Archive for March, 2010

The Walrus

The BBC on Walruses:

The wal­rus (Odobenus ros­marus) is a large flip­pered marine mam­mal with a dis­con­tin­u­ous cir­cum­po­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion in the Arctic Ocean and sub-Arctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. The wal­rus is the only liv­ing species in the Odobenidae fam­ily and Odobenus genus. It is sub­di­vided into three sub­species: the Atlantic Walrus (O. ros­marus ros­marus) found in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Walrus (O. ros­marus diver­gens) found in the Pacific Ocean, and O. ros­marus laptevi, found in the Laptev Sea.”

Note how the plural of “Walrus” is in fact “Walruses” and not “Walri”. This is because the word has mod­ern ger­manic roots and not clas­si­cal latin.

And now, the Walrus of Space:

Walrus

The Walrus of Space

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also: The Whale of Time.

 

John Travolta, Ducks

Anatideaphobia:

Anatidaephobia is defined as a per­va­sive, irra­tional fear that one is being watched by a duck. The anati­dae­pho­bic indi­vid­ual fears that no mat­ter where they are or what they are doing, a duck watches. Anatidaephobia is derived from the Greek word “anati­dae”, mean­ing ducks, geese or swans and “pho­bos” mean­ing fear.”

Now feast your eyes on this:

DUCK

A duck play­ing in a saucer of milk, painted with 2 red stripes, car­ry­ing a mars bar in one of its wings, with a man of 56years old watch­ing him.

 

Whales

Encyclopedia Britannica on Blue Whales:

The most mas­sive ani­mal ever to have lived, a species of baleen whale that weighs approx­i­mately 150 tons and may attain a length of more than 30 metres (98 feet). The largest accu­rately mea­sured blue whale was a 29.5-metre female that weighed 180 met­ric tons (nearly 200 short [U.S.] tons), but there are reports of 33-metre catches that may have reached 200 met­ric tons. The heart of one blue whale was recorded at nearly 700 kg (about 1,500 pounds).”

The Whale of Time is the mas­ter of time as we per­ceive it. It swims in the sea of con­tin­uüm and is mar­ried to the Walrus of Space.

The Whale of Time

The Whale of Time. He wears a monocle

 

Using Hugin for stitching panoramas

Hugin isn’t any­thing new, but I’ve only just tried it for the first time today and I have to say I’m very impressed. The process of cre­at­ing a panorama with Hugin is beau­ti­fully sim­ple and quite straight for­ward. It involves load­ing pairs of images and spec­i­fy­ing points that ought to match up. That’s about it, Hugin then does it’s best to align the images accord­ing to your lens’s hor­i­zon­tal field of view angle and the points you spec­i­fied, and allows you to crop the resul­tant image.

And what’s won­der­ful about this project is that it’s open source. There’s a ton more options to cus­tomise how it han­dles your images, and even a com­mand line util­ity. All in all, a great piece of soft­ware. I’m plan­ning on exper­i­ment­ing with PTGUI too, which is based on the same library, Panorama Tools.

NYC Panorama

Panorama of New York from the top of the Rockafeller Centre

 

Drugs.

Who’s” means “Who is” or in some instances “Who has”. If you would like to indi­cate pos­ses­sion of some­thing by some­one described in a sen­tence as “Who”, the cor­rect word is “Whose”.

In the mean­time, enjoy this draw­ing about drugs.

eat my drugs

I don’t know.

 

In your FACE!

Seeing as though one of the rea­sons I decided to take the plunge and start a per­sonal blog was to start doing more cre­ative stuff for the sake of it, I am now going to try and do at least 1 sketch every week and post it on here. More often than not, it will be pretty ran­dom in it’s sub­ject, that’s just me.

This is for you:

Scarf

in your FACE society!

 

DIYDSLRPHC (DIY DSLR Pinhole Camera)

stella bottle pinhole photo

I’ve always been inter­ested in pin­hole pho­tog­ra­phy, but the process in the tra­di­tional sense (with 35mm film) has always put me off … for what it’s worth, it’s quite a lengthy and tedious process!

Then I noticed the body cap for my SLR, and thought “hey, if I could put a really small hole in the cen­ter of that then I’ve got a pin­hole camera!”

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