[Toshi]

tim, i'm just going to order that easton off supergo. or was it nashbar? in any case, i'm in seattle now so it makes more sense to do that. thanks for the effort tho

oh yeah, moving in sucks. especially when you have a (electronic but heavy! 150 lbs or so) piano and a second floor apartment without elevator. i guess i should be glad it wasn't 5th floor, but still...

 

[TWISTED]

Sorry, I didn't get the chance to talk to the sales guy.
Have fun in Seattle.

 

[Toshi]

interesting: uw's library system doesn't have many popular books. popular as in somewhat-recent sci fi and novels, "paladin of souls" (bujold), "the cookie monster" (no, not _that_ ; vinge), "legions in time" (swanwick), "a study in emerald" (gaiman), or a few others that i tried.

on the other hand its science libraries have plenty of slightly drier fare. i'm going to grab "Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke: Pioneers in Mathematical Analysis and Catastrophe Theory from Evolvements to Quasicrystals" (arnol'd et al.), "the demon in the freezer" (preston), "Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics" (wheeler, ford) and maybe "thus spake zarathustra" tomorrow. yum, books

 

[Toshi]

yet again my minigolf title has been taken away

on the upside i survived day one of orientation. getting immunizations was not fun: hep a, b, tetanus and a tb booster. ugh.

 

[Toshi]

i'll be gone until tomorrow afternoon. orientation retreat and all. i'm very close to having a 20D in my paws btw -- i can't disclose exactly where i'm on the list but i should be getting one in the next shipment or two.

 

[Toshi]

here's a page to boggle the mind when not thinking of more serious issues like russia's devolution into totalitarianism under the guise of counterterrorism... er, where was i? oh yeah, the link: http://masamania.com/archives/2004/08/hotrod_of_ayumi.html

 

[Toshi]

t-mobile won't sell me a cell phone since i cancelled my previous service with them less than 90 days ago. cingular won't sell me a cell phone because they lack some unspecified bit of "required info". what's going on?

 

[Toshi]

i'm taking a wild guess that i'm not riding with this guy in the future: http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97341&page=2



plonk:

in related news my ignore list is now up to 38 members. ink: ink:

 

[Toshi]

thought of the night: are YOU covered for robot attacks?

http://www.robotcombat.com/video/old_glory_hi.mov

 

[Toshi]

i'm thinking of making a privacy act request for the records that the fbi may have on me:

http://foia.fbi.gov/privacy_instruc.pdf
http://foia.fbi.gov/privacy_request.pdf
why: http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1260447#post1260447

 

[Toshi]

here is an interesting photography-related technology:

Quantitative phase microscopy is a relatively new technique that can generate phase images and phase-amplitude images. In practice, to obtain a quantitative phase image one collects an in-focus image and very slightly positively and negatively defocused images, and uses these data to estimate the differential with respect to the defocus of the image. These images (a through-focal series) can be easily obtained in our system with our z-motion nano-positioner. The resulting data can be solved to yield the phase distribution by Fourier-transform methods. Results are obtained by essentially solving an optical transport equation. Significantly, the phase that is obtained does not have to be unwrapped, as is required for interferometry.

http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/radoncology/crr/reports2003/a3.htm

basically the camera takes images focused before, at, and after the desired plane of focus and extracts (dramatically) more information about the plane of focus from the differences it has with the others. cool stuff, although i wish i knew more of the underlying math. what is "an optical transport equation" anyway? this mit paper talks about solving it using the (crude, like throwing darts at a board and counting how many fall in a given region) monte carlo sampling method but doesn't explicitly state what the equation is unless i'm missing something. eh, ok, maybe the answer isn't out there: this page on optical tomography states "Direct solutions from Maxwell's equations have hardly been attempted. Instead several differential or integro-differential equations have been used among them the radiation transport equation and the diffusion approximation which is derived from the transport equation."

why am i posting this, besides giving a rundown of what's in my head at the moment thanks to a slashdot writeup on the first topic? two reasons: it's relevant to photography, and it is relevant to a field i might want to go into, brain imaging. there are so many novel technologies being used to model the brain and the abovementioned technique has been applied to MRI and optical tomography so it's significant.

ah, i found the transport equation!

from http://www.iatia.com.au/technology/insideQpi.asp

makes no sense to me tho (the mathematical primitives do, but i don't know what they mean)

 

[Toshi]

another interesting offshoot of the above slashdot discussion on QPM is this work, from a stanford team, on using parallax to resolve obscured images. it's even bike related, check out this video!

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/plane+parallax_calib/bike-sap.mov

the page itself, with some explanation of what they're doing: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/plane+parallax_calib/

before:

after:

 

[Toshi]

here's a page to boggle the mind when not thinking of more serious issues like russia's devolution into totalitarianism under the guise of counterterrorism... er, where was i? oh yeah, the link: http://masamania.com/archives/2004/08/hotrod_of_ayumi.html

i know thad enjoyed the link above

here's another one in a similar vein:

http://homepage2.nifty.com/ztath/starthp/subpage01.html

crazy. i kind of like 'em actually.

 

[Toshi]

i'm thinking of making a privacy act request for the records that the fbi may have on me:

http://foia.fbi.gov/privacy_instruc.pdf
http://foia.fbi.gov/privacy_request.pdf
why: http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1260447#post1260447

ooh, i'm replying to my own posts regularly now. maybe i'm going insane

anyway, i submitted the foia request on friday, so in a few months i'll have a report of what dirt the fbi has on me, if any. also, the easton came altho i've been too lazy to put it on the klein as of yet.

finally, i just watched this: http://www.mentalwardfilm.com/Stuck Multimedia/Construction.wmv . while i'm certain i'm just as much of a nerd in my own way (music, ridemonkey ) i still feel somewhat sorry for the people in it. on the other hand, i guess they have their whole community, everyone who helped build that "falcon", so they're as well off as anyone else.

 

[WTGPhoben]

Nice to see you're all getting cooler in my absence

At any rate, some biking news:

I got a first-hand glance at the Specialized Epic today while riding with a new member of our regular riding contingent. Didn't ride it yet, but looks cool and its rider certainly seemed to think it made him ride better.

In other news I need new tires (for my car 2002 passat wgn):
I have the option of summer tires and snows or all-season (I have two wheelsets)

I think I want to go wider than stock (stock is 195/65/15), with the word on the street that the biggest I can go is 215/60.

Some AS tires that look good:
BFGoodrich Traction T/A (HR)
Michelin Hydroedge (TR)
Goodyear Tripletread (TR)
Continental Extreme Contact (VR) only comes in 205/55 or 205/65

Insightful and longwinded suggestions are appreciated

EDIT: good snow traction is key, as I'm going to be skiing every wknd, but doing lots of hwy driving to get there (a possible reason why I woudn't want dedicated snows)

 

[Toshi]

i have no comment on tires, besides to not get bfg mud terrains for your passat . helpful, eh?

 

[WTGPhoben]

i have no comment on tires, besides to not get bfg mud terrains for your passat . helpful, eh?

sometimes I wonder why I bother asking advice from you people.

me toshi
:nuts:

 

[Toshi]

sometimes I wonder why I bother asking advice from you people.

i don't know. are you a slow learner?

 

[WTGPhoben]

i don't know. are you a slow learner?

clearly.

Hopefully thad will be bored enough to be constructive.

 

[Barbaton]

clearly.

Hopefully thad will be bored enough to be constructive.

what, hey? sorry....i was napping...

 

[Toshi]

not riding for a while makes your body soft and weak. i'd draw a parallel between my weakness and the governator's command, "don't be economic girlie-men", but the proper wording escapes me at the moment. anyway both of my wrists are sore from last night's street ride. ow. poor me.

 

[Barbaton]

what, hey? sorry....i was napping...

seriously, though. I don't know much about those particular tires, but I'd go with something all-season over the summer. You're milage is already suffering from the racks and the big-ass tires you want, so I'd go with the ones that are better for the snowy winter, having had some summer tires on my dad's car that got me into some trouble at Jay Peak a couple years ago...

 

[Barbaton]

does this look like a good deal for the blur? Overkill for the sort of XC I do?

http://www.supergo.com/profile.cfm?LPROD_ID=20888&lsubcat_id=7589&lcat_id=7604&referpage=

 

[Toshi]

that's an excellent deal for the pair. i'm on my second or third set of hayes and they work well enough. with 6" rotors they'd be well suited to your blur

 

[WTGPhoben]

that's an excellent deal for the pair. i'm on my second or third set of hayes and they work well enough. with 6" rotors they'd be well suited to your blur

that is def a good deal, but if you get discs we're going to have to start doing scarier stuff.

In car news, not that anyone cares, I got BFGoodrich Traction T/A-H 215/60/15 All-seasons, and some low-end snow tires to put on my extra rims. all mounted and balanced, with a free mount and balance for putting my extra michelin mxv4s on my dad's car in the spring for $669 incl tax.

After my dad buys the michelins (his tires are all done), I'll have two sets of tires mounted for $300

Should be all done by tomorrow night, and I'll have pretty pictures and reviews to follow.

 

[Barbaton]

that is def a good deal, but if you get discs we're going to have to start doing scarier stuff.

Better brakes mean barbaton go slower... :devil:

 

[Toshi]

Better brakes mean barbaton go slower... :devil:

heh, that would be the conventional wisdom but it actually works out the other way. once i got my brakes dialed in (levers close to the bars and as far inboard as possible) i was braking later and later. this manifested itself in me getting quite a bit faster over this season's course -- of course jumping up from the evil + z1 to canfield + monster helped there too -- and going over the bars more often.

 

[Barbaton]

heh, that would be the conventional wisdom but it actually works out the other way. once i got my brakes dialed in (levers close to the bars and as far inboard as possible) i was braking later and later. this manifested itself in me getting quite a bit faster over this season's course -- of course jumping up from the evil + z1 to canfield + monster helped there too -- and going over the bars more often.

yeah, i was just alluding to the fact that keith thinks i'm a slow-ass. then again, he's probably right. on the other hand i don't have inhumanly long legs for leverage.

 

[Toshi]

i'm not so sold that long legs are advantage. sure, keith is fast, but maybe he'd be fast if he was short, too. hmm. keith, want to undergo elective leg-reduction surgery to test the theory out?

two things to back this up: 1) except for indurain most pro cyclists are not huge, either in height or (especially) girth. 2) given that the forces are directed into a circle of radius 170-185mm one would think that length of the limb generating the force would be irrelevant.

 

[Toshi]

i ordered the wrong fork for my klein. dumb dumb dumb. note to self: threadless !=> 1 1/8". (it's 1" threadless...)

good news: i have this afternoon off so i can take care of the fork, er, "issue" along with buying a new chainring and front skewer at the local supergo store. it's ridiculously close by...

 

[Toshi]

new thread: what would it take you to emigrate?

 

[Toshi]

good lawd, my new cell phone (SE T637) takes horrible looking pictures. my old phone (nokia 3650) took much nicer shots. this is FULL RES too, just for the record

 

[WTGPhoben]

good lawd, my new cell phone (SE T637) takes horrible looking pictures. my old phone (nokia 3650) took much nicer shots. this is FULL RES too, just for the record

the only correct thing to do is to put it out of its misery. I suggest a little black paint, or for the more through at heart, a red hot nail through the lens

Then you could glue it to the bottom of your d30 and have a real camera phone.

 

[Toshi]

dude, i sold my d30 a month ago...

 

[WTGPhoben]

dude, i sold my d30 a month ago...

ok, so you'll have to wait for the 20d

 

[Barbaton]

Speaking of, were you guys aware that the 1Ds mark 2 can do WiFi? I wasn't. Details here.

Sounds cool. You can shoot photos and have them stored on your powerbook somewhere else, maybe running a script to upload them realtime to a webserver or something. Convergence

 

[Toshi]

it's not only the 1Ds MkII, that module also works on the 1D MkII and the 20D!

 

[Barbaton]

it's not only the 1Ds MkII, that module also works on the 1D MkII and the 20D!

Cool. you should get one for yours if you can cough up the 7k or whatever i saw it for...

EDIT: on second thought i think that was the price for the whole camera. I was quite shocked when i first saw that and thought it was the attachment price.

 

[Toshi]

Cool. you should get one for yours if you can cough up the 7k or whatever i saw it for...

no no, the 1Ds MkII will be $7k. the wireless deal is separate: http://tinyurl.com/6yb5l . it has no price set yet.

 

[Barbaton]

no no, the 1Ds MkII will be $7k. the wireless deal is separate: http://tinyurl.com/6yb5l . it has no price set yet.

hmmm. looks like i was editing my post while you were typing yours...

:nuts: