AAAaahhhhHHHH-CCHOOOOOOO!!!!

sometimes I love colorado. but right now I wish I was in washington...



This is a map of the pollen concentrations today

~T

woah

amazing breaking clip, really this crew has got to be one of the better I've seen.... I think this is from the "planet b-boy" documentary. Mostly I just like the clip.



~t

Igor Kenk

This guy is a damn punk. Glad they caught him.

Prolific bicycle thief arrested

~t

owie...

I finally figured out today why most people don't wear flip-flops while mountain biking. It has mostly to do, I think, with the fact that if you crash you run the risk of getting your feet cut up or mashed or whatever. Luckily (I suppose) I went the simple route and just removed some skin from the top of my foot. I was commuting home from my office on campus, and (as usual) was practicing wheelies and manuals and such, when I had to avoid a kid (freshman?)....

My front wheel slid out (once I had put it back on the ground... I know, 100% my fault) and so I found I was sliding along the ground in a kneeling position with my shin kind of tucked underneath me. At the end of the slide (My jeans left a 4 foot blue skid-mark on the concrete) I popped back up and hadn't even lost a flop... both were still in place, but I had managed to put holes in my last intact pair of jeans. I also put a few holes in myself but nothing worth complaining about. Darn kids ;p




(the lower right scab above my knee is from last week... the new ones are from today)
~t

ridge

~t

~t

Crested Butte

home safe and sound after a weekend of riding...
~t

Clouds

clouds during sunset Tuesday.

~t

HAHAHA

I hadn't seen this one yet... awesome!



~t

Color Tests

I tried to do an anaglyph using a color base... it works, but it's still a little hard to look at. The image itself (the overlain satellite image) is very low-res, things would probably look a lot better if I used a higher-quality image.



~t

Anaglyphs are awesome...

Today I was supposed to go into work and magically turn about 10 pages of notes (already typed) into about 5 pages of carefully sculpted prose with a scientific twist. That somehow failed to happen (again) so instead I learned how to generate 3D anaglyph images using expensive software (a commercial single-user node-locked Mac OS-X license for ENVI+IDL = $7000).

Yeah... that's SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS... seriously. I should note that since this software was developed by faculty in my department, I get that same license for twenty-five bucks.

Anyway, I finally figured out how to make totally-sweet 3D anaglyphs from my also-totally-sweet high resolution digital elevation model data of taiwan... essentially I hope to be including images like this in posters so that I can give a poster presentation in one of those crowded AGU aisles with a bunch of people standing around, all wearing goofy red-and-blue glasses. The image below is a south-looking view across high terraces in Puli. You will need a standard pair of 3D glasses to see this, or just something red and something cyan to look through. Red goes over your left eye.



~t

return of the kiddies

It's beginning. clueless adults with dazed-and-confused looks on their faces, children throwing tantrums and wishing their parents would just leave already... I speak of course, about the beginning of the fall semester. Along with the influx of something like twenty-thousand kids (I can say that, because many of them are ten years younger than I am) comes the heightened risks of commuting through town. Boulder, compared to a place like Manhattan, is bike-commuter heaven; many wide concrete paths wind through and around the perimeter of town, have painted lane markers and pass either under or over major roads. Bicycle-car interactions are minimized, but just as dangerous are the behaviours of uninitiated riders on the bike-paths. I have several friends who have suffered injury (broken collarbones, torn ankle ligaments, concussions) because of kids not knowing the rules of the paths, or just lacking common sense. I myself have found that some kids just home in on you like heat-seeking missiles; swerving directly into your lane, slamming on brakes in front of you, ultimately just doing everything in their power to bring about a head-on collision. That is why, this year, I feel very comfortable riding my 35 pound free-ride/downhill bike around town; it's a version of the compact-car/SUV crash model - The bigger vehicle wins. As the actual new-student arrival date approaches, I may start wearing my full-face helmet and body armor too... that way when some unwitting, unaware, foolish child swerves into my lane of the path I can offer a verbal warning but I am no longer going to swerve off the path, or risk my own injury to save them from the embarrassment of learning a lesson the hard way.

I regularly offer friendly advice to drivers in town... like when they pull in front of me across a bike-path I may whistle sharply and say, "hey, watch out for the bike path" or "please don't block the path". I generally assume that if a driver doesn't have a bike-rack on their car they don't know any better, so there's no need to curse and yell at them... most of the time. There are occasions when I wish I had something like a balloon full of honey or oil that I could lob, but maybe some of these magnets would be better.

It seems like biker/driver tensions are gaining momentum, but personally I just think more people are hearing about it... I have always been yelled at and harassed by drivers, regardless of where I was riding or what I was doing. Check out some good articles on the subject...

From BikesnobNYC, about a cop that should be strapped to a rusty bike-rack naked and flogged with an old inner-tube: NYPD assaults cyclist
...Or this one about the misadventures of commuting in a big city, And finally this from a more reputable source: The NY Times on Moving Targets.

~t

New professional contact

After about three years I've decided to actually put my contact information and some form of a CV up on my department webpage... the content isn't there yet, but the splash page should be. Check it out here first...



~t

spaceships and church...

see: "come on..." and "How stupid do you have to be?" for some background on this....

Reading back through some previous posts, and listening to some interesting talks about creativity in skool and what 'purpose' modern education serves (a valid question) I've come to realize, or perhaps merely posit, that organized religion is one of the last major stumbling blocks that human, global, society faces with respects to making the necessary steps to start exploring beyond our preconceived limits. The stars are one thing... is light-speed an attainable goal? what about superluminal travel (i.e. subspace or wormholes)?? Screw traveling to alpha-centauri... why can't we (humans) develop and disseminate electric cars? solar panels? wind-turbines? tide-turbines? geothermal exchangers? There exists so much calculable clout and solid design behind these ideas, it's literally a wonder these technologies haven't been globally shared and implemented already. ...but perhaps not so much a wonder when considering how much money stands to be made off prospects like drilling oil in Venezuela (which harbors some of the richest and most extensive, as yet untapped, oil reserves on the planet) or Alaska. ...or how much money the "big four" stand to make off their no-bid contracts in Iraq. It's disgusting, really.

I drive a car, whenever I need to transport more than 40 pounds of cargo. My car (a '96 VW golf) gets ~35mpg but I still feel lame driving it when I don't absolutely need to. It's a luxury; one that I feel privileged to have at my disposal, but a luxury none the less. If I had the money (or could cheat my way into it) I would quickly convert my golf, or buy a car like this one.

~t

Prophet, or perve?

"To my understanding the Koran does not place a limit and it is up to what your own power, your own endowment and ability allows," he says. - this from Mohammed Bello Abubakar, 84, of Nigeria.

This man has married 84 wives, and has sired "at least 170 children"....


WTF!?!!

The other thing that gets me:
"Every mealtime they cook three 12kg bags of rice which all adds up to $915 (£457) every day."

OK... I buy rice by the 12kg bag, and here in Boulder (admittedly one of the more expensive places to live within the united states) I pay a whopping $25 per bag. So, by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, I would pay 75 dollars for three 12kg bags, whereas this man spends almost a thousand??!! ...boy is he getting ripped off (or the BBC reporter for this particular article is WAY off in their reporting. Either way, I'm glad I (most likely) will never sire even a hundred children (actually, I'd hope to keep the total to no more than twice two orders of magnitude less than that!)

[nieerd!;]

~t