Author: jonathan
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Giant Eye
A Florida man was taking a stroll on a beach when he stumbled across something out of the ordinary: a giant blue eyeball, just sitting there in the sand.
Slate reports that a giant eyeball washed ashore in Florida, and that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission needed help identifying it. Early money was on that it was the eye of a swordfish due to its color and the bones around the ball, and genetic testing confirmed the hypothesis. As for how the eye came to be disembodied / disarticulated, that’s a bit harder to figure out. The leading theory on that front is that it was tossed overboard from a fisherman.
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Bento Curry Bathers
Categories: installation / sculpture -
Iranian Student Painter
Categories: photo
An Iranian female student at Tehran University in 2006.
Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images -
Pareidoloop
Categories: tech
Philip McCarthy‘s Pareidoloop overlays semitransparent polygons until a human face is found. (github link) It’s inspired by Roger Alsing‘s Evolution of Mona Lisa, where he applied the same technique recreate the Mona Lisa.
(google code link)A more interesting variation of this technique would be throw the images through a classifier trained to recognize various religious images, print them on toast, and the post the toast to eBay Virgin Mary toast style.
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Endeavour
Friday, we went to see Endeavour’s fly-by of NASA Ames. Ming wasn’t too crazy to go at first, but she relented. It’s the last time anyone was going to see a shuttle in the air. Although Maximilian isn’t going to remember this, I still wanted him there. (Got to start them out early on science.)
When reading up about the shuttle retirement, I came across this image on wikicommons:
This flag first flew on the first shuttle mission, and then again on the last one. It was left behind on the ISS to be retrieved by next US launched manned mission. It’s kind of sad and nice at the same time. A “We will return,” promise. (Albeit not likely in a spaceplane.) I had no idea that this flag existed. NASA has also slated this flag to fly on the next manned mission to leave Earth orbit. The sentimental part of me likes that there’s this symbol that’s passed from crew to crew, even if its history only goes back to 1981 instead of 1961. -
Hanger One Still On the Chopping Block
NASA’s inspector general is still gunning for Hanger One. Essentially, the IG and NASA HQ are upset with Ames Research Center’s leasing of property to private groups such as Singularity University, Airship Ventures, and the Google Triumvirate, and insist that future leases correspond to “current or future mission[s]”, and to sell any properties that can’t be leased. I believe the IG is referring in particular to the airfield itself.
Not having any particular knowledge beyond what I find in the local papers, but that seems a bit strange. I thought NASA Ames was one of the centers that was researching heavy lift airships for cargo transport to remote areas, and that Hanger One was intended to be used for these airships.
