Open Hatch

[This entry was temporarily posted at this page, and has been moved here.]

 

 Nemmy and Mago, September 2008: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve mentioned this electric sheep screen saver. Here’s one mpg from it.

I may find a way to batch convert them and incorporate them into the blog design. That won’t make it impossible for you to read.. Click either “play now” or “play in popup” to see it. If either of those don’t work, click the download link and have a look at it in Windows Media Player.

The screen saver has downloaded a bajillion of these goodies into its cache on my machine. Eye candy. I think this one is morphing between four different “sheep” IDs.

 

 00202=20781=20564=20717: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I ran across this today and tried it - so worth it.

It’s a screen-saver that does mutating, “genetic” computer-generated animated art for your screen-saver, and distributes these across the internet to everyone else who has the screen-saver installed, and users can vote for or against the various “electric sheep” (up arrow key votes yes, down votes no) so that cooler ones get promoted.  I took the following image from the sites gallery of current images (which fluctuates - they render new “sheep” images from user’s machines during idle time/bandwidth) and scaled it up - it’s a desktop now.

This is a link to the image because the thumbnail isn’t working for some reason.

I love that MATRIX screen-saver I found and will probably go back to it from time to time.  Meanwhile, this.

- do.

This really got me.  Hard to find any other way to praise it - words fail.  Well done.

[Update Jun 1st: there were several inaccuracies in this article now corrected, and I’ve added some too - all in bold.]

I just ordered a Canon VIXIA HD30 camcorder - this is a higher end HD consumer beast. I’m excited about it. There are many things I’ll do with it.

I’ve been asking around and doing a lot of research about HD and particularly how it may transfer to film and/or project on a big screen, and I want to say I notice a fairly sharp divide between people who insist video should never imitate or copy to film vs. people who say go for it. What’s odd to me is that folks against it seem to usually describe that as the more realistic or practical approach, or that copying video to film is only “dreaming.”

Well, gee, imagine any film maker dreaming.

I’m in no mood after writing my thesis to cite the sources of facts I present and form my conclusions on. Suffice it to say I believe you could verify these facts.

My take is that in truth it is more practical to go digital if you can. We are in a digital cinema revolution, and physical film stock may always have its place, but the reality is that the blockades to shooting digital film which audiences don’t perceive as different after transfer to film - never mind the options to just distribute digitally increasing every year! - blockades to that quality break down steadily every year.

[Why am I speculating? With a ruler I drew a grid on a post-it note at the resolution of HD - 3 pixels an inch assuming a 30 foot screen - and filled it with alternating black-and-white squares, and looked at it from 40 feet back. There would really need to do be some image processing and projection magic with the way pixels transition into each other to make it look good. Fairly obvious “I am pixels” look at that resolution. But I need to know. I’m looking for sources that give a lot more detail on this, and I’ve also simply got to do real application visual tests on all this theory myself, somehow.]

About digital film projection, I’m going to speculate now. I don’t know how this actually plays out, this is theory, and I’d love to know of the real-world tests that certainly are playing out on these questions. But my speculation is that depending, digitally projected high-definition video could look not only anywhere from sufficiently as good as film to just as good, but better. Consider resolution available from the Red One. Here’s a picture of a 2006 model with some kind of super-exo-death-armature-skeleton-frame thing around it.

………………..

[This section had inaccuracies about the resolution of the Red One when I first wrote it - it’s fixed now.]

It shoots 2k (just over 1080 vertical pixels). That’s a bit more resolution than George Lucas thought was good enough (snobs have turned against him after the Star Wars prequels - yes, I will make that abusive statement, anyone who derides Lucas over his Star Wars prequels is a snob - I have qualms with the stories and writing on Star Wars Episodes I, II, sorta III and totally VI, but IV and V still rock the world, and I give Lucas full faith as a technological pioneer: arguably, he has single-handedly initiated the special effects revolution, and then the digital cinema revolution. Whether he simply vanishes like a good Jedi or makes it to heaven or not, before and if you pass the pearly gates, you’ll at least have to give him a hearty “thank you”.) Never mind that the Red One looks like a Star Wars Tie Fighter or something, and has a name reminiscent of Luke Skywalker flying the Death Star trenches - they have their market down - but it can record 1152 vertical pixels (or rows) at 120 frames a second, so that if projected at the same rate, it’s showing images exactly five times the frequency of standard film. I’ve read of tests going back to the 1970s demonstrating that people see a difference between 24 frames a second vs. 60 frames a second, and 120 is twice the upper range of those tests. I’d think that would probably look brilliant. Or you can do about a five hundred more rows of pixels at 60 frames a second, or again about five hundred more than that (or 2048 rows) at 30 frames a second - still a better frame rate than film. And digital projectors that do this are steadily spreading to theaters worldwide - my dear local Wynnsong has some now

Interesting math: that highest resolution mentioned (4x) has 4,096 vertical pixels, and if you divide that into 30 feet (for the typical height of a theater screen, and that link passes those paramaters into google calculator), and express that in inches, it’s about 8 pixels an inch. The math for x1080 resolution gives 3.333… pixels an inch. How does that look when you’re sitting 30 or 40 feet back (or further) from the screen? Losing detail and size for distance, they’d likely appear a lot finer and closer together I’d think. How does the density of pixels multiply across the visual range with distance? [When I first posted this I wondered if ten inches would shrink to 1, visually, so that what used to look like 3 pixels in an inch would be 30, and whether that would be enough - but no, 300 pixels an inch (or 100 times as many as 3 per inch) would correlate with the usual baseline for digital images.] That would seem like a reasonable baseline they’d go for in apparent density for “digital film”. If the visual density multiplies by about a hundred - would it? - I haven’t done that math or looked it up - but if that were the case then x2 resolution might be effectively 600 dots per inch, and x4 resolution maybe 1200 dots per inch?]

I’ve read of cinema house worries over the fickle and perhaps difficult to manage aspects of digital media, and there may be a lot of kinks and things to figure out with digital cinema along the way - but what do we expect? - it’s a brand new medium. Besides, those kinks will probably be worked out fairly fast. It took a good 60 or 70 years or so to figure out how best to technically work film, but vast improvements with digital film are advancing over stages of years, not decades! Ten years ago nobody would have thought you could buy a camera that shot at 1080 vertical pixels for under a thousand dollars. Three years ago the same camera would have cost several thousand dollars. If the trend continues the same quality camera will be available in a few years for half the price, and a camera twice as good will be available at the same price. Expanding that trend to decades it’s easy that around, say, 2020, teenagers from middle to low income families could be armed with camcorders that shoot at a resolution you can blow up to an IMAX screen - and by then there may be some bid-to-rent digital distribution network in place so that they can show their independent film at a local theatre for costs low enough that independent filmmakers of today might gasp. You can distribute for what cost? That low?

That all sounds like a dream, and it could be, but again, given the way these specific technologies have advanced in the past decade it’s easy they may advance to that stage in another decade. In my book digital cinema has to be the way motion pictures go. (I think high definition and beyond will also radically transform home entertainment.) We’ll still use film a lot, I think, especially for long-term storage because digital storage is notoriously destructible and fickle.

I collected this sound a long time ago while looking for rude sounds for work (no, they opted out of using them - I suppose wisely), but ran across it again today.

This has been really cracking me up. The original is at the freesound project, here. Another amusing one by the same user is “nuclear genocide”, here. It’s not done after the first. Wait - there are long pauses.

At BYU’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Symposium this January (which I was very delighted to attend), Orson Scott Card gave two addresses. The first was a main address seeking to answer this question:

“Why are Mormons over represented among emerging Science Fiction and Fantasy writers?”

That phenomenon has relatively recently emerged in the history of Science Fiction and Fantasy writing - this has been going on long before Stephanie Meyer’s now great fame (and her work certainly counts as fantasy and science fiction). As an example, the Writers of the Future Contest is a blind contest (I’ve personally dreamed of entering since a teenager - and gee golly, I’m a Mormon! - but I’m still sitting on the seeds of ideas which are germinating) - none of the judges know the identities of entrants, and every year a disproportionate number of winners of the contest happen to be Mormons.

Card’s second address was entitled “Science Fiction as a Valid Literary Genre”. To introduce it he said that every year, articles come out in either Atlantic, or Harper’s, or New Yorker about, as he puts it, “.. why Science Fiction sucks.” In this speech Card completely shredded (in my opinion) the snotty, self-absorbed triteness (my words) of literary fiction and most of all literary fiction writers which the aforementioned magazines (and also elitist literature programs at universities) apparently encourage. I have audio recordings of both speeches, which are both very enlightening, entertaining and to me even moving - but unfortunately my recording of the latter is cut off too soon. However I have a full, cleaned up recording of the former speech, which I here present. Strictly I may not have any authorization to do this, so I’m not giving a download link for this recording, and I want to seriously advertise the symposium and the proceedings; if you like this, you’ll probably like Card’s other address and anything and everything else at the symposium, so please: watch BYU’s web site for news on next year’s symposium, and releases of the proceedings from previous years. Email them via the “contact” link at that page and ask them what’s up and when the proceedings will be published.

Meanwhile, here’s my audio recording of Card’s main address. This is just over 47 minutes.

It was an odd coincidence, after watching so many episodes of the new BattleStar Galactica on DVD, that after I penned that essay yesterday I watched an episode where the abortion debate was raised.

(By the way, I waited five weeks checking three different Blockbuster video stores for the right disc of the right season of BattleStar Galactica to be checked in - there was a conspiracy to keep me from checking out that disc - and then one day my wife brought home the entire season of the show, checked out for far less a price, from the Orem Public Library. Now, as well as for the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum, I have a testimony that the Orem Public Library is true.)

The premise of the show is that the Cylons, robots created by humanity but which betray humanity, wipe out all the planetary colonies and drive and hunt the very small remainder of humanity into space. The entire show is humanity outsmarting, outmaneuvering, thwarting, and seeking to destroy the malevolent forces which they themselves created - while the evolved Cylons who are indistinguishable from humans fool people into David/Bathseba fiascoes.

In this episode (Season 2.5, “The Captain’s Hand”) President Rosylin is presented with a young pregnant woman who stowed away on the fleet command ship (Galactica), seeking asylum from her evil, fanatic, controlling parents to abort a child she apparently doesn’t want and/or can’t support. Rosylin has begun campaigning for re-election to office (she became President de facto as the highest ranking surviving political officer of the human race), and apparently the majority of the fleet is “pro-choice”, and her whole life Rosylin has fought to support the right, as she puts it, for a woman to control her own body. But General Adama reminds her that after the Cylon struck and nearly destroyed humanity, one of the first things she said to him was that “..if humanity is to survive we need to start having babies now.” Adama points to the number of humans still alive which Rosylin has kept on a whiteboard behind her desk since being sworn into office - around 54,000 - and says “That number hasn’t gone up for a long time.” Despite her position on abortion, Rosylin issues an executive order declaring any interference with the birth of a child as subject to criminal penalty - she makes abortion illegal. At the same time, since the executive order occurred after the young woman’s abortion, and the woman had already claimed asylum, Rosylin does not hold the woman subject to criminal penalty, which outrages the religious, fanatical representative from Gemenon. This principled compromise also outrages the eleven of the twelve colonies who support abortion (uh, how reflective of America or humanity would that be in real life - not very - the issue is very divided, and pretty equally). It also opens the way for a former political ally to come out in opposition and betray her in a factioning bid for the Presidency. Not bending to either extreme, Rosylin outrages everyone. Huh. Sounds like prexy Bush, dudn’t it?
The episode, in my opinion, underscored what Orson Scott Card said of the Science Fiction genre, in his main address at Life, the Universe, and Everything XVII (which symposium I very much enjoyed attending). Card sought to answer the question of why so many prominent writers of Sci-Fi and Fantasy happen to be Mormon. Apparently Mormons have been heavily dominating winners in the Writers of the Future contest for many years - and the contest is run blind. None of the judges know the names of any of the writers who submit, as the names are stripped from the entries before judging. Card argued that Science Fiction often embodies both the American plain narrative style and the American pragmatic hero - the hero who tests and tries things for himself until he finds the best solution - and, Card argues, Mormonism is also an embodiment of both of those, or more specifically, of the Scientific Method in harmony with religion. Mormonism does not ask its followers to simply blindly accept the religion, but to try it out.

“Prove me now herewith“,

- echoes the Mormon God in the Book of Mormon,

“..if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it.“

And again in Moroni:

“..And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.“

If you are showing faith in Christ, if you are sincerely seeking Him, if you have changed your life already, if you are experimenting on the word (Card didn’t mention the verses that say that), and you have a sincere desire to follow these things if they are true, God Himself will manifest the truth to you by the power of the Holy Ghost. If you sincerely try Mormon principles and doctrine in your life, Mormonism promises, you will know for yourself whether the doctrines are true. That, Card argues, is the Scientific Method - run tests, try things out for yourself, experiment on a hypothesis until you have an idea whether it seems true or false - that is the Scientific Method in complete harmony with the Mormon religion.

In summary then, Mormons who are raised with these values of pragmatic experimentation find themselves very easily at home in a body of literature where pragmatic experimentation is the norm.

And what pragmatic truth does this episode of BattleStar Galactica unfold to our view? (By the way - I heard asides from Card that he doesn’t like the overt references to Mormonism made in BattleStar Galactica - because the leaders of the 12 colonies are more like the 12 idiots.) When the human race is driven to near extinction by evil robots, abortion is not a good idea

I’m looking for people to form a group in the Provo/Orem (or even wider Utah) area which will work through the excellent creativity (and unblocking) workbook THE ARTIST’S WAY (cover pictured below). If you may be interested, please email me.

Also, I decked out a Creative Reference wiki page listing this and other very useful books.

The opening sequence to THE MATRIX is among the most beautiful art ever done with film and computers. I just found a Windows “screensaver” (imagery that appears on your computer monitor if you leave your machine idle for so many minutes) that emulates the very thing very well - on your computer.

I first tried the official screensaver released by Warner Bros. back in 1999 (Okay, has it been that long or longer since THE MATRIX? - I’m getting old..), and after that I tried three others - this one is far and away the best. It can emulate the opening sequence to THE MATRIX tracing a program to your phone number, calling on your name .. kinda eerie. Exceedingly cool. Change the speed, speed variation, font animation, line density, and color of the scrolling code also.

Caveat: almost predictably, you have to be a geek to install this thing. 1. It runs on windows (hmmm.. the platform on which most internetworked clients in the world are run?) 2. You have to know where your Windows install places the .scr, or screensaver files, and copy the file to that directory. On my Windows XP install, that is C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 - and then 3. You have to know where to change your screensaver.

I am attending the whole of Life, the Universe, and Everything at BYU (courtesy work vacation days). If you know who I am, perhaps I will be delighted to run into you.

The last time I attended was many, many years ago, and I asked David Farland (pen name for Wolverton - who commented here recently) a question. He had presented with other authors (Barbara Hume and Kevin J. Anderson) their recent works in the eternally expanding Star Wars literary universe. Afterwards - and I was quite young - I asked him this question:

“If a Star Trek fan is a Trekkie, what is a Star Wars fan?”

He stammered a bit and answered

“Uh.. I dunno, I guess a.. a ‘Warrie‘.”

That is an excellent answer

This excellent essay by Orson Scott Card (link) really gave me pause. Here’s that link again. If you are a Republican who goes along with common Republican reasoning on immigration, this may be a particularly relevant read. I have said some things at this blog about amnesty vs. naturalization which made basic assumptions that Card’s essay there turn on head. And I think he’s right.

There is not an essay in Orson Scott Card’s “World Watch” columns at ornery.org which I would not recommend - especially to avowed Democrats, because Card divides asunder the hypocrisies (such as in this essay) and off-the-wall illogic of the current Democratic party. It seems to me that most of the flurry toward Democratic candidates hinges on disgruntlement about the war. If that is the case for you, please read Card’s comments on that, also.

The Democrats use the word “withdrawal”, but they all know it’s a euphemism for surrender.

My previous entry gives reasons I could never support Clinton or Obama (because of their stance on partial birth abortion). Here are a few more reasons I wouldn’t support Obama: he has the most liberal record in the Senate. He is farther left than anyone else in the Senate. Also, his church swears to a creed of black nationalism. Here is one link about that (which points out Obama’s spiritual advisor affiliates with terrorists), and here is another. If sympathy for a position that simply returns the worst of white racism is your definition of spiritual, Obama is your man.

I’m the #1 google result (at the moment) for “richard dutcher nudity“!

Well.. I guess I’m honored, but insofar as I am aware, Richard hasn’t dropped his trousers for any photographer.  Sorry guys.   (Or should that be gals?)  Try some other name searches with that word.  You have a virtual world of options!

What a way to exit. I’m with him. He’s absolutely right to stand on the most important principle our nation is questioning - our survival. Michelle Malkin copies this transcript from the speech - and I copy it from her -

I disagree with Senator McCain on a number of issues…(audience boos) but I agree with him on doing whatever it takes to be successful in Iraq… And I agree with him on eliminating Al Aaeda… If I fight on in my campaign all the way to the convention, I want you to know that I forestall the launch of a national campaign.

Crowd: “NOOOOO!”

Frankly in this time of a war, I cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror. This isn’t an easy decision. I hate to lose. …Not just about me…I entered this race because I love America. I feel I have to now stand aside. We cannot allow the next President of the United States to retreat in the face of evil extremism.

Romney makes a rousing exit.

I like ALLAHPUNDIT’s questions:

What’s the best thing about this? The goodwill it’ll earn him among the party establishment for not dragging out the primary? The fond memory it creates in the mind of the base of a man willing to sacrifice his own ambition to support victory in Iraq? The venom it’ll draw from the left about him using the war as political cover for his own failure? Or the fact that it backs Huckabee into a corner by framing the continuation of his own campaign as effectively furthering the Democrats’ plans for withdrawal?

Bravo.

My sister made this LOLCat, I believe inspired by this oddball video of mine and/or my related t-shirt for it.

Yyech! Furball! It tastes like you got mixed up with another traveler! Dial again!