Over the past weekend, I took three different timelapse videos of my flowering cactus over three separate evenings. The results are quite lovely. Each frame was captured as a 5.7 MiB, 1944×1296 pixel, “small RAW” file, I sized them down to the maximum HDTV dimensions of 1920×1080 before loading them into iMovie. [...]

Now this is a timelapse flower movie! Four hours and thirteen minutes, one photograph every minute. I’m so pleased with the result! The animation is smooth and perfectly captures nature’s beauty. What’s rather amazing is that there is motion between every single frame. The cactus never spent a full minute [...]

Not even humor is safe from analysis by those pesky evolutionary biologists. Apparently sarcasm is an evolutionary survival skill. Well that explains a lot!
It’s easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy [...]

Those of you that follow my blog regularly know that I have somewhat of a fascination with timelapse videos and that I live in a town with a huge tidal basin that fills and empties with water twice a day in one of the locations on Earth with the largest difference between low and high [...]

Last Saturday, I was looking out the window at the full moon and noticed another unusually bright celestial object near it. Curious what it might be, I dashed to the computer to fire up Stellarium, the quickest way to identify objects in the night sky. It turned out that the bright object I [...]

Only recently have we had to buy eggs for the first time in Spain. That’s because my father-in-law’s hens are producing very few lately, apparently unaware of what fate awaits them if production ceases. But we still get some from him, but this is a first. It has got to be the [...]

I was really tired after coming back home from the in-laws’ on Sunday, so I went to bed at 10pm, disappointed that I wouldn’t get to witness the landing of the Phoenix spacecraft on Mars at 2am, Spain time. But then I woke up at 1am and couldn’t resist getting up to tune into [...]

Last night, I took a timelapse video of the waning gibbous moon rising in the night sky using my usual method. Unfortunately the focus was a little off. Apparently “infinity” focus was inappropriate.
The moon was accompanied on its celestial journey last night by Antares, the 16th brightest star in the night sky, only [...]

It might not be possible to have too much fun, but it’s definitely possible to have to much Phun. Phun is a “2D physics sandbox”. What that means is that it allows you to draw shapes (circles, squares, or arbitrary freehand shapes) and then lets you bang them together using simulated physics laws. [...]

A few Christmases ago, my parents gave me a Crookes radiometer. Although I did not know the official name of the device, I had first learned about them watching Mr. Wizard, and had later seen some in science classrooms during my jaunt through the public school system. The explanation I was always given [...]