Spanish lawmaker ‘angered’ his photo used for Osama bin Laden poster

 dumbassery  12 Responses »
Jan 172010
 

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/01/16/2010-01-16_spanish_lawmaker.html

A Spanish lawmaker was stunned and horrified to find out that the FBI used his photograph as part of a digitally enhanced image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today.

Gaspar Llamazares of the United Left party said he would no longer feel safe traveling to the United States after his hair and facial wrinkles appeared on a wanted poster updating the U.S. government’s 1998 photo of the al-Qaeda leader.

What Gaspar looks like, unmodified:


At first I saw his point. But then I read this:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100116/tts-uk-spain-politician-binladen-ca02f96.html

LLamazares is a former leader of Spain’s communist party Izquierda Unida and is currently its parliamentary spokesman.

Suddenly my ability to give a damn has evaporated.

Next time if you want to complain about being used… try not being a Communist.

commiesamahair.jpg

 Posted by at 1:32 am

Astrophotography: new and improved

 awesomeness, cats, photography  4 Responses »
Jan 172010
 

One of the things awaiting my return was a new 55mm f/1.4 lens for my D5000. The advantage of this lens is the low “f number,” which means that it has a large aperture, which means that it gathers a lot of light, which means that it can take low-light photos. More relevantly to me, it can take photos of the night sky with a much shorter exposure than my existing lenses… which means, in the absence of a motorized equatorial mount, much less “streaking” of stars.

Tonight I tested it out for the first time. Sadly, it’s pretty hazy out there, but it’s good enough for some preliminary tests. Here, for example, is Orion with a 2 second exposure and an ISO of 3200:

dsc_1728.jpg

Even with the haze, it’s pretty spiffy.

Something I’ve wanted for a long time (for reasons which seem good to me) is a good, clear photo showing Orion and the Pleiades together. While I’ll certainly do this again on a darker, less hazy night, this still came out pretty damn well (some brightness & contrast tweaking to get rid of the haze):

2010-01-16-pano-1a.jpg

My guess is that the haze is responsible for the large, blobby appearance of the brighter stars.

As a bonus, here are some shots of Koshka taken with the same lens, in relatively dark rooms and no flash. Without this lens, these’d be pretty dark. One of the effects of low f-number is that the depth of field is pretty small. Outside of a narrow band of distance from the camera, things get blurry pretty fast.

dsc_1701.jpg  dsc_1706.jpg  dsc_1715.jpg

 Posted by at 12:09 am

Ungrateful little bastards

 blather, cats, Gah.  8 Responses »
Jan 162010
 

As the keener minds may be able to surmise, I have returned home from my most recent travels. After collapsing in a heap for an inadequate night’s sleep, today I had to go out and Do Stuff. Some of it was obvious… get mail, groceries, cat from neighbors, etc. Some less so. Take, for example, the requirement to visit Home Depot.

At the begining of the 2008/09 winter, I decided to be A Hell Of A Nice Guy for the cats living outside. To that end, I cut a cat-sized hole in the side of the big steel workshop. Inside, I built a large (about 4 foot cube) “room” out of drywall, and lined it with old blankets and such. The result was what I called either the “catlock” or the “cat house,” depending on which neurons were firing at the moment. Thus the outside cats could come into a portion of the shop during the worst of the winter, curl up in the dry and not freeze to death.

The catlock served perfectly well for over a year. However, imagine my joy upon finding out that apparently it wasn’t big enough… one or more of them *chewed* through the drywall, making a cat-sized hole, and creating complete access to the workshop for the whole clan.

Did they cause a ruckus in the shop? Yes, they did.

Did they find the large bag of dry catfood and eat *all* of it? Yes, they did.

Did they crap all over? YES, THEY DID.

Gah.

So, I’ve procured a large shelving unit (24 inches deep by 36 wide, 72 inches high) and some 2X4 sheets of half inch plywood. With this I’ll make another, hopefully sturdier, catlock using the bottom two levels of the unit. A hole will be cut in one shelf to allow for upward and downward travel, and the plywood will be bolted to the sides.

And at some point, I’ll have to bring in a back hoe and do cat crap cleanup.

 Posted by at 8:04 pm

˙˙˙uıɐƃɐ oƃ ǝʍ ǝɹǝɥ ‘ןןǝʍ

 blather, news  10 Responses »
Jan 142010
 

˙snoɹʇsɐsıp ǝq pןnoɔ ‘pooƃ ǝq pןnoɔ ˙ǝɹoɟǝq uǝʞɐʇ ɹǝʌǝu ǝʌ’ı ǝʇnoɹ ɐ ʎq ʇnq ‘ǝɹoɟǝq uǝǝq ǝʌ’ı ǝɹǝɥʍǝɯos ƃuıoƃ ˙os ɹo sʞǝǝʍ oʍʇ ɹoɟ ʇɐɥʍǝɯos pǝןıɐʇɹnɔ ǝq ʎןǝʞıן ןןıʍ sǝıʇıʌıʇɔɐ ƃuıƃƃoןq & ǝuıןuo ʎɯ ‘ʇɥƃıuoʇ ǝʇɐן ƃuıʇɹɐʇs

 Posted by at 12:36 pm

“From RAINBOW to GUSTO:” A-3 Variant

 aircraft, drawings, projects, RAINBOW to GUSTO  4 Responses »
Jan 142010
 

Twelfth in the series of reconstructed drawings from Paul Suhler’s book “From RAINBOW to GUSTO.” This is the A-3 variant as drawn by Dan Zuck. This is Figure 62(c). This particular drawing has a Source Grade of four:

a-3w_small.gif

“RAINBOW to GUSTO” is available from Amazon.com (for $39.95) and direct from the AIAA ($29.95 for AIAA members).

To download the high-rez version of the A-3 variant drawing, simply click THIS LINK. You will be prompted for a username and a password. For the A-3 variant drawing, use these:

Username: the FIRST word in the body of the text on page 114

Password: the LAST word in the body of the text on page 114

(Remember: Case Sensitive!)

Up next: Figure 623, Final A-3 configuration

 Posted by at 12:33 pm

Hubble photographs grand design spiral galaxy M81

 awesomeness, photography, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jan 142010
 

 http://spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0710a.html

The sharpest image ever taken of the large “grand design” spiral galaxy M81 is being released today at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii.
A spiral-shaped system of stars, dust, and gas clouds, the galaxy’s arms wind all the way down into the nucleus. Though the galaxy is located 11.6 million light-years away, the Hubble Space Telescope’s view is so sharp that it can resolve individual stars, along with open star clusters, globular star clusters, and even glowing regions of fluorescent gas. The Hubble data was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 through 2006. This colour composite was assembled from images taken in blue, visible, and infrared light.

Neato!

Now, here’s the downside:

Fullsize Original
706,082 KB

There are, fortunately, some smaller versions also available.

 Posted by at 10:11 am

The best books that you – and everyone else – will never read

 awesomeness, blather, humor  1 Response »
Jan 132010
 

This list was certainly worth reading:

7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World

While snarky and profane, it’s stilla  good summary of many of the books that we know once existed, but exist no longer. To me, the loss of “On Sphere Making” by Archimedes is one of the greatest losses. While it would certainly be nice to have the other six volumes of the “Epic Cycle” (the two extant being the Illiad and the Odyssey), “On Sphere Making” could have sped up the industrial revolution by a millenium or more had it been known and read.

 Posted by at 11:27 am
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