The Unboxing Experience : Evil Husband Edition

My wife is a fan of James Bond movies, in much the same way that Warren Buffett is getting by okay, Van Gogh liked to paint a bit, or Linus Torvalds is a geek.  Prefixes like "rabid" or "über-" come to mind.  This fall marked the 50th anniversary of the Bond franchise, and a "Bond 50" boxed set was released on Blu-ray.  There was a brief burst of media about this, coinciding with the theatrical release of Skyfall, and then it was pretty much forgotten... except, of course, by those of us who are married to hardcore Bond fans who had birthdays coming up.

Of course, it wasn't cheap, and when I found a local store that had it, the words "limited availability" featured prominently.  I bought the one they had on the shelf, a few weeks before Christmas, and hid it away.  Then I got to thinking... my wife is sneaky and likes to play tricks on me, but I grew up in a tricky family.  Obviously, the gift needed to be disguised somehow. Fortunately, we had boxes of various sizes sitting around, waiting to be taken to the recycling center, as well as several days' newspapers.  I decided to give her an "unboxing experience" - but one not nearly as shiny and elegant as you find when you buy the latest iThingy.

Thus a fairly large, heavy package sat next to the Christmas tree for about four days, until shortly after midnight on my wife's birthday - she insisted on staying up late the night before and opening her presents in the middle of the night.  She made it through the "normal" things - cards and money from family, some clothes from my parents, perfume and lotion from me - and then tackled the big, mysterious box... 

...which unfortunately was neatly wrapped in a couple different layers of paper.  (Newspaper underneath keeps sneaky people like her from trying to read through the wrapping paper.)

It turned out to be a box from a sewing and embroidery machine - which she already had. I'd taped it securely shut (of course).  Upon opening it, she discovered a couple old phone books near the top (for weight, naturally; I told you I come from a tricky family) and beneath them, cushioned in crumpled newspapers, another box, also neatly double-wrapped.  At this point, she thought I'd had my fun... She was wrong.

This one turned out to be from a Crock Pot slow-cooker - which, again, we already had. It, in turn, contained another box - this one only wrapped once in newspaper, since I was running low on decorative paper.

This one was a box from baby wipes - which wouldn't be a good birthday present for my wife, even if we were close to running out, and we weren't. Fortunately, this box contained yet another gift-wrapped box, in a different style of paper.

Finally, she said - progress!  Better yet, it was a shoebox - she loves shoes. Unfortunately, it was a shoebox from my old shoes, definitely too large for her and of entirely the wrong style. And it was taped on every side, naturally.

It did, however, contain another neatly wrapped package - and by now, things were getting small enough that there couldn't be too many more layers to this Russian nesting doll of a present.  This was, at last, "Bond 50" - shown below for scale, next to the packaging she had to open to get to it.

The end result was, of course, worth it, since she got a surprise gift that she loves.

It was worth it for me as well - I got a lot of laughs, and photos of the whole process. ;)
But oh, yes, she has vowed to get revenge on me for this... I'd better watch my back!

Lake Waiau

I took this photo of Lake Waiau, located in a cinder cone on Mauna Kea. The lake is 13,020 feet up - 8th highest lake in the US, 37th in the world. Grass and small plants are sometimes found around it, but the rest of the mountain is very dry, and few plants are found beyond 11,000 feet above sea level.

In the summer of 2012, dry weather caused the lake to be much smaller and shallower than in years past; it's easy to tell in this photo how much larger it used to be.

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.