Category: Culture

It is a thing now, these bloated whales.

The office was abuzz today with the CBC news story about the bloated whale washed up in NewFoundland. Not to be outdone, The Atlantic has a brief history of exploding whales, with video here.

I am quite excited about getting a Quadcopter and GoPro for kayaking and other things this summer. Philip Bloom does a great review and commentary here. This is part 1 of 3. The videos at the bottom of the page are quite nice.

Maps plus time lapse! Hell yeah!

A time lapse showing the various borders of the various states and other entities in the past 1000 year here.

Today is rather overcast. I fixed the Tokina so that the aperture was wide open. I have not been able to replicate the blue spot.

Here is a Jehovah Witness video designed to teach deaf children not to masterbate. It is dubbed with a 50 cent track.

It was really bright this afternoon so I decided to see if I could replicate the “blue spot” that has been reported using this Mitakon lens adaptor. On a very bright brick wall at f1.4 it was quite apparent but I didn’t realize it until I uploaded the images to review. It isn’t in other images at f4 and above. A little tricky to use but I enjoyed myself! The only issue is what to shoot at approx. 71mm. So here are a few images from earlier today including a crop to show the moon.

You can see the blue dot clearly at 11mm in the bottom two images taken with the Tokina, especially in the crop… It appears that, for the Tokina, when the lens is wide open there is no blue dot. In the 50mm, the opposite is true! When I stop down the aperture, the dot disappears!

I did, however, open the lens up manually (the adapter doesn’t have aperture control) but that works fine. I will re-test this in the sunlight and revisit this issue since I really want to use this lens and adapter for architecture while travelling.

First Borgen and now this: an ad campaign that rewards women for getting pregnant while on vacation! Yes. That’s right, after discovering that a large percentage of baby making occurs while on vacation, there is now added incentive for doing so. Let’s see in one year what the impact is on the birth rate!

My friends and I fly helicopters once in a while at the office. Flight Club would be insane with one of these.

Here is an awesome video using the quadcopter in Alaskan ice caves.

While I love my iPad, I still have issues reading on it. I read manuals and other materials but I prefer books but could be convinced that digital is more than supplementary. This new option from Sony is a large screen wifi enabled reader but it also includes a digital pen for annotations. Cost around $1000 so not a price point that interests me.

Sony is rolling out its new technology that looks quite interesting here.

Crimea is now part of Russia. The pro-EU leadership in Kyiv is staying.

So what next?

The pragmatist in me thinks that the only viable path is to de-escalate this situation through a declaration of neutrality for Ukraine. Ukraine will not join NATO, Russia will agree not to annex more Ukrainian provinces. Ukraine will be between the East and the West and resources can then be used to stabilize the economy and give the people of Ukraine the opportunity to have a legitimate chance to build a better future. This way Russia’s Eurasian Union will not begin with an aggressive stance against the European Union and tensions between these heavily armed powers will ease. This is the first precondition to the success for the people in the streets of Kyiv. I hope that the demands for transparent political and economic structures is fulfilled, not simply the reestablishment of another set of corrupt systems. Time will tell.