeness” compulsion, particularly when it comes to reading. In its most innocuous form, I cannot leave a book unfinished or skip/skim over parts of it, even if it is nonfiction. This includes the introduction, appendices, and footnote material. The idea of putting a book down because you are bored with it, or only reading the “relevant” chapters just makes no sense. This is why my “currently reading” list can have the same books on it for months (or years….) at a time, … Continue reading Cover to Cover