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.