Wierd – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Sun Halo – May 4, 2011

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Spotted a halo around the sun on May 4th. I’ve seen them around a full moon before, but not around the sun. By obscuring the sun with my hand or my index finger I was able to shoot some reasonably good photos of the phenomenon.

22° halo is a halo, one type of optical phenomenon, forming a circle 22° around the sun, or occasionally the moon. It forms as sunlight is refracted in hexagonal ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. As the light beam passes through two sides of the prism forming a 60° angle, the angle of minimum deviation is almost 22° (namely, 21.84° on average; 21.54° for red and 22.37° for blue). This wavelength-dependent variation in refraction causes the inner edge of the circle to be reddish while the outer edge is bluish.

Diorarium

When I picked Cynthia up from work on Monday she was carrying an empty 40oz plastic pretzel jar. I asked her what it was for and she proudly announced that she was going to make a terrarium out of it.

As we drove home we talked about the project and I suggested getting a lizard to put in the terrarium. She suggested a frog. We both quickly recognized that this was a recipe for disaster. I then suggested a fake plastic lizard or frog. Cynthia didn’t really like that idea so much and as the conversation unfolded she came up with the idea of staging a diorama of an alien spaceship abducting someone in the woods. I countered that maybe it should be a diorama of an alien spaceship abducting a cow.

Cynthia liked this idea. I said we could call it a “diorarium” (pronounced die-a-rare-ee-um) to which Cynthia immediately said “no” due to the unpleasantness of how the word sounded.

I told her I had a perfect UFO in the form of a die cast model of the Jupiter II from the original Lost In Space TV series. I also suggested we could probably find some plastic cows at the toy store.

As the plan unfolded we I came up with the idea that we could go to the model shop where I was sure we could find some N Scale cows used for scenery in model railroading. They ended up having the PERFECT cows.

Then it was just a matter of getting the plants, the soil, activated carbon and gravel to build the terrarium part of the diorarium (by day two Cynthia embraced this as the name of what we were creating).

With all the parts assembled we had to figure out how to suspend the spaceship and the cow being abducted. I went to the hardware store and purchased some monofilament fishing line which ended up being perfect.

If it works as it is supposed to we should not have to open it or water it again, or at least for a very long time.

Here is the completed project. As it turns out, photographing a fake UFO abducting a fake cow inside a plastic jar presents many of the same challenges as photographing the real thing. If the real thing actually exists. Which it probably does. (shhhh!)

Arc Attack

The main thing I wanted to see at the Gloworama event was one of the performances by Arc Attack. Imagine two custom engineered hand built Tesla Coils that throw out electrical arcs up to twelve feet long, each one acting as an instrument with a sound reminiscent of the early days of the synthesizer. Each “arc” of electricity carries the sound of the music. During the show, the MC engages both the crowd and the Tesla Coils by walking through ½ Million Volt sparks wearing a chainmail Faraday suit. Spectacular!

Arc Attack

And if that’s not enough, after the MC does his thing a guy in another Farady suit comes out with a modified electric guitar that plays through the singing Tesla Coils

Arc Attack

This was a challenge to photograph. I used my vintage Minolta 35/2 lens to capture the action and I am pretty pleased with the results.

Shiny Euros

We have received our travelin’ Euros for the upcoming trip. I love the colour of European money. The holograms are so pretty. It’s like play money in that it doesn’t look real, but it also evokes the passion I associate with travel. Having Euros in hand makes the whole thing more “real”, if that makes any sense.

Of course, being the shutterbug I am, I wanted to photograph the bills as a matter of course so I played with different configurations and ended up with the above shot.

When I had finished procressing the RAW file and went to open it in Photoshop CS3, the strangest thing happened. This message popped up saying “”This Application Does Not Support the Printing of Banknote Images”:

In doing some research, this seems to be the same for the new American bills that were recently issued.

What stikes me is that this is not a scan of the Euro notes. It’s a photograph and it doesn’t even include a complete, unobscured bill in the photo. Yet Photoshop recognized the content of the image and produced that warning and, presumably, will not print it in the unaltered form.

It only let me save the oringinal file as PNG and I have not tried to print it.

Technology is cool!

Uh…

Found @ Walmart Canada.

*EDIT*

To be fair, this was likely accomplished by manipulating the image ID in the URL and was never posted like this on the actual Walmart site. Still, bad webmastering exploited in such a manner is rather humorous. Much like when someone hotlinks to your hosted image and you just swap the image for something more “interesting.”

It does appear that Walmart is trying to fix the bug.

Who are you to resist?

A Message From Clear Channel Communications

*Photo by Jennifer Lynn

Vandalism? Art? Who knows. Evidence suggests that the billboard modification was performed by someone who goes by the moniker give up.

Wake n’ Bacon

Via mathlete.com

What: An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.

WHY: No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon, just like waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of Mom cooking breakfast. Unless you’re Jewish.

HOW: A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n’ Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.

Nice Pants

New Flint Police Chief David Dicks orders police to crack down on sagging pants

I only recently learned that the sagging pants phenomenon has it’s origins in the American penal system. Prisoners combined one size fits all pants with the “no belts” policy of prisons to come up with this little bit of gangster chic.

The resulting “sagging pants” look was later adopted by the rap/hip-hop community as a way to enhance street cred and, I suspect, as a means of “keeping it real, yo” …

Personally, when I see some young person walking around, struggling to keep his pants on I am not thinking “gangsta” … more like “idiot.”

I’m much more “old school” about my trousers and I obviously had MUCH better taste in pants when I was young.

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