Thursday Sophie and I drove up to mill creek to go play-boating. It was running at 318 cfs. Brian had lab, so did not rent a boat, but then his lab ended early and he ran up to swap in for me for a little bit. No swimmers, and everyone hit a combat roll. I managed two spins, a first for me. (i learned to play-boat in holes).
Still mulling them over, but the jokers will likely look something like this: And now the Black Joker:
I have been meaning to do this for a while, with out making the time to, so i am procrastination writing up the proofs due tomorrow to do this. While sitting at the monastery, i would count my exhalations (usually up to ten and then restarting). The first distraction was usually something along the lines of 1,2,3,4 (oh that's square), 5 (oh that's prime) 6 (oh that's perfect, wait is it, yes it is.... ) and so on and so forth. below are the thoughts/questions that this led to. Were i know the answers I have posted them. the top part is pointing out that 7,8,9 are a consecutive prime, cube and then square, and wondering how many more such triplets exist. then i wonder how many primes of the form x, x+2, x+6, x+8 exist. For example 11,13,17,19 and 101,103,107,109. Kind of like the twins prime conjecture. the question posed is how many triplets of the kind square,prime,perfect number are there. (perfect means the factors add to the number) Here I find a rather obvious pattern for the difference of cubes. (although i did manage it in my head...) I then point out the (n-1)th derivative of (x+1)^n-(x^n)=n!.(i think... with out proof, perhaps later, or an exercise for the reader) The top is just some observations on prime density... didn't go any were, except to note that the max is 4. (easy proof). then the factorial stuff is finding the number of permutations for the cellphone lock that has those 9 circles in a square connected by the user. I was stuck on this problem for a while, i think because i was thinking about it geometrically. I think the above is right, but am not certain. I also owe some credit to Alec, Kevin, and Louis for that last part b/c much to their frustration they helped me work it out.
I briefly wonder and then solve how to prove there are an infinite number of primes if we consider one to be prime. An exclusion i always thought arbitrary. (although thinking about it now it might be needed for the uniqueness portion of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.) Lastly i wonder if the simple pattern finding technique that I (we all?) used in grade school will always work. (that is given a indexed list of integers find the difference b/w each step, then the difference b/w those then repeat until it spits out a constant). The question being is there a function with multiple integer pairs such that it never has a constant derivative. The answer is yes, namely multiplicative patters, like 10^x. please always call it research: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E Staying at the Zen Monastery:
The short of it is that I really enjoyed my stay, except for the lack of sleep. We had very short nightly ritual at in the kitchen at 9pm, and the wake up bell was rung at 4am. Hence a theoretical maximum of 7 hours of sleep, which in practice was more like 6.25 to 6.5 hours. I was also arriving after waking up at 4am? (in the dark 30) to catch my flight. As I continue to find out, I get and am therefore accustomed to more sleep then the majority of my peers (everyone I know except my roommate). Unless traveling or pulling an all-nighter for social reasons (last night of; camp or HMI) I get 8 hours, usually 9. Hence this last week was rough. A typical day went like this: -Wake up at 4am -Put away sleeping pads and bag, put on all of my warm clothing. (3 wool layers and a down jacket, because not hats or socks allowed in zendo, which was at 55 degrees?) -enter Zendo around 4:25 -4:30 start chanting, monotone repetition of sutras in English or transliterated from Sanskrit to Chinese to Japanese to English. Some repeated many times, like 33. -5am, exercise period, static and dynamic stretches. Light-yoga. -walking meditation, walk laps, half inside and half outside the Zendo. -sit Zazen for 50 minutes, divided in two 25 minute sessions with a break to change positions. -immediately to pre-breakfast chanting about 5 min -formal breakfast -its now about 8am, everyone helps clean from formal breakfast -now we (Kevin, Alec Louis and I) clean the Zendo -have about 20 minutes of free time -8:45 meet to do some outside manual labor, while (supposedly) meditating. I have forgotten the Japanese term. -10am or a little latter meet for morning Tea/snacks, called Sorry. -after Sorry do more manuel labor, until 11:45 -clean up -12pm, formal lunch -everyone helps clean -ends around 12:50, then free until 2pm, usually try and nap now -2pm talk with head monk about zen/monastic life. I know his name but would spell it horribly wrong. -3:15-5:00 free time. More napping or explore the woods behind the monastery, go canoeing on the pond. -5:00pm informal dinner. Microwave leftovers, eat anything. -6:25 enter zendo -6:30-8:30 sit Zazen, four 25-30 minute sessions, with a walking session for 5 minutes half way in between. Besides the physical pain of sitting (ideally perfectly still) for 25 minutes sitting was enjoyable, and I plan to continue it in the mornings and evenings for (hopefully) 10 minutes. The problem was that the morning sit decayed drastically. I would end up between each breath falling asleep, starting to fall over from sitting, and jerking awake. Then repeating this for 20 or 25 minutes. At that hour of the morning my clock dependent alerting was really low, and I was already heavily sleep deprived. After the morning Zazen, my day improved drastically. Once I learned how the formal meals went and memorized the sutras well enough they were enjoyable. Find a link that shows/explains a formal meal or own explanation. Then working outside I have always enjoyed, so planting trees, or taking down fences was fun. Sorry also enjoyable, especially at enso house. Enso house is a hospice center, right next door to Tahoma. (the monastery). Sitting down with the same people at every meal or Tea time and talking with them was really great, and if fostered a sense of community. As would be expected people who have been practicing Zen for a long time consistently are really kind, and tend to b have interesting stories. although this does not contain the promised panorama, a one or two small ones are on the way. I have spent about 20 hours in the art bulding in the last few days... and it seems i did not turn of I bought paper today, finished the spades and hearts, and have all of the photos ready and cropped for the clubs. I have 17 cropped and edited candidates for the diamonds. Now I am stuck on the theme/ idea for the jokers. If there was only one I would just do a self portrait...
Since I struggled to find any good tutorials on how to use Hugin (a good free stitching program), I posting here what i finally made work for me. Ideally shoot images on a tripod, especially if using a wide-angle lens. (use manual mode and shoot every image with the same shutter speed, aperture, focus point, white balance…) Then import photos into lightroom and apply the lens profile corrections, and increase the clarity slightly on all of the images. (to say 25 or 30) Increasing the sharpness on all the images might also help Hugin. Sync the developed settings among all of the images. Then export them all into a folder as JPEGs. Open all of the images in Hugin, and click; align. Hugin will think for 20 minutes to an hour. Then it will say something like: images are connected by ummmph thousand control points mean error after optimization is 20-30 pixels, very bad fit… Ecetera bad news. What happened is that Hugin created a ton of control points some of which are wrong. The less time/effort way to get a good output from here is to just delete the ones that are bad. You can do this in several ways, in order from the least time consuming and potentially least effective to most time consuming and potentially most effective. (it also possible to create control points by hand, but for many images panoramas that is not fun.) After each of these steps (which can be done incrementally and repeated) you should run the optimizer, I have found that the “everything without translation” is the best bet. This will improve some of the control points, allowing you to delete fewer of them. You should periodically check the panorama in fast preview window, to ensure you have not gone to far and messed it up. You can also save projects very quickly as a way to try and step and then undo it. Leave it on panosphere mode. 1. Open the control points tab and delete all of the ones above a certain amount of error. I usually start at around 25 and then work down to 7 or 15. 2. go to the images tab and select images with the most control points, or those with excessive amounts, and tell Hugin to “clean control points” 3. go through every image pair and delete control points until the bar telling you the quality of the fit between the images improves. Here you need to use some discretion. Instead of just deleting all of the control points above a certain threshold in an image pair, it is good to try and just delete the outliers. Leave as many control points as possible while still increasing the fit quality. After every time you change the control points Hugin has to re-align the images to tell you the quality of your fit. Each successive one takes less time. Once the mean pixel error is below 3 or 4 pixels and the “fast preview” window looks good, go to the stitcher tab, and stitch it. This will also take time. I have also had panoramas in which the fast preview looked good, and Hugin said it was a bad fit, but the panorama came out fine. If the images were shot on a tripod it is not that much work to decrease the mean error drastically from the original alignment. here is an example of a 12mm rectangluar lens on a full frame camera with out a tripod: If I had been more skillful or lucky in shooting these images it might have been successful. See the previous (and hopefully next) post for examples of successful stitches.
Hugin is a free program that can be downloaded via this website:http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ apparently they just came out with a new version There are two main reasons I like Hugin better than Photoshop. It allows you to choose from more than 15 different projections. This allows for different 2-D distortions of a 3-D world, which appeals to both my artistic desire for choice, and the math behind how these projections are created is cool. Second, with more human intervention Hugin will make more accurate panoramas faster than Photoshop, and it is free. Oh did I mention that it can do HDR panoramas if you load bracketed photos, and can do masks? (this allows you to control which parts of overlapping images show) So I finally managed to get Hugin to work, and stitched this: its not the worlds best composition, but simply making a seamless (I have not found any, but they may be there) panorama with free photo software was an achievement. Hugin also lets one choose the projection type for a given panaorama (something photoshop does not allow), which is awesome. Eventually I am going to use Flexify, or something similar to re-project this into shapes that can be folded onto cubes, spheres, ectera. And then fold them into said 3D shapes. This panorama does not actually capture the ground under my feet, which i why i think i could not fold into a seamless cube. I am still working on how to take that picture, ideally with out having the tripod that the camera is on be in it....
Speaking of free software, also been toying with Enfuse for HDR instead of Photomatix. It gives a more realistic look. In other news, Pie day, and putting my art skills to good work: Is so very different than in walla walla.
1. I am forced to see people, lots of people.... 2. so many lights to stop at 3. even though I have more running friends in the boston area my chances of running into them (pun intended) is much smaller than in walla*2 There is a much lower ratio of good places to run to population in boston then walla*2, hence all of those good places are crowed. Then running feels like a people watching/ being watched expedition, and the people watching is not pretty. Too many people fall into one or more of the below categories... 1. they dislike running and are forcing themselves to do it for its supposed benefits. (ipod, grimace, slow pace, duress) 2. their running form puts a grimace on my face. (most notably the monstrous heel strike) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGojEyYBmwc 3. they are wearing 200+ dollars worth of gear... (my most enjoyable runs only involve shorts (10$) and a watch,($40, because everyone uses their omnipresent cell phones these days... a rant for another time...) barefoot and bare-chested) Since i have been running with a camera lately all of these people are finding there way into my photos. Its not fun to stand around an wait in the middle of a run and try and catch the moment when my frame is empty of people, so i don't. It is funny to pass people out with their DSLRs and other gear, while running with my $25 holga in hand, and think that i am going to cover at least 5 times as much ground as they. (although spend less time per a place). In the morning I am those people... My next running competition that actually matters is sometime in September. This is the longest gap i have in racing in since i started running. (there will be one track meet this spring, and probably a 10 mile race this summer, but they are small beans). Hence running has transformed from training aggressively (which although rewarding is mentally and physically exhausting) to something whose sole point (as long as i put in the miles) is to be fun, and a way to help me keep my sanity. Running (especially on trails) can be very meditative and left brained (a rarity for me). Mostly running the Betington Lake trails barefoot i tend to achieve a mind set were the only thing i am thinking about is the immediate present; were to place my feet and how to run a efficiently as possible. The above is part of what i am trying to capture in my running photos, although i have not heard any critique of them from a fellow runner...I also suspect that most runners do not think about it the same way i do. No posts in the last few weeks due to exorbitant amounts of work, like every other student the week before spring break. I am now home, although this morning I was in Seattle, weird. Looking forward to a week of running, lots of photography, some light math and special relativity. Finally done with circuits in physics, although we still have one more lab to due. Last lab I (accidentally, I swear) input 15 volts to drive our NAND gate logic circuit and fried the chip, producing a lovely smell of burning silicon. Then (with hind sight) because I was sick and tired and hate electronics i tried to smash the chip to see what was inside of it. You know, "its in the computer". The hammer failed, so I used my trusty multi-tool pliers and cut in open with the wire cutters. The short answer is, there is virtually nothing disconcernable to the naked eye with in. A lot of black silicon and if you slice it just right some metal lines. Anyway once back on campus I am going to scan the bits, just for kicks.
In all of my studying the past week I found my self scribbling math on most any available writing surfaces, which in the dinning hall meant the back of the little things that supply useful, necessary, and interesting information about our food. (there really needs to be a font for sarcasm.) Any way, at some point I decided that putting mathematical proofs on the back of them and then putting them in backwards was similar to changing the text in photoshop. It also let me practice my math writing.... although this "art?" form is probably appreciated by many fewer people. In other news, Light Room 4 came out, and its main advantages seem to be that it can almost do HDR now, and soft proofing. Soft proofing would be extremely useful, but only if I printed from this computer which I currently can't/ don't. I suppose it would help me avoid some of the quality loss when I export images to this site by previewing how the compression and color space changes the image, but a 5mb JPEG is usually plenty big. I really wish they had improved the healing brush, ideally with content aware fill, because 90% of the time I have to go into Photohop it is only for that tool. Also it is unclear if a Light Room 4 catalogue I created on my external drive with computer could be opened int he digital lab were they only have Light Room 3 for now. If Whitman licenses LR 4 then I will probably buy it, but if they don't then I won't. Hoping to have some digital files ready for my first 3D art after break. I need to shot a panorama that captures the entire field of view from one point, sticht it in Hugin (the hardest part) and then project and print it like this http://www.planetaryvisions.com/Project.php?pid=2236 then cut it up and form it into a sphere, probably taking 2 or 3 tries to get the final work to have the craftsmen ship that I want. The most important question being what should I shot the panorama of? |