Coloring Time 2

 Monday, around 70-75 first-grade students became the first people to try out the new coloring pages I've been creating.  Some rather... interesting alternate color schemes for the observatory emerged.

Tuesday and Thursday, another 120 or so first, second and third-grade students will get their hands on the coloring pages.  I look forward to seeing what they do.

Coloring Time

As a child, I did my fair share of coloring, first with crayons and later with colored pencils and ink markers.  Unlike at least one friend (shout-out to Eva of Dawn and Dark Ivory fame), I didn't grow up to be an artist, so I haven't done that sort of thing in quite some time.

Instead, I wound up with careers in other fields, and in one of them, I've lately gotten to the point where I occasionally get to visit schools and talk to kids about what I do, how it relates to things they're studying, and all that.  And so, I've developed an interest once again in coloring pages - but this time, from the side of creating them!

Conveniently, I take a lot of photos of things that make interesting subjects for coloring pages.  Inconveniently, I don't have a light table and parchment paper, which I'd instinctively want to use to trace the outlines of things in a photo to create a coloring page.  I do, however, have Photoshop.  But knowing how to use Photoshop to process photos is one thing, and knowing how to use it to create a coloring page from a photo is quite another thing altogether.

I was well aware of the various filters available in Photoshop for this sort of thing.  I could "Find Edges."  Or, I could create "Glowing Edges."  Or I could "Trace Contours," or "Emboss."  So many choices!  A tutorial video online suggested instead creating a greyscale image, duplicating the layer, setting the top layer to "color dodge," doing a gaussian blur, and adjusting the blur ratio.  I tried it, but found it to be a rather complicated manual way of arriving, more or less, at "Find Edges."

Then I ran across a page suggesting the "Photocopy" filter, with its sliders for "Darkness" and "Detail."  Aha!  Photocopiers, I could handle.  (Fax machines, less so.)  I gave this a shot, then went in with a white "pen" to tidy up the image, followed by a black "pen" to strengthen some of the lines - steps which have to be done after using this filter - and in an acceptably short amount of time, actually had something I can give schoolchildren to color.  Hooray!  Here's a scaled-down version of the first coloring page I've ever created.

The Subaru Telescope and its adaptive-optics laser.

I intend for this to be just the first of several, perhaps even "many," such pages, now that I've found a practical and reasonably quick way of creating them.

Aloha, cousin?

With apologies to Stitch, of course...

If you're on Geni.com, and have enough of a family tree entered, sooner or later someone in your family tree is going to turn out to be in other people's family trees as well.  This tends to start happening a few generations back, and occur more and more as you go further back.  Geni calls the interconnected tree-of-trees the "World Family Tree."

For example, actress Liv Tyler and I are both about 10 generations descended from Joseph Morse (1671-1745), which makes us 9th cousins.  One has to go back a couple generations earlier than Joseph, though, to find the ancestor we have in common with noted 19th-century "coder" Samuel Finley Breese Morse - he's descended from one of Joseph's cousins.

There are plenty of other more distant relations to be found out there.  Like many people, I'm distantly related to plenty of recent US presidents, and to various and sundry European royals in the old days.  None of this gets me anything, of course.

Anyway, I'm curious.  I already know who my cousins are, and at least most of my cousins once removed, cousins twice removed, and second cousins.  I'm sure they're far outnumbered by my third cousins, fourth cousins, and so on.

So here's my question: will anyone read this who turns out to be more distant than a second cousin, but less distant than Liv Tyler?  A third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth cousin?

Here's my Geni profile - well, there's a lot more to it than that, but it's not all visible to the public.

If you're on Geni and are a pro or plus member, I believe it will tell you whether it thinks we're related.  If you're a basic member, it won't tell you, but it will tell me (as a Pro member) if you give me the URL for your Geni profile so I can search.  Of course, it'll be more likely to work if you've entered a bunch of your ancestry!

Oh, and sorry, the "World Family Tree" is not the same concept as Yggdrasil the "World Tree," for those who might be wondering.

Rick Santorum wants healthy babies to die.

 CBS News reported today that Rick Santorum criticized President Obama's health policies requiring medical insurance plans to provide free prenatal screening.

Santorum said, "...free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society... That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."

This position is not the least bit new to me.  Since I was a kid, I've been aware of the March of Dimes, which works to fight birth defects - and I've heard the mantra that people are likely to abort babies who they know have defects.  I also know that Santorum himself has a three-year-old daughter who suffers from Trisomy 18, which is usually fatal in much less than three years.

My wife any I are Christians of modest income, living in a small city, doing everything we can to get by.  (In my case, that means full-time work, plus part-time when I can get it.)  We're not the sorts who'd chose abortion ourselves.  In fact, Santorum would probably think we're the "target market" for his campaign messages.

I don't know whether the Santorums' faith led them to entirely opt out of prenatal screening for Trisomy 18, or just to have their daughter regardless of the results.  I do, however, know that Santorum is absolutely "full of it" on this point, because prenatal screening can also save the life of a mother or baby.  In fact, if it weren't for prenatal screening, my daughter wouldn't be alive today.

A tale of two ad-supported ecosystems

Both Google and Facebook have long made most of their money off ads, and given away their services mostly for free.

In Google's case, ads are delivered based on search terms, or based on the content of other web sites where context-sensitive ads are being served.  So they can be served to anyone in a reasonably sensible manner, regardless of whether Google knows anything at all about them.

Facebook, on the other hand, tries to "target" ads based on personal information about their users. I'm sure this works in some cases, but if I had a dollar bill for each time I've been shown a beer ad (I don't drink beer), or a car insurance ad when I didn't have a car, or a "buy a house from this guy" ad for some realtor I've never heard of just because he claims to have an office in my town (oh, and I already have a house)... I'd be a pretty wealthy guy by now.

Now, Facebook is IPO'ing and trying to raise (*bites pinky*) five Billion dollars, based on all that personal user data they have, and all that targeting they can make advertisers believe actually works.  (And maybe it does, in some cases - regardless of how total-FAIL it's been in my experience.)

Another way to look at this, courtesy of "Breakout" on Yahoo Finance, is that Facebook wants to make big bucks off its user data.  Of course, this doesn't in any way benefit the people who give their content to Facebook, thus driving traffic.  This is a different model than Google, which (for example) gives me this blog for free and gives me a cut of the revenue from ads that appear on it.

Needless to say, I'm once again reducing my presence on Facebook - which is now easier than ever, since most of my friends are now on Google's social network, Google+.  And since Facebook wants to make a buck off my data, I'm updating as much of it as possible to be completely bogus, then deleting it.

I know this my actions will not in any way cause Facebook to crumble or falter in the slightest, but as a content creator, I can at least refuse my content to places that want to have it for free and then make money (even indirectly) off it.

December 10, 2011 Total Lunar Eclipse

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, there was a total eclipse of the moon early this morning (local time), and I had... well, I'd consider it a rather good vantage point.  Above 40% of the atmosphere, above 95% of the water vapor in the atmosphere, and so on.

I promised various people that I would put something together, image-wise... so I have.  Click to see a larger view of it... and then consider that the larger view is only 1/4 as wide and high as the actual original image.  Maybe I'll make a giant print of it or something.

Update a day later: I made a couple versions with the stages of the eclipse arranged in a more curved manner.

Using a Lunar Eclipse to Study Earth

Working around lots of insanely brilliant Ph.D. types, I occasionally run into ideas that wouldn't occur to me.

Tonight, there's a total eclipse of the moon, with the "exciting" parts starting in less than 20 minutes.  Great!  Like many people, I like eclipses.  Like many people, I think, "I'll just use my zoom lens to take pictures of the moon at various points during the eclipse.  That'll be fun."

Insanely brilliant Ph.D. types, on the other hand, submit proposals for telescope time, with titles like "Refined Measurement of Earth's Transmission Spectrum through a Lunar Eclipse." And the proposals actually get accepted, by a telescope with an 8.2-meter mirror and the highest-resolution visible-light spectrograph on any large telescope in the world.

Yes, kids, if you grow up to be an astronomer, you can actually talk people into letting you point huge telescopes at the moon.  Cool, huh?

But the insanely brilliant Ph.D. types aren't taking pictures - they're taking a spectrum of the light being reflected off the moon, at various stages during the eclipse.  The're using the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope, with 11.6 times the light-gathering area of the Hubble Space Telescope, and its High-Dispersion Spectrograph, the highest-resolution visible-light spectrograph on a large telescope anywhere in the world.

And to make it even cooler, they're not taking a spectrum of the moon, or even of the sun (since the moon merely reflects sunlight) - they're taking a transmission spectrum of Earth's atmosphere!  When the moon is totally eclipsed, the only light reaching it has been bent through the Earth's atmosphere.

Comparing a spectrum of that light with the known spectrum of ordinary sunlight, and with a spectrum of light coming straight into Earth's atmosphere from a well-known star, will enable them to figure out which features of the spectrum are specifically due to the light passing through Earth's atmosphere.  And those spectral features will tell them which chemical elements are in Earth's atmosphere, and how abundant they are.  It could even give an estimate of how polluted Earth's atmosphere is, on average.

This technique is applied all the time to distant exoplanets that transit in front of their stars,  to get some idea of what their atmospheres are like.  But applying it to study Earth's atmosphere, using a telescope on earth, is a pretty neat trick, and definitely an interesting approach to a lunar eclipse.

As for me, I'll just keep taking pictures, and post some when it's over!