March 10th 2008
On today’s trip to the cheese section at Andronico’s, I stumbled upon this outlandishly huge block of cheddar. I measured it as 11″x14″x6″. There was no tag on the monster to indicate its exact weight, but I took the measurements of one of its smaller neighbors. The littler block of cheese was 3.5″x3.5″x 1.5″ and weighed in at 0.73 pounds -> density(cheese) = 0.04 pounds/in^3. Extrapolating, the monster block should weigh 37 pounds (which felt about right). And at $11.99/pound, that makes it a $443.63 piece of cheese. Yikes.
This was not the only gargantuan piece of cheese sitting out on the showroom floor. Over next to the beemster there was a huge slab of Parrano, there for the taking at the low low price of $194.27. Andronico’s is kind of like the Maserati dealership for fine cheeses. And for that, I love it.
Posted by dylan under food | 4 Comments »
February 29th 2008
The Long Now Foundation hosted a seminar by Craig Venter, so of course I had to go. My impression of the man was some combination of Peter Schultz and Al Gore (that is, An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore). Beyond that I won’t even try to summarize. Here is host Steward Brand’s attempt. Hopefully the seminar audio and video will be available soon, here.
What I can say is that 1) during the post-presentation book signing Dr. Venter was kind enough to autograph a printout of his own karyotype that I brought. This came from his recent PLoS publication (open access, thanks internet! You can also download a gigantic pdf of the sequence, for $0.00).
And 2) I was inspired to the point where I felt compelled to throw money at the Long Now Foundation by purchasing this very attractive watch (timepiece? bracelet?). It is the most accurate watch in the world and worth every penny. I am still trying to think of witty things to say when people ask me what time it is - suggestions welcome.
Posted by dylan under outer space & machines & humans | 1 Comment »
January 5th 2008
This is my first entry into the realm of lolcats. What do you think? I would be pleased as punch if this was promoted to the front page, so please click and vote 5 cheezburgers, spread the word, etc.
Posted by dylan under cats | 2 Comments »
December 21st 2007
Today is a landmark day where I fought a pitched battle against my very own visual cortex, and I am proud to say that I emerged triumphant. No doubt you’ve seen those pictures of a bunch of colored dots, where if you stare at them long enough a 3D picture is supposed to “pop out.”
I remember these used to be popular circa 1995 when everyone had huge Magic Eye posters plastering the walls[1]. In the 10 years that I’ve been staring at these speckled dot things (autostereogram, to be precise) I never really got it. The advice people tell you when trying to perceive these images is vague and unhelpful: “you just have to stare at it long enough!” Sometimes it worked, usually not[2]. Until today.
Espousing the wikipedia is passé, I know, but I feel it’s necessary because this page has allowed me to overcome a decade-long frustration and master my own personal visual perception system. The reason why it’s so hard to “see” an autostereogram is because you’re asking your brain to do something totally unnatural. Millennia of evolution have hard wired the actions of focusing and convergence into your eyeballs. Stereograms are basically just a dirty trick on the brain, and for the illusion to work you need to defeat your subconscious reflexes.
It’s helpful to understand how exactly the illusion works, and to practice on simple wallpaper images like this one. Then you can move on to level 2, random dots. It really is just a matter of practice and training. Once you’ve mastered the control of your visual cortex, it’s a cinch.
I’m impressed at how, once locked into the illusion, you can flip between images without having to recalibrate yourself. Take a bunch of images (here’s a zip file of 50) and make them into a screensaver or slideshow. You should be able to switch pictures and stay in 3D the whole time.
Easier, download these quicktime movies I made that cycle through the whole bunch automatically:
1 second per frame or 3 seconds per frame
For best results, open in Quicktime and go to “View” -> “Present movie…” -> “Actual Size.” Stereogram animations are also cool. For the ultimate challenge try this on for size… stereogram tetris! I played for 10 minutes it left me unable to look at still objects, or walk straight.
[1] 1995 was also The Year of the Fractal. Computer-generated images used to be cool.
[2] Turns out I was doing it all wrong. I was crossing my eyes, which made the images inverted. Most stereograms are rendered to be viewed “wall eyed.”
Posted by dylan under machines & humans | 5 Comments »
November 22nd 2007
Normally I’m not one to get angry at celestial objects, but I’ve got some words to say about this so-called “freak comet” currently sailing above our heads. If you haven’t read the news, there’s this Comet Holmes thing, which is usually a mediocre ball of ice that’s invisible to the naked eye. For reasons unknown, a few weeks ago it got a million times brighter within the span of a few hours. Sounds pretty awesome, right? I’ve been pointing my head up every night for the past 2 weeks, expecting to see a blazing fireball, like this and this.
A big waste of time. This “comet” is hardly worthy of its namesake. Maybe it’s just because I don’t have a giant telescope, but to my naked eyeballs Comet Holmes looks pretty much like any other point of light in the sky. Perhaps ever so slightly more blurry than a star, but that’s about it. I would like to write an angry letter, but I’m not sure who to address it to.
Posted by dylan under outer space | 3 Comments »
November 5th 2007
The short story: I modified a crappy digital camera to make it capture infrared images. Step-by-step instructions available at this instructable.
The long story: A fortuitous sequence of events has led to the successful creation of a real, actual infrared digital camera, done right. The first step was to get my hands on a reasonable digital camera (ie: one that was actually compatible with my computer). For this, I marched straight into the nearest Ritz Camera store, walked directly to the counter, and stated “I would like to purchase your absolute cheapest digital camera, because I have every intention of possibly breaking it.” On that lucky day, there was a very nice woman working the register who simply reached down below the counter into some sort of lost-and-found and retrieved an orphaned VuPoint 3.1MP digicam. “You can have this one, if you want,” she said.
Not one to look a gift digital camera in the mouth, I graciously accepted the offering, said my thanks, and immediately left. Granted, this camera is just about the bottom of the barrel (fixed focus, plastic lens, dim LCD, generally cheap components), but it *does* have a removable SD card that I can simply stick in my USB card reader to make it interface nicely with iPhoto.
Having procured 1/2 of the necessary components, the next step was to order a sheet of Congo Blue (Lee #181, Rosco #382) lighting filter gel from B&H. Once everything arrived in the mail, it was time to get down to business. In short, the idea here is to crack open the digital camera, remove the IR-blocking filter, replace it with lighting filters that block everything *but* infrared, and reassemble the camera, hoping nothing got broken along the way. Again, this is all describe in detail on this instructable.
The surgery was a complete success, and I now have in my possession a 100% certified infrared digital camera. For something that cost slightly more than $0, I am completely in love with this camera. Here is a smattering of pictures that I took at Point Reyes National Seashore and more recently at the Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve. Yes!
Posted by dylan under machines | 1 Comment »
September 28th 2007
Infrared photography a fun way to create some interesting and unusual images, like these. Photographs of outdoor scenery are the most impressive, where trees and grass look bright white instead of green (chlorophyll is transparent to infrared light). Once upon a time, the only way to take pictures in infrared was to use a 35mm camera loaded with special film, but nowadays you can modify any digital camera to capture infrared relatively easily.
I found this set of instructions for how to modify a digital camera and I thought I’d give it a shot. In principal all you have to do is remove the IR blocking filter from behind the lens, and put in some red plastic gel lighting filters in its place. But in reality, taking apart a digital camera involves working with a lot of miniscule screws and very fragile components, and there’s a high probability you will ruin your camera forever if you mess up even slightly. Options to consider are 1) paying a professional hundreds of dollars to modify your camera for you, like this place, or 2) practicing on a really cheap camera so that you won’t cry when you turn it into a brick.
I chose option 2. I went to Fry’s and picked up the cheapest digital camera I could find. This item here set me back a cool $24.99. Don’t be fooled by its stylish appearance. It’s 100% plastic and would probably disintegrate into a million pieces if you sneezed on it. It came in a big piece of plastic packaging along with a “digital photography for dummies” book and a CD full of dubious-looking software. The software was only for PC and it was unclear whether the camera would work with my shiny macintosh without it. But it was USB, so I figured there was a good chance it would just mount when I plugged it in, and I could pull off the images.
I got it home and took two pictures of my feet, then plugged it into my computer. Alas, it didn’t mount. I’ve since returned it (my apologies to the next person who may buy the camera and find it loaded with pictures of my feet, there was nothing I could do). The quest to find a disposable digital camera goes on. While I was in the camera department of Fry’s a feeling overtook me, which I can only describe as megapixel-related-depression. My current “nice” digital camera is a Canon PowerShot S30 that was state of the art when I got it back in 2002. Now its 3.2 megapixels are easily outshined by even the cheapest digicam (of the ones that don’t come in plastic packaging).
Posted by dylan under machines | 3 Comments »
September 21st 2007
I just finished reading The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (amazon). It’s an account of John Snow’s work in solving the riddle of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, and how that changed the way we build cities. I won’t bore you with a book report, other than to say that the book was “good.” Steven Johnson also gave a very excellent talk about this subject for the Long Now Foundation, which is available as a free download here.
One of the sniglets I picked up from the book is that the International Society for Infectious Diseases has an email list that sends out daily notices about emerging infectious diseases and toxins. It’s called ProMED-mail and anyone can subscribe to the list. This is a way to keep your thumb on the proverbial pulse of the planet, a paranoid hypochondriac’s dream. I am now a proud subscriber. Here is the digest for today, September 21 2007, concerning topics such as ebola hemmorrhagic fever and the measles situation in Kenya. Note the interesting use of Facebook.com to disseminate information about bat rabies in Ontario.
ProMED Digest Friday, September 21 2007 Volume 2007 : Number 485
News you can use. There you have it.
Posted by dylan under humans | 3 Comments »
September 15th 2007
This is the story of why I got 6 pounds of cheese in the mail. There’s this really fancy grocery store Andronico’s that is conveniently located on my way to work. It’s full of opulent and comically expensive foodstuffs, like a $10 jar of sea salt imported from Sicily. Normally I would have no business shopping there, but a while back I discovered the day old meat section in the butcher’s department. Of course it’s still perfectly fine meat, just not worth the exorbitant amount of money it would normally sell for. So I make a habit of going there pretty much every day on the way home from work to pick up some high-quality, drastically discounted meat that I immediately throw on the grill for dinner. It’s great.
Andronico’s also puts out little samples of very expensive food products on toothpicks that I like to munch on while in transit to the day old meat section. They especially do this on Saturday, and if you go at the right time you can pretty much make a meal out of it. A couple of weeks ago I had an experience that would forever change my perception of cheese. I picked up a toothpick with a little 1cm cube of cheese like I had done a million times before, but this one literally stopped me in my tracks when I ate it. I stood in the middle of the isle, floored by the taste sensations unfolding in my mouth. When I regained my composure, I went back to see what exactly I had just eaten. It was Beemster XO.
Immediately I ate about 6 more of the little sample cubes and picked up a big chunk for the road. The stuff was $21/pound, definitely not cheep but very much worth it. I spent the rest of the night curled up with my chunk of XO and a box of crackers, on a culinary spirit journey. I came to learn much about the cheese: Beemster is produced in the eponymous municipality in the Netherlands. Technically it’s an aged gouda, but that’s like saying a Rolls-Royce is technically a car. Besides, you’d never pin it as a gouda by its taste. It’s impossible to adequately describe, but the Beemster experience is a roller coaster ride that goes through several distinct taste stages and leaves you with the feeling of complete satisfaction. The cheese has some interesting physical characteristics too. It’s hard like parmesan and if you look closely you can see little white specs in it. According to the Beemster FAQ these are actually protein crystals - a product of the 26 month aging process it goes through. They have an interesting flavor and crunch that adds an idiosyncratic dimension of awesomeness.
Over the course of the next week I ended up spending about $60 on cheese, at which point I realized I could not support a Beemster habit in my current financial situation. So I sought a cheaper source. Unfortunately, all the Beemster in the world is produced in one location that necessitates such things as the perfect nutritional content of the grass that the cows snack on, giving rise to perfect-quality milk, and the fact that the town of Beemster is located 20 feet below sea level, creating a unique climate in which to age the cheese, etc. etc. In other words, there is only Beemster and you should accept no substitute. They have limited distributors in America and it was only by happy coincidence that my day-old-meat retailer of Andronico’s is one of the few in California. Seemingly I was trapped in a $21/pound cheese habit with no escape. That is, until I noticed that igourmet.com also carries the product, for only $15.99. I knew it was time to invest.
I noticed that igourmet.com was having a special on Beemster classic, which is the same as the XO variety, only it’s aged 18 months instead of 24. They were selling a 6 pound block, which came with a free knife, for only $69.99. I consulted with my financial advisor and concluded this was an opportunity not to be missed, so I placed an order post haste. UPS delivered the goods a few days later, arriving in a very large and strangely cold box. I opened it to discover what could have well been the shipping method for an organ transplant: the cheese was buried in a styrofoam container along with several cold packs and pieces of insulating material.
And then there was the knife. When you get something that comes with something else for free, you expect the free thing to be a piece of junk, right? Well igourmet.com does not mess around like that. Along with my cheese they gave me what could more accurately be described as a machete than a knife. It’s about 2 feet long, incredibly sharp, and has a solid, sturdy feel to it. You could definitely use it to defend yourself in a post-apocalyptic urban warzone, for example. It goes through the 4 inch-thick cheese like butter, and I love it. Did I mention that the knife came with it’s own wearable branded knife holder?
For the past two days I’ve had Beemster for lunch and dinner. I hate to say it, but I fear the honeymoon is over. I am now realizing that 6 pounds is a lot of cheese and I really don’t know what to do with it. I hacked off about a pound from the master piece of cheese, basically an aliquot that I am working on slowly. The remaining 5-ish pounds are in the refrigerator, hermetically sealed as per the very detailed instructions on the FAQ. Does anybody want some cheese? Seriously, I will send you some of this very high-quality cheese, my treat. For now the best plan I have is to start leaving large blocks along with a box of crackers and a big sign saying EAT ME in random locations, like Johnny Appleseed.
Posted by dylan under food | 32 Comments »
