entirely safe and fun

Adapted from this, and likewise made available under the GFDL

Toshiba, key player behind the HD-DVD format, announced this week that they’ve called in the priest for last rites. The conventional wisdom holds, then, that the competing Blu-Ray format “wins” the high-def format war. Honestly, I don’t buy it. It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to win. Downloaded or on-demand content is the next, and in some senses final, medium of choice for movie distribution; Blu-Ray gets to be King of Nothing for a day at best.

Consider: High-end computer monitors already offer resolutions of 1600 lines (2560×1600 glories in the entirely parody-proof name “WQXGA”) or more, compared to the 1080 lines addressed by today’s “high-def” content. Next year, there will be even more monitors with more than 1080 lines than there are this year, as an inevitable consequence of computer desktop creep. The year after that, there will be still more. At some point, it will become a selling point for high-end TVs that they are, as electronics salesthings are wont to say, “future-proof” in the same way as those computer monitors. Right around that time, some enterprising person, probably in the adult entertainment industry, will decide to sell content with 1600 or more lines of resolution, targeting the profligate. As a hard-coded standard, Blu-Ray is completely incapable of filling that many lines; it was written with VC-1 as its (arguably) highest-efficiency codec in terms of pixels/Mbit, and with Blu-Ray’s hard limit of 40Mbit/s video throughput, VC-1 can paint at most 1920×1080 at 24fps. On the other hand, a general-purpose computer, driving that same monitor, can add a new codec at any time. There is no pre-set limit on the throughput of its storage or network devices, and in fact we can expect that to remain a fast-moving target; thus, there is nearly no limit on the number of pixels per frame, or frames per second.

You will have your five-megapixel QSXGA smut, sure enough, but it is going to have to be delivered as “just data” rather than on a disc of the older, player-based kind. It may come on a BD-ROM, at least for a little while, but eventually will ship over the ever-accelerating Internet. Blu-Ray simply isn’t enough format, a problem compounded by the popularity and youth of the DVD format, and it seems likely that it’s destined for a northern winter’s day in the sun.

Documented here, the continuing saga of my attempt to master microfoam. Also, the awesomeness of ImageMagick. I was able to make that little montage with just a few keystrokes, by putting just the sixteen pictures I wanted in a directory by themselves, changing to that directory, and saying…
md small
for %i in (*.jpg) do convert %i -resize 100 -filter Lanczos small\%i
cd small
montage *.jpg -geometry +1+1 ..\montage.jpg
Note that “convert” and “montage” are two of the programs in the IM suite. I do have one small complaint about IM — why is it that I can’t take all the results of a batch transformation and “pipe” them into a multi-image operation like montage? The support for piping single images is incredibly handy, and it would be awesome if it could be generalized.

Embarrassingly, I didn’t notice that the previous/next links at the bottom of each page weren’t working, as a consequence of my changes to support the moblog. What I needed to do was query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-16");, rather than just query_posts("cat-16");. What a silly thing to miss…

fig. 1: The baby perceives the object of his desire, but discovers that it is out of reach.

fig 2: He raises his rear end as high as possible…

fig 3: …and rolls onto his back, critically, straightening his torso. Here, he is momentarily distracted by his socks.

fig 4: Dante rolls onto his tummy, having moved forward about four inches. He wins the prize.

More pix on Flickr, tagged “protocrawling”.

As you can plainly see, Dante is still very cute. His cute overflowed, in fact, requiring a cute trim! He’s been trying really hard to sit up — he can do it with a little help, in fact — and he rolls and wiggles about, an obvious precursor to crawling. However, he has an idiosyncratic method of rolling. Consider how you, an adult, might go about rolling from your stomach to your back: probably, you’d do it by pushing up a bit with your upper body, then reaching across your torso with one arm and pushing with that arm (you might instead do the same thing with your hips and legs). Dante prefers to pull his legs under himself, stick his butt in the air, and then lean, giving a more catastrophic character to his movement than would be expected from something as gently named as “rolling”.

Lots of new pictures are up on my Flickr page, tagged “20080129″, and there are more in the “yearzero” tag.

Now that we have cool weather again, I have resumed brewing. Punam got me a thoughtful Christmas gift, an immense, 8-gallon clad-bottom brewpot with two threaded ports, which we’ll also use for canning. It went to work a day early, when, on Christmas Eve day, and with the help of my friends Chris and Carolyn, I made another batch of my German-Belgian hybrid wheat beer. I decided to change up a few elements of the process this time. Most importantly, since it was the beginning of tangerine season and our tree is bent under the weight of its fruit, I substituted three full ounces of fresh tangerine peel for the usual half-ounce of dried orange peel. To accentuate the citrus flavor, I bumped the reinforcing coriander by 50%, changed the hops to the unassertive, floral/pine-woodsy variety Challenger, and lowered the amount to keep alpha acids approximately constant. I then took the fermenter outside, brewing at ambient temperatures, which stretched fermentation time to just over two weeks. I brought the fermenter inside once bubbling had come to a virtual halt, to make sure fermentation went all the way to dry… and did it ever! The final gravity was noticeably lower than usual, at about 1.010, pushing the upper limit of attenuation for the yeast strain. Final product is precisely what I anticipated, the citrusiest (is too a word!) beer I’ve ever had, delicious and nutritious. Some extremes are easy, I guess.

New photos are up on Flickr, tagged “month four”. My favorite is this one, which is festive and seasonal and smiley, but there are others… with some of Dante’s baby friends… Rule of Cuteness #12. More babies = more cute. The relationship is not linear, either, but rather exponential, until you can’t resolve the individual babies anymore.

The boy acts so much more like a tiny person now than he did before. He takes conversational turns with his noises, occasionally decides to mimic facial expressions, smiles and giggles, and has taken to making a pretty wide range of sounds, with four or five different vowels now. It gets harder each week not to try and interpret what he’s saying as underformed English, no matter how many times I reassure myself that it’s impossible that he would be producing meaningful signals of any sophistication. He’s also become more demanding of attention, as he rolls around now and has become a potential danger to himself and others. The scariest moment so far was the first time we found him sleeping face-down, nighmare-provoking after all the back-to-sleep coaching we got over the course of Punam’s pregnancy and during Dante’s perinatal care. Of course, babies sleep just fine on their stomachs, have been doing it since the dawn of time, etc, but the power of the modern culture of scaring new parents to death cannot be denied.

Some of you may have heard that we had a moderately strong magnitude 5.6 quake centered right under San Jose on 30 Oct. Like (happily) everyone else, we’re all fine, none the worse for the experience. In fact, it was kind of a fun ride! But the long-distance capacity of the phone network was strained, so we couldn’t make calls to let everyone know what had happened. So I have turned to the Internet to let everyone know that Dante rode the whole thing out in style, camped out with me and his mom under a doorway.

You got your Yoda in my Cthulhu!

A new batch of pictures is up, covering the last month or so. This is my favorite, as it shows off Dante’s recently acquired “smiling” skill, and also the awesome calamara-cephalic hat that our crafty friend Jenn was kind enough to knit for him… and, as if that weren’t enough, there’s also his Yoda robe. So cute.

For friends and family looking for baby pix, Dante features in a few moblog entries, like this one, featuring Dante wearing an outfit that says “Baby” on it. This is so users know that he is a baby. My dad pointed out an interface problem, though: when you bathe a baby, you almost always remove its clothing. How, then, does such a label enable you to distinguish baby from bathwater?

A week later, we received a bathrobe, also featuring the legend “Baby” on it, which goes about halfway to a solution.

“As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!”

Google Maps has just put up Street Level images for Pittsburgh, PA, and my friend Brian discovered evidence that the next-generation weather control laser, which the University of Pittsburgh has been developing for years, has now gone into production mode. Mounted to the 42-story Cathedral of Learning on the Pitt campus, it is the first weapon capable of dispersing Pittsburgh’s persistent (some would say “constant”) cloud cover. It is also capable of vaporizing a human target in orbit, which will be handy when Space Hitler inevitably returns. Critics have complained about the expense of the project, pointing out that there are plenty of other skyscraper-based death rays, but proponents emphasize that none match the Pitt device for energy density, total photon flux, or appetizing pierogie aroma.

A kind of funny story: Punam and I were in Bangalore on New Year’s Day. We went to the Leela Palace for the brunch buffet, which, to my delight, offered pork and sauerkraut per the German tradition. I happened to notice that one of the bussers had a bottle of cleaning fluid which bore a most auspicious name…

And then, during an episode of the drama Parrivaar on ZeeTV, I couldn’t help but notice a familiar bottle in the hands of a servant. I wasn’t even watching it full-screen, just in a PiP window while I figured out which football game was likely to be most enjoyable.

It is astonishing how, given just a few pixels, smeared out by JPEG artifacts, I was able to pick out a weak brand identity to which I was exposed just once. In the screen grab on the left, the enhanced portion was created by applying edge detection, probably replicating what my retina had to work with (once you add the colors back in), and you can see it’s not the kind of data you’d want for an OCR project, yet my recognition was instantaneous and thoughtless.

The clear corollary to all this: everyone needs a recognizable, colorful brand to maximize their memorableness.

Like this, maybe. People are really sensitive to primary colors. That red, in a region of high contrast, is good for getting attention, right? It worked for the red lettering on a yellow background on the bottle of Colin cleaner.

And now, robot dancing! There are some excellent new pictures of Dante up, tagged with “week five”. You need to see them! Dante is bathed, his hair is temporarily tamed with the application of water, and he has an encounter with a robot (or maybe not — this, after all, is “コレジャナイロボ: IT IS NOT THIS!”, a sort of Engrish antinomy with the Pentateuchal “I am that I am.”).

Update: I was finally moved to do some research on this robot, a gift from some of our East Coast friends. I am a very, very poor and very, very slow reader of Japanese, so this was a painful process. It turns out that Zarigani Toy Works, in Japan, produced this highly generic and yet crappy toy robot to ensure that when an adult gives it to a child, that child will be disappointed that it isn’t the right robot, already a likely a priori outcome due to the large number of robots from which a Japanese adult would have to chose. The small child might, in fact, say, “kore ja nai!” — “This isn’t it!” (or more poetically, “IT IS NOT THIS!”). I’ve turned to Google’s machine translation engine for a doubly hilarious crib to share with the world…

“As for wanting this – it is!!” The scream of sad it is given out from the child who opened the present. Christmas of pleasant expectation suddenly, in the shambles. Is there such experience? If possible, it is something which we would like to avoid. But life, many risks as for the how story which enters into the dying hand so there are no desired ones. In order to obtain desired ones also it is good to know that in a some opportunity also effort is necessary, probably will be.
As for “[korejiyanairobo]” the exquisite copy impression, with parenthesis trick, the it probably is to convey to the child with the effect of trauma class.
Please try by all means as a sentiment education toy.