An informal survey of two people suggests that this is more funny to women, but I am just dying with laughter over this dissection of a tampon ad, looking at the copy, typeface, and the fascinating background images. Make sure you read through the comments as well. For extra fun, try visiting the URL from the ad (www.upgrade-u.com) for even more surreal tampon fun.
Crazy Image Morphing
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 watch the video to see how cool this is. [via Glark]
Yummy, not purple….
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 bit sticky. The bread turns out only lightly herby – this is not an overwhelmingly flavored bread – but is nice and rich from the butter and buttermilk. Definitely worth trying if you like to bake.
Gently prod your television with a pointy stick!
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 I have to say I’m just not that interested. And in a weird fit of anti-snobbery, I’m worried that I’m becoming one of those “I’m too good for television” people. But I think more of it falls out of the trend towards more tightly-scripted, arced television shows. It seems that it is harder and harder to find shows that you can watch occassionally and still enjoy – with DVRs, shows can more easily expect viewers to keep up week from week. The season-long plot arcs have allowed television to do more interesting things and elevate itself as a storytelling medium, but there is part of me that feels like it has also made television watching into a chore, where you can’t miss a week or you are “behind”. And I have come to the personal conclusion that I do not need my entertainment to start adding to my to-do list as well.
And really this relates to my theme of relaxing about completing books from a few posts ago. Except for a couple of shows, I’m just not going to worry about whether I catch every episode. And if it turns out I do not enjoy the show that way, I am just not going to watch it. (I know – revolutionary!) Which shows am I going to stick with? I’ll watch Heroes, assuming it remains as good as the first season. I’ll watch The Office, assuming the increased focus on the Jim/Pam relationship doesn’t get annoying. And I’ll watch Project Runway, assuming they continue to make absolutely insane clothing. But other than that, I think television is going to happen if I happen to be home and in the mood for a break.
T-minus 12 days
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 sophomore students who have not had me in class before get the long-detailed version. Upper-level courses with students who have all taken at least one, if not two or three or four, courses with me get the fast and dirty version.
- Office Hours – I have held office hours at least three hours a week each semester for the past three years. The majority of the time, I am in my office alone during my office hours – sometimes having had to pass on attending a lecture or a meeting because I have office hours scheduled. The majority of the time that I meet with students is either by appointment or, more frequently, them catching me in my office and stopping in to ask questions. Sure, the theory is that you can get other work done during office hours if students are not there, but some tasks do not lend themselves well to the potential interruption, and I do not like having grading out or drafting assignments or exams if I know a student might wander in. So, I am going to experiment with not holding pre-scheduled office hours this semester and telling students to either schedule an appointment or just drop in if I am around. Really, this should give me more time to meet with students because I will not be starting with three potentially dead hours a week of “student time” before I see my first real live student.
- Administrivia – It is overwhelming the number of little things you forget about that have to be handled in the week or two before classes. Meeting times need to be set for various committees and the department, and the course schedule isn’t in the room scheduler system yet, so it’s a mystery which rooms are worth sending in requests to reserve – I’m starting a trial-and-error process of hunting down a room for one committee. Lab access has to be set up for students, which means making sure everybody is on the same page for the lab access policy. Making sure my student assistant is actually going to get paid. Sorting out where to drop off course packets to be copied. Making sure the software I need is on my lab’s computers. I’ve probably sent a dozen emails today about minor things that need to happen.
- Courses – Oh, yeah… I’m actually going to be teaching soon. I’ve spent a lot of time earlier in the summer thinking about my classes and what I want to do, but the next week is going to be filled with the less interesting details of how instead of what. I am really looking forward to this semester though. I’ll be teaching upper-level programming for the first time and I’ve got some really fun ideas of what I want to cover – both on the theory side and on the nitty-gritty tools side. I want to see my department’s open houses continue and see if we can get a good mix of substantive discussion and social interaction going on at them. And I have two students I will be doing some type of research with, both working in really neat areas. At the very least, I am going to be busy.
Overall? This is either going to be a really great semester, or I will collapse into a little ball of stress by mid-October. Stay tuned to find out which!
No need for a hot glue gun either….
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….
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 is rather embarrassing that I have never read it. But I might work my way through their science fiction collection first…..
Road Trip!
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 it is just a bit far at a bad time of year….
Now I have a few months to decide who to root for – should I be a loyal alum and support Team Cornell, go with local favorites Tartan Racing, or root for Stanford because I like their technology best? It’s a dilemma!
Internet Line Art
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 go back to it. The creator, Mateusz Skutnik seems to have a few other games as well as some comics linked through their site that I want to look at sometime soon.
Good thing they didn’t find sea monsters….
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, with Canada comparing it to a 15th century colonial land grab.
The appeal of the underwater site is as access to a significant gas and oil reserve, to which Canada, Norway, Russia, the US, and Denmark all have claim to based on proximity. It sounds like the submarine expedition to the bottom was actually fairly dangerous and sophisticated, and it was not undertaken only to plant a flag but to collect samples to compare to established Russian geology – the flag was merely symbolic. It is interesting seeing a “first-ones there” approach to claim staking still taking place on Earth, though, and not just in space.