China

Hi everyone, I'm in China! The internet is really slow, and blogger is actually blocked by the great firewall... please expect short, infrequent and randomly timed blog posts from me for a while.

I am quoted in today's Wall Street Journal

Today's front page of the Wall Street Journal contains a story about how Chanukah and Thanksgiving coincide this year. The reporter for that story contacted me because he read my blog post on the topic from December 2010. I was one of the "researchers," and I got a quote in the paper, too!

Also, just so everyone knows, this is not the last time for many thousands of years before Chanukah coincides with Thanksgiving.  As I pointed out in that previous post, in the years 2070 and 2165 after finishing (or in the middle of) Thanksgiving dinner people will light the first Chanukah candle. Additionally, although the first day of Chanukah won't coincide with Thanksgiving until the year 79043, (assuming the calendar isn't fixed before Passover happens in the summer in the year 15115), in the year 76334 the eighth day of Chanukah coincides with Thanksgiving.

Grandma Rose Lansey, 1920-2013

Two weeks ago, our grandmother, Rose Lansey, passed away at the age of 92.

Grandma in September 2007

A brief obituary can be found here: http://www.jstandard.com/content/item/28423

Grandma always encouraged us to try our hardest, and that we, like her, could do anything we set our minds to. We will miss her greatly.

mheslop youtube comment [explicit]

My old Paternoster video had a very interesting comment on it the other day ... you can't make this stuff up, oh internet. Careful though ... the comment is a explicit and surprising so proceed with caution. mhslop says:

That is more mad than going in to a gym where people hang their clothes up on pegs armed with dog shits freshly picked up off the pavement, and inserting them into people's underpants. In other words, fucking insane. But possibly very fun.

Thanks for the comment mhslop!

No Re Entry

I saw this door recently, with the explicit sign "No Re Entry." And yet, I suspect that people tend to manage getting back in, somehow.

My thesis

It only took a year, but DARPA finally cleared my Ph.D. thesis for public release. If you're interested, you can read it on my website, here: http://eli.lansey.net/research/ThesisFinal.pdf

Fun with stop motion

I got a remote shutter release for my camera and tested it out by making a video.

Escape from the Past

When cleaning out a room, someone in the Biomedical Research Lab uncovered this important set of VHS tapes:

That's right, there was a time where a VHS tape could help you escape from the past and provide solutions for "the 21st Century"!:

Fun with the Droste Effect

These past few weeks I've been creating some Droste-style effects with Matlab. This one is my favorite, my new background image. Let me know if you can think of a good title for any of these 'art' pieces.

This is the old ish clock I 'fixed,' that has been spotted on the blog before. 

finite ish Clock

infinite ish Clock

These are a pictures from the first version of the program. It was just a few lines of code but it warped the image a little making me look like an elf. I fixed the warping problem but some other more subtle problems appeared in certain circumstances. Although I understand how the problems arise, it isn't trivial to actually fix them.

While playing around with the spiral pattern, I accidentally created some sweet Moire patterns. Click to see the full version with all the circles in all their glory. This "piece" is titled "Coffee Power" (by my friend Fanny).

Coffee Power

This is the same as the first image but before I added the angular component that creates the spiral.

Sunflowers are already kind of fractally and spirally to I pulled this one off of flikr (thanks gypsygirl70) and made some cool patterns.

title anyone?

If you want to create images like these without using my hackey Matlab code then check out the MathMap image processor which works as a GIMP plugin.

This isn't the Droste effect, but I think it looks nice anyway.