This example of the City of Poughkeepsie’s branding seems poorly thought out:
Maybe not quite as bad as the “Too Cool to Do Drugs” pencil, but …
Selah.
Category: Photography & Images
Taking & making images.
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Sandisk Extreme Plus: End of Life
The Fly6 rear camera on my bike started giving off three long beeps and shutting down. Doing the reformatting / rebooting dance provides only temporary relief, so I think the card has failed:
Sandisk Extreme Plus vs. Samsung EVO MicroSD cards The Fly6 can handle cards up to only 32 GB, which means I should stock up before they go the way of the 8 GB card shipped with the camera a few years ago.
Some back of the envelope calculations:
- It’s been in use for the last 19 months
- The last 22 trips racked up 88 GB of video data = 4 GB/trip
- They occurred over the last 6 weeks = 3.6 rides/week
- Call it 250 trips = 1 TB of data written to the card = 32 × capacity
That’s only slightly more than the failure point of the Sony 64 GB MicroSDXC cards. The Fly6 writes about a third of the data per trip, so the card lasts longer on a calendar basis.
So now let’s find out how long the Samsung cards last …
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Battleship Wiring
A view from behind one of the switch panels in the 16 inch gun control compartment, deep inside USS Massachusetts BB-59:
USS Massachusetts BB-59 – Gun Laying Control Cables Although the doc isn’t contemporaneous with Big Mamie, the Navy can still teach you to lace your cables like your life depends on it (starting on page 2-94, 157 of 1412).
We explored the interior for several hours, all the way to the lower Turret 2 barbette:
USS Massachusetts BB-59 – Turret 2 Lower Barbette 16 inch Shell Storage Each 16 inch projectile weighs 2700 pounds, with 800 shells distributed around three turrets. Looking at the drawings doesn’t make up for seeing the machinery.
The Massachusetts did shore bombardment during the Solomon Island campaign, where my father was assigned to guard a forward observer targeting Japanese redoubts and caves. He said the first rounds went over the far horizon, the second group landed short in the valley, and, from then on, the observer called out coordinates, walked the impact points down the valley, and wiped out each target in succession. BB-59 may not have been on the other end of those trajectories, but he said the Navy saved them plenty of trouble and inconvenience …
Capital ships became obsolete during the Battle of Midway, but battleships remain impressive hunks of engineering.
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Monthly Image: Google Pixel XL HDR at Wappingers Falls Bridge
We walked over the bridge in Wappingers Falls on our way to a play:
Wappingers Falls Bridge – Google 3D Overhead – 2017-09-22 As always, we paused near the center to admire the view (clicky for more dots):
Wappingers Falls Bridge – Pixel XL HDR – 2017-09-22 That’s from the PixelXL, braced on the bridge wall, facing downstream toward the Hudson River.
A dot-for-dot crop of the penstock, showing off the RGB LED garland:
Wappingers Falls Bridge – Pixel XL HDR – Penstock crop – 2017-09-22 Contrary to what you might think, the gorge underfoot appeared almost black to the eye, particularly against the glare from the floodlights, so the HDR works very well:
Wappingers Falls Bridge – Pixel XL HDR – Gorge crop – 2017-09-22 The JPG compression on those images doesn’t materially affect the results; the original image has most of the artifacts.
The EXIF information:
Wappingers Falls Bridge – Pixel XL HDR – Photograph EXIF – 2017-09-22 The “1/10 s shutter speed” probably has very little to do with any physical event. AFAICT, the Pixel camera records 30 images/s for the on-screen preview, then uses various images before-and-after the shutter click for motion compensation and HDR processing. If so, “1/10 s” corresponds to three images.
I had the Pixel location tracking in “battery saving” mode with the GPS turned off:
Wappingers Falls Bridge – Pixel XL HDR – GPS EXIF – 2017-09-22 In reality, the bridge is about 90 feet above sea level. The “GPS Time Stamp” and, presumably, the date, use UTC. We’re in UTC-4, with Daylight Saving Time in full effect, so we were comfortably early for the 8 PM show.
The camera doesn’t produce DSLR-with-big-glass quality images, but it fits in my pocket and it’s better than my old Canon SX-230HS for most purposes.
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Pure Matte Black the Hard Way
The best way to get a pure, non-reflective black uses optics, not pigments:
Matte black blade edges The shiny steel blades reflect light just fine, but the reflections have no way back out of the gap between adjacent edges: the angle of reflection always points away from you and the incoming light.
I always admire the blackness when I open that box.
Yes, I’m a member of the Society of the Easily Amused.
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Monthly Science: Raising a Monarch Butterfly
A Monarch butterfly laid eggs in late July. On the 29th of July they looked like this:
Monarch Egg – focus stacked By August 2, a pair of caterpillars had hatched and grew to 3 mm:
Monarch caterpillar – 3 mm – 2017-08-02 A day later, they were 4 mm long:
Monarch caterpillars – 4 mm – 2017-08-03 They really were sort of blue-ish with green hints:
Monarch caterpillar 1 – 4 mm – 2017-08-03 And:
Monarch caterpillar 2 – 4 mm – 2017-08-03 By August 9, one had had more mature coloration:
Monarch caterpillar – 2017-08-09 The other caterpillar had vanished; we assume it got out of the aquarium and wandered off.
Apparently, the front end of the caterpillar (at the bottom of the picture) has a hard windshield reflecting the ring of LEDs around the camera lens. The caterpillar eats its skin after each molting, except for the windshield:
Monarch Windshield – 2017-08-09 We kept fresh milkweed branches in a vase and the caterpillar ate almost continuously:
Monarch caterpillar – 2017-08-13 By August 15, the caterpillar was ready for the next stage in its life. At 10 in the morning it had attached itself to the screen covering the aquarium and assumed the position:
Monarch caterpillar – starting chrysalis – 2017-08-15 It transformed into a chrysalis by 5:30 PM:
Monarch Chrysalis – with skin The discarded skin remained loosely attached until I carefully removed it.
What look like small yellow spots are actually a striking metallic gold color.
Eleven days later, on August 26 at 9 AM, the chrysalis suddenly became transparent:
Monarch chrysalis – ready – left And:
Monarch chrysalis – ready – right The shape of the butterfly becomes visible in reflected light:
Monarch chrysalis – ready – ventral detail The gold dots and line remained visible.
The magic happened at 3 PM:
Monarch chrysalis – emerging – unfolding The compacted wings emerge intense orange on the top and lighter orange on the bottom:
Monarch unfolding – left The butterfly took most of the day to unfurl and stiffen its wings into flat plates:
Monarch unfolding – dorsal And:
Monarch unfolding – right By 8 PM it began exploring the aquarium:
Monarch unfolded – right As adults, they sip nectar from flowers, but don’t feed for the first day, so we left it in the aquarium overnight.
At 10 AM on August 27, we transported it to the goldenrod in the garden, where it immediately began tanking operations:
Monarch on Milkweed – left A few minutes later, it began sun-warming operations:
Monarch on Milkweed – dorsal Mary watched it while she was tending the garden and, an hour or so later, saw it take off and fly over the house in a generally southwest direction. It will cross half the continent under a geas prohibiting any other action, eventually overwinter in Mexico with far too few of its compadres, then die after producing the eggs for a generation beginning the northward journey next year.
Godspeed, little butterfly, godspeed …
In the spirit of “video or it didn’t happen”, there’s a 15 fps movie of the emergence taken at 5 s/image.
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Mystery Eggs on Glass
An array of tiny eggs appeared on the outside of our bedroom window:
Insect eggs on glass – 2017-09-17 The patch measures 12 mm across and 14 mm tall. From across the room, it looks like a smudge, but it consists of hundreds of eggs, each on a tiny stalk glued to the glass:
IMG_20170919 vs 0917- Insect eggs on glass The bottom image is two days later than the top one, both are scaled to about the same size and contrast. The critters look about the same, although I think the lines have more prominent ripples or bumps.
We have no idea what they’ll turn into, but they certainly look like they have two eyes and wings …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 