Photography, technology and Vancouver life.
Check out this incredible YouTube video of someone digitally painting the Mona Lisa with the most notoriously out-dated computer drawing tool known to man (MS Paint in case you didn’t read the title). It’s impressive… yet so sad at the same time.
The average human retina has five million cone receptors on it. Since the cones are responsible for colour vision, you might suppose that this equates to a five megapixel equivilant for the human eye.But there are also a hundred million rods that detect monochrome contrast, which plays an important role in the sharpness of the image you see. And even this 105MP is an underestimate because the eye is not a still camera.
You have two eyes (no kidding!) and they continually flick around to cover a much larger area than your field of view and the composite image is assembled in the brain — not unlike stitching together a panoramic photo. In good light, you can distinguish two fine lines if they are seperate by at least 0.6 arc-minutes (0.01.Degrees).
This gives an equivilant pixel size of 0.3 arc-minutes. If you take a conservative 120 degrees as your horizontal field of view and 60 degrees in the vertical plane, this translates to …
576 megapixels of available image data.
Curiously — as a counterpoint to this — most people cannot distinguish the difference in quality between a 300dpi and a 150dpi photo when printed at 6×4″, when viewed at normal viewing distances.
So: although the human eye and brain when combined can resolve massive amounts of data, for imaging purposes, 150dpi output is more than enough to provide adequate data for us to accept the result as photographic quality.
But don’t forget that women have more cones and men have more rods — I kid you not.Therefore the ladies see colours brighter than gents but can’t see as well when it gets dark.
Shorpy.com is a photo blog about what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating. We’re starting with a collection of photographs taken in the early 1900s by Lewis Wickes Hine as part of a decade-long field survey for the National Child Labor Committee. One of his subjects, a young coal miner named Shorpy Higginbotham, is the site’s namesake.
French Alain Robert, 44, known as Spiderman climbs Petronas Twin Towers with his bare hands, in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, on March 20, 2007. Alain Robert completed the climb in only 20 minutes. Alain Robert also climbed the Sears Tower in Chicago, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority tower in UAE, Eiffel Tower in Paris and Empire State Building in New York City.
Actual quotes from the courts:
Q: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
A: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.Q: Did you blow your horn or anything?
A: After the accident?
A: Sure, I played for ten years. I even went to school for it.Q: The youngest son, the twenty-year old, how old is he?
Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began
the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive nevertheless?
A: It is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.
There are lots more at Scribd — What People say in Court
When I first viewed these pictures I immediately assumed they were a Photoshop fake, but, according to this news article, they can be visited in Mexico. These things are huge! Notice the little guy off to the left in the above picture. I think I’ve just found another location for my “places to visit before I die” list. Someone should give those guys a Superman costume, the cave looks kind of like the Fortress of Solitude.
The Naica Mine of Chihuahua, Mexico, is a working mine that is known for its extraordinary crystals. Naica is a lead, zinc and silver mine in which large voids have been found, containing crystals of selenite (gypsum) as large as 4 feet in diameter and 50 feet long. The chamber holding these crystals is known as the Crystal Cave of Giants, and is approximately 1000 feet down in the limestone host rock of the mine. The crystals were formed by hydrothermal fluids emanating from the magma chambers below. The cavern was discovered while the miners were drilling through the Naica fault, which they were worried would flood the mine. The Cave of Swords is another chamber in the Naica Mine, containing similar large crystals.
As a professional photographer who specializes in environmentally difficult, narrow and wet canyons worldwide, it was almost impossible to obtain clear photographs even using every trick and technique I know, because of the extreme ambient environment. These crystals are probably stable, as the temperature in the cave is over 150 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity. In other words, these structures are enveloped in steam. As a photographer used to working in dark and dangerous environments, this experience was unique. A human can only function in this environment for six to ten minutes before severe loss of mental functions occurs. I was so excited while photographing the crystals that I really had to focus and concentrate intensely on getting back out the door, which was perhaps only thirty to forty feet away.
Crystal Cave of Giants, Mexico — Crystalinks and Crystal Cave of the Giants — Discovery of the Largest Crystals on Earth via Digg (and again)
Update: Here is a link to one more picture.
Update 2: This news article refers to another set of caves with similar properties in Spain.
Update 3: National Geographic has some more photos found here.
Kim sez, “Mitch Bainwol and Cary Sherman of RIAA try to explain why they are suing students with a new article in Inside Higher Education.”
“Yet this is about far more than the size of a particular slice of the pie. This is about a generation of music fans. College students used to be the music industry’s best customers. Now, finding a record store still in business anywhere near a campus is a difficult assignment at best. It’s not just the loss of current sales that concerns us, but the habits formed in college that will stay with these students for a lifetime. This is a teachable moment — an opportunity to educate these particular students about the importance of music in their lives and the importance of respecting and valuing music as intellectual property.”
Hilarious: the people who created sex, drugs and rock and roll, who glorified thug life and guns, are suddenly all concerned with the moral character of America’s teens. That’s about as credible as the idea that they’re really worried about musicians’ fortunes.
You’d think that a philosopher could reason out the best way to behave, right? But you’d be wrong, very wrong.
If you have ever used these social media websites, you’ll know how true these comics are.
See more at Drivl.com | Social Media Websites in Illustrated Form
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