tisiwoota

So. Today, via Stumbleupon, I discovered this amazing, mind-blowing video that tilt-shifts and time-lapses a monster truck show rally (and puts it to a rockin’ beat, to boot).

Since I’m taking a video editing class for fun this semester, I was ravenously curious to discover how it was done (I mean, I know about tilt-shift lenses… but for video?). And to figure out if (maybe maybe I hope I hope) it was something I could do, too– without buying expensivo equipment. Since it took more than a few clicks to answer all my questions, I figured I’d aggregate my findings for the internet at large. {You’re welcome}.

The way the artist, Keith Loutit, made his videos is explained in this interview.

But I’m just an amateur who doesn’t have the time (or fancy lenses) to take 60,000 PHOTOGRAPHS and then convert them to Quicktime.

Fortunately, there are short-cuts.

Someone has come up with a clever way to create a tilt-shift effect via Photoshop and FinalCut (okay, some fanciness required, but maybe it’s adaptable to other programs?). Example vid here.

Combine with instructions for making videos time-lapse (either by frame rate or in post), and voilà!

Or, I hope voilà.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to play around with this before the end of finals.

SO COOL.

update: A friend says there should be plenty more tilt-shift video coming with the new DSLR bodies with video recording– e.g. the new Canon 5DMkII.

Time Lapse, Tilt Shift

The Union of Concerned Scientists is sponsoring a global warming cartoon contest.

A great entry that was pointed out to me:

Seed podcast of 7/28:

While environmentalists whine about the melting of the polar ice caps, one group of Greenlanders is making the best of the situation. An entrepreneurial company is turning the melted Arctic Island into beer. The first ever Inuit microbrewery is taking the fine water—over 2,000 years old and pollutant-free, according to the brewers—and using it to produce ale that supposedly tastes cleaner and smoother than other beers. The first 66,000 liters are on their way to Denmark, and the brewery says the US and Germany have expressed interest in the product.

Some random questions that I found in another forum…

1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.

2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?

3. Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?

4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?

5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn’t been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?

6. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters “dw” and they are all common words. Name two of them.

7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them?

8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.

9. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter “S.”

Answers are below: (more…)

While sorting through some old papers, I came across a page I had clipped out from the letters section of the student paper at my alma mater.

To appreciate the fantasticness of the below, you need to know two bits of background information:

1) Professor X, the most conservative professor at the institution, had recently written a letter to the paper implying that a student who had taken a liberal position in an editorial was simply aping the opinions of his professors and essentially acting as their lapdog.

2) A group of liberal professors had recently sent a letter announcing their intentions to protest an upcoming speech by a prominent conservative judge by boycotting the event. This led to much controversy about whether encouraging students to boycott opposing views was an appropriate exercise of free speech.

And now, the piece de resistance:

PROFESSOR X ATTACKS STUDENT SUBTLY

We have always understood that attacks by members of the faculty against other members of the faculty are not appropriately carried out in the pages of this venerable paper. So we would not dream of attacking Professor X’s recent letter in which he suggests that, while a particular student is a careless and perhaps even dishonest reasoner, he (Professor X) would not dream of attacking him publicly because it’s always been understood that attacks by members of the faculty are not appropriately carried out in the pages of this venerable newspaper.

No, of Professor X himself we will not speak. We write only to suggest to those members of the faculty who do feel compelled to assure a student in the pages of this venerable newspaper that they would not dream of attacking him in the pages of this venerable paper that they might seek to resist accompanying said assurances with an attack on said student in the pages of this venerable paper.

Finally, lest it be thought that we are open to debate regarding the above suggestion, we must let it be known that the undersigned members of the faculty will not pursue the liberal ideals of constructive disagreement with, nor even attend lectures by, anyone who holds a divergent opinion.

Signed,

Professor Y (of philosophy)
Professor Z (of mathemetics)

A link clearly momentous enough to merit its own post:

A computer game that turns pet hamsters into virtual man-eaters could be the first in a new breed of games aimed at both people and their pets.

“Mice Arena” is an augmented-reality computer game in which human players are pitted against a real, live hamster.

The hamster is housed in a tank fitted with infra-red sensors that track its motion as it chases after a tasty piece of bait. Its movements are mimicked by monster hamster on a computer screen, which chases a virtual character representing a human opponent.

Ha. This is fabulous:

The backlash against social networking sites like Myspace and Friendster has begun. Welcome to the antisocial web.

A site called Snubster lets you create a list of people that you don’t want to be friends with [or things you don’t like]. Enter a person’s email address and they’ll get a message to says they are “dead to you”, or “on notice” along with a reason, if you see fit to give them one.

Even better:

…the idea is already being turned inside out as some people are making social connections by browsing each other’s hate lists.

“It has developed into a sort of community atmosphere,” says the guy behind Snubster. “It seems as though people find entertainment and connections in finding other people that hate the same things as them.”

Google romance? Eh, it was cute. Aliens on Google Earth Area 51? Better. Every other web company getting taken over by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft? Pretty much happening anyway. (And btw, what would be so hard about actually making a virtual pet dragon?)

But then there’s Virgil and Socar. Unlike those wannabes who think they’re being sooo clever by posting on March 30 rather than April 1, these pros get their pranks rolling a full month in advance. And boy are they elaborate. And just like last year, its pure brilliance– they invented a blogger, 58-year old Howard Glassman, who is dedicated to eating the “compleat works” of Neil Gaiman.

By “compleat works,” I mean “everything the man has ever published, be it comics, essays, poetry, or prose.” By “digest,” I mean “pass through my alimentary canal.”

This choice of theme actual reminds me of an author I’ve read– not Neil Gaiman (because I’ve ah, never read him), but Geoff Nicholson. Nicholson’s characters are typified by bizarre obsessions (such as a quest to walk down each and every street in London), which often have some literary element to them or are being charted by a failed writer. These obsessions are employed as devices to make philosophical commentary about literature and the act of writing. In particular I’m reminded of Bedlam Burning, which begins with a pompous bout of book burning by academic types at Oxford, and centers on the travails of a man who finds himself employed as a writer-in-residence at an insane asylum, where he is expected to guide the inmates in producing their own work. Howard Glassman would fit right into the mix– as inmate or observer.

Ah, and here we go: the Nicholesque meta-commentary.

DAY SIXTEEN
…Here’s how I view it. Books are no longer the precious commodity they once were. Gone are the days of short runs and hand-tooled leather bindings. Nobody toils over the printing block, slotting hundreds of individual letters into a wooden frame so we can read a single page. Books were once objects to be revered, it’s true: if not works of art, certainly marvels of craftsmanship. What I’m eating, however, is nothing like that. These are mass-market paperbacks, run off by the tens of thousands. They ship with blobs of glue still clinging to their spines. Their pages come loose on the first read through. You can pick one up anywhere in America for less than ten dollars, or have one shipped anywhere in the world at the touch of a button. There’s nothing precious about the object, only the ideas inside.

It’s also interesting how writing about obsession is at heart an exploration of the way that people categorize the world around them. An obsession about something soon becomes less about that particular something than about how the person decides to parse their own rules and delineate the boundaries of their subject:

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
Are you planning on printing out and digesting his web-posts?

I hadn’t thought about that. It would be a big commitment, and one that would likely last for the rest of my life. Neil Gaiman is a young man. He is also a prolific Internet poster, if his website is anything to go by. It would take me years just to plow through his journal archives. For now, I think I will stick with his conventionally published material, with the understanding that if he ever launches forth on the ebook market, those will be printed out and digested.

I haven’t decided yet about books on tape. On the one hand, they could be classified as alternate editions. I feel it’s important to eat all the words, but not every instance of the words. On the other hand, the reader’s voice brings something new to the story. It brings an interpretation, of sorts. At the moment, I’m leaning towards ignoring books on tape: I’m not sure the reader’s interpretation is enough to constitute a whole new experience.

…

UPDATE: Ah. I just came to an unmistakable sign of Virgil.
A smattering of rhyming couplets:

Posted on the fridge this afternoon:

Thanks to you, who stole my lunch,
I had to eat a Crispy Crunch.
Thanks for nothing, thanks a bunch.

…I know who did it, I got a hunch.
I got something for him, it’s a punch.

Of course. Well then, that will make next year easy– assuming one small advance in technology. Seeing as Ask.com (that crass Jeeves layer-offer of a search engine) unveiled a “Rhyme Search” feature today, it is only a matter of time before Google adapts its blog search to enable searching for recent blog entries that contain rhyming couplets. Presto! (Or better yet, I’ll use my internal Google contacts to have such a capacity personally developed for me. And then I shall WIN. Win what, you ask? Um… eternal smugness for having found out a Virgil/Socar prank?)

Considering all the other crazy things people have tried to snag IP rights for, it’s not surprising someone has come up with this (credit: Siona):

>>
“The idea is that Keats, 32, sells the rights to his brain, and with it his original thoughts, for perpetuity.

This relies on new technology - not yet invented - which will keep his brain alive and functioning, even after he has died.

…

…Keats had to figure out how to mould his plan to fit the conventional rules of the financial markets.

He came up with a novel approach. Keats has registered his brain as a sculpture which he created thought by thought.”

This is amusing. [pdf]

Introduction:

“THIS IS ME. I am a lawyer. Lawyers are important. They go to important offices and do important things. Color my underpants important.”

And another good frame:

“THIS IS MY DESK. It is mahogany. Important people have mahogany desks. My walls are mahogany, too. I wish I were mahogany.”

[These would make great book plates if anonymous lawyer got book-ified…]

As a friend commented after last night’s State of the Union, “Thank god this matter has been brought to public consciousness.”

Technorati: Posts that contain Human-animal Hybrids per day for the last 30 days.

Naturally, this has sparked some creative discussion along the lines of “Manimals I hope Bush Doesn’t Extinctify”. Here are some of the favorite suggestions I’ve seen:

mantelope
humanatee
girleopard
zebruncle
girlilla
guyger
croworker
mog

and…

A maliger. (”It’s pretty much my favorite animal. It’s like a man and a lion and a tiger mixed…bred for its skills in magic.”)