David Gessel
March 1997?
What happened in March of 1997?
- March 4 – U.S. President Bill Clinton bars federal funding for any research on human cloning.
- March 6 – President of Guyana Cheddi Jagan dies in office.
- March 6 – Pablo Picasso‘s Tête de Femme is stolen from a London gallery (recovered a week later).
- March 6 – In Sri Lanka, Tamil Tigers overrun a military base and kill more than 200.
- March 11 – An explosion at the Tokaimura nuclear waste reprocessing plant in Japan exposes 35 workers to low-level radioactive contamination, in the worst nuclear accident in Japan’s history.
- March 13 – India‘s Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
- March 13 – The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China creates a new Chongqing Municipality, out of part of Sichuan.
- March 13 – The Phoenix Lights are seen over Phoenix, AZ.
- March 16 – Sandline affair: On Bougainville Island, soldiers of commander Jerry Singirok arrest Tim Spicer and his mercenaries of the Sandline International.
- March 18 – The tail of a Russian An-24 charter plane breaks off while en-route to Turkey, causing the plane to crash, killing all 50 on board, and resulting in the grounding of all An-24s.
- March 21 – In Zaire, Etienne Tshiksekedi is appointed prime minister; he ejects supporters of Mobutu Sese Seko from his cabinet.
- March 21 – Mercenaries of Sandline International withdraw from Papua New Guinea.
- March 22 – Tara Lipinski, 14, becomes the youngest women’s world figure skating champion.
- March 22 – The Comet Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth.
- March 24 – The 69th Academy Awards, hosted by Billy Crystal, are held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with The English Patient winning Best Picture.
- March 26 – In San Diego, California, 39 Heaven’s Gate cultists commit mass suicide at their compound.
- March 26 – Julius Chan resigns as prime minister of Papua New Guinea, ending the Sandline affair.
Nom Nom Leg
I came home to find that Tortuga, one of the stray cats that’s adopted us, had developed a nice open wound on her forelimb. When I left two weeks ago it was a bit swollen, presumably abscessed, and then drained. I’m sure it was really gross. Anyway, the cat just couldn’t get enough licking that yummy puss and had turned the wound into a nice open sore.
The vet gave me some antibiotics and antiseptic cleaning solution and this lovely and stylish Elizabethan collar that Tortuga clearly just loves to wear. Her thought bubble probably reads something like “once this collar comes off and I can get my teeth around your neck, you better sleep lightly.”
OMG kitten Mittons are real!
Not just an Always Sunny in Philadelphia joke anymore!
HDR video with SLRs
HDR is kind of cool – a nice way to get past the limitations of solid-state image sensors and recover some of the latitude of film, even improving on it.
The problem is that solid state image sensors tend to have very linear responses to light – an underexposed image vanishes into the noise floor of the sensor while an overexposed image clips off to pure white. Film exposure response is commonly called an “s-curve” and basically means there’s some data in the random conversion of a light sensitive molecule here or there even in the most underexposed image, and a few that resist converting under the harshest blast of light such that there is perceivable data in both.
This film is a pretty impressive example of HDR video. But there’s something a bit odd about such a technical achievement in cinematography mixing up “underexposed” and “overexposed.” The funny thing is, they’re using the terms as in making a print (e.g. printing on photo paper) or an x-ray where more light darkens the print: the paper starts out white and turns black with more light vs. a film or digital exposure where the media yields a black result that increases in representational lightness with with increasing light exposure.
Chico and Rita
TFF 37 Mini Review: Chico and Rita, Spain-Cuba, 2010, 96m
Chico and Rita is an animated story of a talented Cuban jazz pianist named Chico and the love of his life, the talented singer Rita. They chase each other across the Americas and across the decades, overcoming personal and political barriers to their marital bliss. The director went to significant effort to stylistically match the period in geography, dress, and music. The movie’s soundtrack is filled out by performers such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Practical Santa Monica Car
Seems to be a real mil unit or model thereof, up-armored looking windows but the unarmored coily cable to the turret looks dubious. I bet people reflexively yield.
A week of tweets: 2010-09-05
- Oddly, LAX seems to limit cab arrival frequency to about 0.005 Hz #
ACTA: Alliance for Covert Totalitarian Action
ACTA is apparently going into force this month, implementing still secret rules that will make everyone with an internet connection an international criminal in order to protect people with obsolete business models. Since the cost and value of publication, editorial review, and syndication have dropped to near zero thanks to the invention of broad direct distribution, the “recording” industry is obsolete. Why do we need an industry to make records when nobody buys records any more? The industry has changed business plans to extortion.
But the recording industry has historically made a lot of money and people with money hate giving it up and won’t do so without a fight. If the population won’t buy the recording industry’s products any more, choosing instead to shoulder the incremental cost of self-publication in a collaborative model, then the recording industry, naturally, turns to increasingly draconian efforts to preserve their revenue stream. It is far more cost-effective to co-opt the government and exploit public-funded investigatory and prosecutorial resources than to, say, pay private security to break into people’s houses and businesses: as a bonus working though the courts they can seize children’s college funds: keeping kids out of school means they won’t grow up to found competing industries. If there’s nobody left capable of innovating, there’s no point in the government enforcing that obsolete constitutional thing about “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.”
Peer-to-peer communications and especially self-publication technologies have always been a threat to the copyright industry. The DMCA was a huge victory for a dead industry and helped preserve it well beyond any economic utility at a tremendous cost to innovation and progress. But the copyright industry may still win a losing battle by shifting the cost of prosecuting civil infringement to the public and other industries by creating a new class of crime: not optimizing copyright industry profits.
Fight ACTA
https://www.eff.org/issues/acta
A week of tweets: 2010-08-29
- Congratulations Dr. Bill! #
- Small earthquake in Santa Monica just now. #
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/ci/10785197/us/index.html I love the did you feel it game. They should reward firsties. #
- Stored fare smart cards on a flat rate transit system are waste paper generators. Reusable tokens rule, charlie card drools. #
- interval research strikes from the grave! http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_15917028?source=rss&nclick_check=1 #
Tarmac BBQ
This is very cool. Some very nice late summer employee appreciation.
