Sophianotloren

While I cannot be sure this would work on Mr. Capital Letter-Speak, it is amusing.  I have been accused of thinking a suitable supply of candy bars heals all ills! (And yes, ferret-like, I swiped this from a blogger in my morning ramble and can’t even recall from whom.)

Rep Dennis Ross (R-Round the Bend) is a man of action.  And he has the toolbox to make things happen.  So, the minute this here election is over, he’s returning to Congress with an emergency bill in his briefcase to save Americans from Ebola.

Rep Ross agrees with his colleagues that a travel ban is the way to go (because a big plastic bubble over the country would take too much time to roll out).  Doctors, epidemiologists and international experts have traveled to Congress to give their advice—that travel bans won’t help and could make things worse—but, Republicans, being Republicans aren’t buying it because . . . . well, aren’t doctors and experts usually elites trained in liberal universities? and doesn’t Obama hope that we’re all too sick to stop his world conquest?

For whatever reason, Republicans have decided that they know best and should therefore take charge.  So, they wrote a letter to the President to apprise him of the fact that they are taking the lead on Ebola—as soon as the election is over.  So far, 53 Republicans and six Democrats, who might as well be, have joined up.

Rep Ross (R-FL) got himself on MSNBC this morning to let Americans know that Republicans are going to save them . . . as soon as the election is over.

I believe we can nip this in the bud, if you will, at least by banning those flights temporarily until such time as the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] believes the epidemic is under control and also make sure we don’t issue visas to travelers from over there. We have a good border patrol, believe it or not, and they can catch these people with fake passports and fake visas as they come across the border. It just seems to me we ought to have the debate on this and flush this out and that’s why I filed the bill to allow for the banning of these flights.

Despite what the experts say, that could work, except for one thing: there are no direct flights that come to the United States from West Africa, as New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters pointed out to the congressman.

Rep Ross apparently didn’t enjoy being caught flat-footed and immediately pivoted to snark:

Then we don’t have any problem. Everybody’s contained, correct?  They are not. They are traveling. They are traveling.

“It will not solve the problem,” he added of his bill. “It is a step in the right direction.”

I guess . . . especially if it buys us some time to get that big plastic bubble set up.

Watch Rep Ross go off around the 2:15 mark.  And get a load of his face after his rant when they show the whole panel.  Bet that’s the last time Dennis Ross goes to MSNBC.

“Woman is at once apple and serpent.” ~ Heinrich Heine Related Posts: Fertile Fields Sweet Spring, Cummings Lingering Give me shelter Forget The World

“Don’t be a know-it-all!”

This was shouted at me just before the shouter pushed me into a brick wall.  Hard. I was twelve years old.

I don’t even remember what I was expounding upon on the barren asphalt “playground” in Pocatello, Idaho; but I sure remember the push for presuming to know something the pusher did not know.

It has been almost fifty years since that chilly October day; and I still occasionally get vocally pushed for knowing something — usually something someone else would prefer NOT to know.  But then, in proof of the premise that “You cannot win,” I often get an angry response to not knowing, too.

Or, to be more correct — for saying that some things are unknowable.  The nature and number of presumed deities, for instance.  Yes, that is an unpopular opinion, let me tell you.  It kind of boggles my mind that people take comfort in assumptions about the nature of divinity — something very much NOT under human control; but they get rattled at the idea that they SHOULD know what their government is doing, or the location of some once-obscure-nation-now-in-American-bombsights.

Perhaps because I didn’t get my personal ethics system from a religious base, per se, I don’t invest the idea of comfortable certainty in divinity?  But because I can posit the idea of Beings beyond our complete knowing, it does seem a wee bit over-the-top hubristic to presume defining such Beings.  I think human matters belong to us humans; divine matters belong to the presumed divinities.  I admit, I am uncertain where the interface is located.

But I often think people would be a whole lot better off admitting that there are things they simply do not and cannot know.  We can explore our phenomenal world; it is next to impossible to absolutely ascertain anything in that noumenal world of presumed divinities and possible afterlife.

And it seems to me that the presumption of having grasped a certainty about the noumenal world and its presumed inhabitants, and bringing BACK that “certainty” to THIS world causes a fuck-load of trouble.  All those religious screamers, telling women to cover up — and beating or otherwise torturing them when they don’t; or controlling other people not EVEN of one’s oh-so-assured “faith”.  I could be here all day enumerating the issues caused by religious know-it-alls. I think admission of UNcertainty and some humility based on an inability to know would do the world a world of good.

Admission of doubt is not weakness, any more than kindness is.  Admission of doubt and of not knowing is HONEST and human.  And being human?  That could lead to a bit more of being humane.  And the world could certainly use more humane behaviors over more religious know-it-alls.

 

 

Tagged: doubt, gnosis, pagan blog project

I remember seeing the photo above on Flickr once, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong.

The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector ‘read out’, i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about, lets have a look.

Many modern digital cameras use as their ‘sensing’ device a CMOS detector, also known as an active-pixel sensor, which works by accumulating electronic charge as light falls upon it. After a given amount of time, the exposure time, the charge is shifted row-by-row back to the camera for further processing. There is then a finite time where the camera scans down the image, saving rows of pixels at a time. If there is any motion over this timescale the image will be distorted.

To illustrate, consider photographing a spinning propeller. In the animations below the red line corresponds to the current readout position, and the propeller continues to spin as the readout proceeds. The portion below the red line is saved as the captured image.

First, a propeller which completes 1/10th of a rotation during the exposure:

Some distortion, but nothing crazy. Now a propeller moving 10 times quicker, which completes a full rotation during the exposure:

This is starting to look like the Flickr image at the beginning. 5 times per exposure:

This is a little too far, things have clearly gone mental. Just for fun, let’s see what some different objects look like at different rotation speeds, from 0 to 1 rotation per exposure.

The same propeller as above:

A fatter propeller:

A car tire:

We can think of the rolling shutter effect being some coordinate transformation from the ‘object space’ of the real-world object, to the ‘image space’ of the warped image. The animation below shows what happens to the Cartesian coordinate grid as the number of rotations is increased. For small rotations the deformation is slight, as the number increases to 1 each side of the grid is moved successively towards the right-hand side of the image. This is a fairly complicated transformation to look at, but simple to understand.

Let the image be denoted by , and the real object (which is rotating) be denoted by where are 2D polar coordinates. Polar coordinates are a natural choice for this problem due to the rotational motion of the objects.

The object is rotating at angular frequency , and the shutter progresses across the image at speed in the vertical direction. At position in the image, the distance the shutter has moved since the start of exposure is , and so the time elapsed is . In this time the object has rotated a number of radians . Putting this together,

which is the required transformation. The factor is proportional to the number of rotations during the exposure, and parameterises the transformation.

To get some insight into the apparent shapes of the propellers, we can consider an object consisting of propellers where is non-zero only for for . The image is then non-zero for

or

In Cartesian coordinates this becomes

which helps to explain why the propellers get that S-shaped look – it’s just an inverse tangent function in the image space. Cool. I’ve plotted this function below for a set of 5 propeller blades at slightly different initial offsets, as might be observed during a video recording. They look pretty much like the shapes in the animations above.

Now we understand a little more about the process, can we do anything about these ruined photos? Taking one of the warped images above, I can take a line through it, rotate backwards the appropriate amount, then stick those pixels onto a new image. In the animation below I scan through the image on the left, marked by the red line, then rotate the pixels along that line onto a new image. This way we can build a picture of what the real object looks like even if a pesky rolling shutter ruined our original image.

Now if only my photoshop skills were better I could extract the propellers from the original Flickr image, un-warp them, and slap them back on the photo. Sounds like a plan for the future.

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To figure out the real number of blades in the photo at the top of the post and the rotation velocity we can look to this excellent post at Daniel Walsh’s Tumblr blog, where he definitely has the edge on mathematical explanation.

He works out that we can calculate the number of blades by subtracting the ‘lower’ blades from the ‘upper’ blades, so in this picture we know there should be 3. We also know the propeller is rotating approximately 2 times during the exposure, so if we try ‘undoing’ the rotation with a few different speeds around that we get something like this:

I’ve had to guess where the centre of the propeller is, and I’ve drawn a circle to guide the eye. Looking at that, the centre shouldn’t be too far off. There is unfortunately a missing blade, but there’s still enough information to make an image.

There is a sweet spot where everything overlaps the most, so picking this rotation speed (2.39 rotations per exposure), the original image and blades look like this:

It’s still a bit of a mess unfortunately, but at least looks something like the real object.

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About the author: Jason Cole is a PhD student from London with a passion for math, physics, and data visualization. Visit his website here. This article originally appeared here.

Prepping for BAHFest. Wish I could tell you about the secret thing.

sekahyyh:

cardsofclow:

decencybedamned:

HELLO FANFIC AUTHORS IT’S TIME FOR A VOCAB LESSON

• wanton: sexually immodest or promiscuous
• wonton: a type of dumpling commonly found in Chinese cuisines

YOUR CHARACTERS SHOULD NOT BE MOANING LIKE A CHINESE DUMPLING OKAY THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT

either way, things are sure gonna get

steamy

GET OUT

First some tweets, and then some commentary.

There’s something both telling and sad about the sort of dude who literally thinks that a) impugning my masculinity is the worst possible thing they can say about me, b) that it’ll somehow lessen me if they do. On the former, meh. Given the ridiculous ideas that they have regarding masculinity, I’m happy not to meet their definition. On the latter, whatever. They’re idiots. I’m not inclined to care, outside of the opportunities it provides for pointing and laughing.

But I do think it’s useful to publicly mock their stupidity on such subjects, for the amusement and edification of others. I also think it’s particularly useful to mock their definition of masculinity and gender, and their baseline assertion that being male is the apotheosis of the human condition. It’s not; it’s merely one way to be. I’m okay with gender being more than binary; I’m okay with people having a gender other than mine; I’m okay with people shifting their idea of what their gender is over time. Because I don’t think one’s essential value is rooted in gender, and someone else’s gender is nearly always not my business anyway. I am for people being who they are, not who anyone else wants them to be, or demands them to be for their own selfish reasons. I’m for letting the world know that I think such a position is the most correct one to have. I’m for calling out people who try to make difficult for those who don’t conform to their own, usually bigoted, expectations.

Want to declare that because I don’t meet your pointless and stupid definition of “masculinity,” I should identify as another gender entirely? Awesome. I get to create a gender that doesn’t have your jackassedness riddling it front to back. The folks in my gender won’t be focused on being a “real man” or a “real woman” but on being “really me.” My gender will have all the best parties because we can do what we want, free of gender expectations! Because there are no gender expectations! My gender gets to love whoever they want! My gender gets to be whoever they want! My gender doesn’t care what you think my gender should be! My gender rocks. And it doesn’t need you, or care what you think of it.

If only it were as easy for people of every gender to be as free in theirs as I am in mine. Because of course that’s the thing: Even when these idiots declare me “not a real man,” it doesn’t change that I am always seen to be a “real man,” and that I get all the benefits that accrue to me for being biologically male, identifying as a man, and conforming to social standards for what both of those mean. The worst these dudes can do is be mean to me on the Internet. It doesn’t change anything about what I get from the world. And while I can mock them for it and proclaim the new Scalzi Gender in all its awesomeness, let’s just say that I know that it’s easy for me to do so, because in the end society has my back. Not everyone else gets to say the same. We need to be working on that.

goose no like drone

Thank you, Ronald Reagan, for promoting the voodoo of trickle-down economics.

Reposted from 2016 because this is my favorite Halloween cartoon ever.

Laurie Penny, author of Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution explains "Social Justice Warriors" and why they're winning. Read the rest

Demonstrators intrude on St Louis Symphony Orchestra concert with a little musical interruption.

It looks like some in the audience are aghast at the invasion, but quite a few applauded.

This is basically what happened.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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bearhatalice:

thedoubleclicks:

robothugscomic:

New comic!

Yeah, I might have watched a movie and gotten kind of mad.

This is seriously a trope I’d love to never see again though.

the lego movie

the matrix

pacific rim

now that I’ve learned I can’t unsee it

The more I think about it, I am not so sure I want a Black Widow movie any more.

thenightlymirror:

 

becausejensenackles:

I feel like I should have seen that coming.

[goneintorapture]

Looks like both BAHFest shows will sell out early. Please buy soon to guarantee a seat!

““I wanted to … make [Rorschach] as like, ‘this is what Batman would be in the real world’. But I have forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans, ‘smelling’, ‘not having a girlfriend’, these are actually kind of heroic! So Rorschach became the most popular character in Watchmen. I made him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street and saying: ‘I AM Rorschach. That is MY story’. And I’d be thinking: ‘Yeah, great. Could you just, like, keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?’”

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Alan Moore (via class-snuggle)

Most Alan Moore quotations make me think he’s sort of insane, but this one is gold. Few things weird me out about fictional characters more than when people idolize the ones who were clearly created as terrible human beings.

(via chrisisoninfiniteearths)

Amazing.

(via losertakesall)

It’s prompt time at Sinful Sunday again. This time Molly has set the challenge of using one of Alison Tyler’s titles as the inspiration for our photos. I scanned the extensive list and set my mind working. As soon as I saw this title, I immediately thought of a certain piece of kitchen equipment.

I wish I had thought of the idea at a time when I was seeing my man. The range of camera angles possible would have been more varied. Mind you, when I look at how pointy this is, I might be glad not to have been at the mercy of another.

So, here is my “Juicy Erotica”.

Just as a little bonus, here is a clear picture of the beautiful implement more usually used to juice citrus fruits.

Check out all the other Sinful Sundays by clicking below.

The Perfect Girl “He led me to the bed, pulled off my towel, set me precisely how he wanted me, right in the center of the mattress.” Related Posts: An English Rose Adam’s Apple Sweet Spring, Cummings Lingering Give me shelter