Erik’s Blog

Today I was accidentally plagiarized by one of my blogging heroes, Phil Plait, keeper of the Bad Astronomy blog. He wrote a post titled “How far away is the horizon?” in which he goes about explaining how to calculate the distance to the horizon given your altitude above Earth. His methods are slightly different, but his diagram and data almost exactly match my “Distance To The Horizon” post from last March. When confronted about it, he said,

Holy cow. Mine really *is* similar to yours. I swear, I never saw it. I even searched to see if someone else had done this before! Great minds, I guess.

I believe him, of course. Even accidental imitation is a form of flattery.

I still like my post better because I calculate the distance along the surface of the ground and I include a handy javascript calculator rather than a lookup table. Plus, mine has actually been put to good use calculating the distance from Sarah Palin’s house to Russia!

At no point in the process of creating this image did I realize what it would be in the end. All I knew when I started was that I felt like doing some Photoshopping. Struggling to come up with an idea, I was staring at some of the objects on my desk and two caught my eye, a gemstone globe and a miniature ceramic chipmunk. I’d already done the "creature standing on the globe" trick with the BITWRATHPLOOB blog header, but nothing else was coming to me. So I held the globe out at arm’s length, focused on the chipmunk, and snapped a picture. Once imported into Photoshop, I cut out background and removed some of the background reflection from the globe’s surface. At this point, it was clear that I needed a star field, so I found a Photoshop tutorial to generate one. As soon as I put the globe and chipmunk in the foreground, the text that was needed popped into my head, and I knew my creation was complete.
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When I worked for a government institution twelve years ago, I recall that there were some bigwigs that worked there that had their secretaries print out every email they received and place it on their desk as if letters had arrived. I presume they would dictate responses. I was always amazed at such a fundamental misunderstanding of what electronic mail is about. But it was 1996 and every web page still used the <center> tag, so I forgive them.
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There is a certain video making its round through every news program on the planet, and doing pretty well on the internet too, of an Iraqi journalist launching two shoes towards President Bush’s face. Not only is the video pretty funny, but it’s hugely symbolic for the failure of Bush’s presidency. I think that everyone who has seen it has probably been impressed by old Dubya’s evasive maneuvers. It’s like he’s been practicing dodgeball on the White House lawn or something.

It occurs to me that the internet is ripe for any parody videos involving flying shoes. If I had any video special effects skills beyond iMovie, I would make one myself. The best idea I’ve come up with is a parody of The Matrix. There are two scenes to choose from. Either President Bush bends back until his torso is parallel to the ground, arms flailing, as time slows and we see the shoes fly past in slow motion. Or we go with the scene at the end of the movie and Bush simply holds out his hand and the shoes slow down, stop in mid air, and fall to the ground.

A good viral video idea is worth thousands of dollars. All you need to make it an advertisement is for Bush to take a sip of some beverage either before or after the action, or for the shoes to have a logo on them as they fly by in slow motion.

C’mon, Internet! Get to work!

Right at bedtime, I came across Lawrence Lessig being interviewed on Charlie Rose, went to his blip.tv site, and got caught up watching this hour-long video about copyright and creativity sharing. I’ve seen some videos of Lessig online before, and possibly a TED talk. But this video perfectly demonstrates his arguments and the values he’s promoting. It really is worth watching. But save 60 minutes to do so.
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The intelligence and creativity of people that create successful viral internet memes amaze me sometimes. In this case, it’s those clever liberals over at moveon.org. What a clever, clever idea!
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The Groups feature on Flickr, along with photo tagging, is what makes Flickr so interesting and better than other photo sharing websites. The structure is wide open. Anyone can start a group, and anyone can add any photo to any group. And, importantly, the group administrator (the person that started the group and anyone the creator deems worthy of administrative rights) can remove any photo from the group. So what you get are groups about certain topics, e.g. flowers, clouds, reflections, west highland terriers, horses, rusty things, door knobs, etc. If you upload a photo to Flickr that fits into one of those groups, you can join that group and add your photo to it. The point being that other Flickr users that like photographs of said subjects can find lots of photos from many different uploaders about that topic.
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I always sort of knew it was only a matter of time, with me so humbly submitting photos of such outstanding quality to Flickr, before I would be offered money for some of my work. Well, it finally happened. I signed over some rights to Panraven, Inc. to use ten of my photos on their website. To me, "Panraven" sounds like a Pentagon operation that you’re not supposed to know about, but from what I can tell without signing up with them, they seem to provide a way for people to write up stories about their travels to various corners of the globe and provide a stock library of photos from common tourist destinations for people to include in their write-ups.

It all began back in September, when I received the following standardized Flickr message: (more…)

I have submitted several of my own blog posts to Digg over the years. The ones I think are particularly clever (The Solution to Iraq), or funny (McCain-Palin Morph), or useful (Widgetize Anything), or artistic (Desk Traffic), or nerdy (Distance to Horizon), or political (Can Sarah Palin really see Russia from her house?), or satirical (Spain Discovers Mars). Most of those received between one and three diggs. My record was 12.
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I was absolutely amazed today to discover that no one out there in the tube system has yet created a video morphing the faces of John McCain and Sarah Palin. How could this be? As someone who possesses the technology, skill, and crazy necessary to create such a video, I felt it was clearly my civic duty to fill this important void in presidential politics. Thus, I have created and posted a video morphing John McCain and Sarah Palin.

With no further ado, I present to you the bastard lovechild of the Republican presidential ticket… (more…)