RU Sirius posted a transcript of his interviews with me at his Ten Zen Monkeys site.

Paul DiFilippo’s cool new story “Wikiworld” is online.

Rick Kleffel reviewed Mathematicians in Love on his Trashotron site.

Owen Maresh has some nice-looking gnarly mathematical movies.

On online zine about Philip K. Dick called PKD Otaku

A wiki about Thomas Pynchon!

A hi-brow ranter with the screen name Gaspaheangea is posting some nice, demented stuff.

SFRevu writes about my story collection Mad Professor.

From Marc Powell, a link to a PDF with a lot of old paintings showing UFOs.

Trey Ratcliff sends a link to his blog with High Dynamic Range photos, also a link to his HDR tutorial about how to make HDR photos using Photoshop and Photomatix on a Mac. I myself would like to start making these kinds of pix in the coming year; if you have Photoshop CS2 you don’t need Photomatix, as mentioned in another tutorial, which in fact puts down Photomatix a bit.

It would be cool if these pictures of mine were in fact HDR instead of simply Phtoshop de-shadowed. But I also think I’d need a better camera. It’s kind of discouraging, really, to look at HDR pix, they make my photos look weak. On the other hand, I take a lot of them.

As I understand it, for HDR you take the same picture at a fixed aperture (so as to have same depth of field) but at five different speeds (I’m guessing that using a tripod is pretty much essential)—or at a fixed speed and five different apertures (so as to avoid motion blur) —and then you let your software munge that into a single image in which the highlighted and shadowed regions are all perfectly exposed. I imagine that in five years, we’ll have digital cameras that do this automatically. Trey argues that we natively do see the world in HDR; my eye is always twitching, getting a little bit of the picture here, a little bit there, and it’s quilted together in my brain into an image of the scene as a whole. My retina opens and closes adaptively as I look from dark to light to dark.

I’m thinking a way to do HDR on the fly would be to have the individual pixel elements each do something like that.

Most of today’s pictures are from a hike I took in Big Basin Redwoods State Park this week with my friend Emilio. A few of them are from a Sunday visit to the Stanford campus as well.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 10:53 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.