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East Coasters just warming up from freezing temperatures should prepare to bundle up again – Meteorologists say the Polar Vortex is coming back with a vengeance to throw the country into another deep freeze. Weather experts prediect that a blast of arctic air will bring chills to the US and Canada starting on January 21st and continuing through the end of the month.

Read the rest of Bundle Up: The Polar Vortex is Returning to Put the US in Another Deep Freeze

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Post tags: Climate Change, Cold Weather Fronts, deep freeze, east coast, Extreme Freezing, Extreme Weather Patterns, global warming, John Holdren, midwest, New York., polar vortex, Snow Storms

Ask a room of computer geeks how they came to deserve this appellation and you’ll likely hear many similar stories. “I got my first computer when I was very young. By the time I was a teenager, I’d logged thousands of hours at the keyboard doing everything imaginable with my computer: gaming, programming, networking, upgrades, the works.”

That’s certainly my story. I was lucky enough to get a Macintosh in 1984, and it changed my life. I spent so many hours in front of that computer, I often look back in wonder at how I found so much to do with so little. This was years before I had an Internet connection. I had very little software and no convenient way to get more. My dollar-a-week allowance didn’t go very far. The only other person I knew with a Mac was my grandfather who lived two hours away. Nevertheless, I put in the hours—willingly, joyfully—and became the seasoned Mac geek you see before you today.

My Macintosh origin story is part of who I am. Being there from the beginning (and staying with the Mac, even through the dark times) gives me a useful historical perspective on the platform. But this is not the only road to geekdom.

The Mac is actually one of the few things I’m a geek about that I’ve been in on since the start. Geekdom is not defined by historical entry points or even shared experiences. A geek must possess just two things: knowledge and enthusiasm.

A Man Makes a Car

I became interested in remote control cars in high school after seeing a friend drive one in his backyard. He’d been building and racing RC cars since he was in elementary school. I was fascinated by these machines, but I worried I’d never be a “real” RC car geek like my friend.

I saved my money, bought a car, built it (badly) myself—and then crashed it. Undaunted, I bought replacement parts, fixed it, learned to drive it with far less crashing, and eventually bought a better car. Most importantly, I subscribed to Radio Control Car Action magazine and read every issue from cover to cover as soon as they arrived at my house.

A year or so later, I found myself in my local hobby shop answering another customer’s questions about his car. It started to dawn on me that I now knew more about RC cars than the average hobby shop patron. I was no longer an outsider looking in.

Around the same time, I was engaged in one of those cheap-music-for-membership marketing schemes that led to me having to select some CDs on a whim. I ended up getting Achtung Baby, and it knocked my socks off. I’d been aware of U2 for years and had probably heard the hits from The Joshua Tree on the radio dozens of times, but I’d never really been into the band—or any band, for that matter. Achtung changed that.

I started to work my way backwards through U2’s catalog, buying as many CD long boxes as I could get my hands on. I bought and read biographies of the band. At my local library, I devoured reviews of all their past albums in Rolling Stone and Spin. I found every magazine with a cover story about U2. When I couldn’t find anything else in the stacks of back issues, I turned to the library’s microfiche collection.

In college, I finally had easy access to singles, b-sides, and bootlegs, allowing me to complete my collection. I also had a fast, reliable Internet connection for the first time. This was beyond the local hobby shop; I was communicating with other U2 fans across the entire planet.

I learned to play the guitar (badly) and downloaded tab for my favorite U2 songs. Dissatisfied with the state of lyrics websites (some things haven’t changed), I transcribed every U2 album, single, b-side, and rarity, leading to the creation of my first public website, The U2 Lyrics Archive. This was my first claim to fame on the net. (The site is gone now, but when the official u2.com website launched a few years after mine, it contained lyrics copied from my site, typos and all.)

A Sort of Homecoming

Remote control cars existed for decades before I got my first kit. Achtung Baby was U2’s seventh album. Yet I was once a serious RC car geek and an unassailable U2 geek. It started with enthusiasm. Given the opportunity, I channeled that energy into a dogged pursuit of knowledge.

You don’t have to be a geek about everything in your life—or anything, for that matter. But if geekdom is your goal, don’t let anyone tell you it’s unattainable. You don’t have to be there “from the beginning” (whatever that means). You don’t have to start when you’re a kid. You don’t need to be a member of a particular social class, race, sex, or gender.

Geekdom is not a club; it’s a destination, open to anyone who wants to put in the time and effort to travel there. And if someone lacks the opportunity to get there, we geeks should help in any way we can. Take a new friend to a meetup or convention. Donate your old games, movies, comics, and toys. Be welcoming. Sharing your enthusiasm is part of being a geek.

Anyone trying to purposely erect border fences or demanding to see ID upon entry to the land of Geekdom is missing the point. They have no power over you. Ignore them and dive headfirst into the things that interest you. Soak up every experience. Lose yourself in the pursuit of knowledge. When you finally come up for air, you’ll find that the long road to geekdom no longer stretches out before you. No one can deny you entry. You’re already home.

Oblivion, la nueva de Joseph Kosinski, es una de esas películas de ciencia ficción (de la dura) que pasará a ser un clásico. Visualmente me pareció fascinante, la naturalidad de las escenas y la gran cantidad de tomas a luz del día es apabullante. Últimamente uno de los trucos es grabar las películas en ambientes nocturnos post-apocalípticos, dentro de cuevas, dentro naves espaciales… para así ahorrarse problemas y costes.

Leyendo los créditos, ¡resulta que la fotografía de Oblivion es Claudio Miranda! Uno de mis directores de fotografía favoritos (La vida de Pi, Seven, El club de la lucha). Claudio es un friki de las cámaras y sobre todo de la iluminación.

Para Oblivion eligió la Sony F65, que puede grabar ¡video a 20 megapíxeles en RAW! Y puede capturar un rango dinámico de 16 stops, dos stops más que la Nikon D800/D4, que es ahora mismo la cámaras full frame capaz de capturar más rango dinámico. Con este rango dinámico es la cámara perfecta para rodar las escenas de día en los paisajes desérticos de Oblivion.

Claudio Miranda con una Sony F65 en el rodaje de Oblivion

Otro detalle que deja ver el frikismo y dedicación de Claudio Miranda. Para grabar los exteriores viajó con todo el equipo al norte de Islandia donde tenían a su disponsición muchas más horas doradas, mágicas, golden hours al ir en la época en la que no se hace de noche.

Las escenas al aire libre en el desierto de Oblivion están rodadas durante un atardecer/amanecer permanente

Para el rodaje de la casa voladora en vez de usar paneles de color verde/azul y luego reemplazar los fondos usando CG lo que hicieron fue irse a la cima de una montaña en Hawaii y grabar el cielo por encima de las nubes durante días usando una cámara RED. Esta es otra burrada de cámara, capaz de capturar ¡16,5 stops de rango dinámico a 19 megapíxeles! Después lo que hicieron es usar proyectores en el estudio para proyectar las imágenes de las nubes que grabaron en Hawaii y así crear un escenario “real” en el que se puede grabar “in-camara” (Sin necesidad de pasar por la fase de CG luego). Explicarlo es complicado, viendo este video a partir del minuto 4:50 se entiende enseguida:

La escena en la que se encuentra a Morgan Freeman por primera vez es brutal, la iluminación es una cerilla y el resto una vela. Para conseguirlo usaron un objectivo Zeiss 16mm de T1.3 (Más o menos igual que f/1.2, aquí explican la diferencia entre medir la apertura con f y t). No llega a la legendaria 0.7 que usó Kubrick para rodar también a la luz de las velas pero no está nada mal, fijaos en el detalle del reflejo de Tom Cruise en las gafas:

Zeiss 16mm T1.3

Si no os habéis cansado con el rollo este aquí más sobre Oblivion y la F65

Paul Walker recently offed himself in a high speed sports car race. By most accounts, he qualified as a super alpha male: famous (most important factor), good-looking, well-liked, thrill-seeking. He started dating, i.e. fucking, a 16 year old girl when he was 33. They were still a couple seven years later at the time of his death. She is said to be emotionally devastated.

No matter how you bristle at the concept of men being divisible by their sexual market value into gradations of omega, beta and alpha, you’d have to spin some sophistic legerdemain to believe Walker didn’t have way more options with women than the average man with honor and integrity up the wazoo. He may not have availed himself of all the pussy throwing itself at his feet, but he could have if he so wanted. And that’s the critical distinction.

A funny anomaly in the laws of the sexual market occurs when a man reaches the rarified heights of super alphadom. Rules governing human interaction break down and recombine into strange new polarities, nearly the inverse of the laws that regulate most biocommerce between the sexes. The dating market constraints that almost all men must abide don’t act with the same force on super alphas. These few high stakes male winners are so massively pre-selected by literally millions of women fawning over the texture and aroma of their daily dumps that the value these anointed men bring is no longer a function of their ability to attract women. The value of the super alpha male, paradoxically, resembles more the value that very physically attractive and feminine women hold: that is, it’s the value of the scarce resource trying to maintain its scarcity. It’s the value of perceived purity.

A regular reader with a lot of ideas in his head writes,

It doesn’t seem like sex was a big deal to Paul Walker. He was raised Mormon. He had a daughter.

I just don’t get the sense he planned his vacations or nights on the town based on the women he planned on meeting.

As we’re hearing girls confess, Paul Walker could have done anything he wanted to them. Who knows if he did. [ed: if i had to bet...] They’re now saying he should have been praised like Brad Pitt and we know what women thought of Brad in his prime.

Assuming he’s straight, the fewer number of girls Walker banged, the more power he had over them. Some female fans probably waited til his death to speak out because it’s too risky to give a man that looks like him that much power and ego. In that sense, by keeping his sperm to himself he has more in common with a chaste woman than 99.9% of men.

What this reader is hinting at is unattainability. A super alpha is perceived so unattainable by most women (keep in mind that super alpha males are much rarer than very beautiful women) that without some compensating behavior or signal designed to reduce the perception of his unattainability, most women will studiously ignore him to preserve their delicate egos.

An ordinary man who surrounded himself with women festooning him with adulation would incite intrigue and sexualized curiosity in other women on the outside looking in at his social harem. His flirtatious profligacy would elevate his SMV. But a famous super alpha who did the same would merely confirm what most women already suspected about him. He would be playing to type, and in an odd twist of hamsterfied feedback his predictable alpha behavior would rob him of some power over women. Perhaps at the highest levels of womanhood — the HB 9s and 10s — any desire to have a long term relationship with such a man is dampened. His sexually entitled behavior might even create limits on the willingness of more average women to indulge in alphamania.

Like the crooning boy band singer who wails in the fashion of a beta male suffering heartbreak, the famous super alpha who, purposefully or otherwise, plays against type to construct an impression that he’s more attainable (in the way that women prefer, i.e., more open to monogamous commitment) than he really is imparts to himself a degree of power over women that only mighty kings free of legal consequence enjoy. In this sense, the super alpha male is similar to the exquisitely aloof beauty: his perceived chasteness is proof of his high commitment value.

Nick V (brickthing) has built something that will bring out the nerd in many of us. I never thought I would write a sentence that used “video card” and “beauty” together, but this replica video card really is a thing of beauty.