Forensics fantasia

Found here:

“Is this the video?” “Yes.”

“There. Zoom in on the forward figure. Enhance.”

The wristwatch seems abnormally bright, zoom in on it. Enhance.”

Is that a building in the reflection on the watch? I think It’s across the street. Wait! That’s the building where the shooting took place! Zoom in on section 3-14 of the watch. Enhance.”

“There, in section 4-6. That’s the window the shooting took place in. Zoom in. Enhance.”

“How long before this footage was taken did the shooting occur?” “12 hours, sir.”

“Do a Quantum Entanglement series on the window. 13 hour time backup with a 2 hour window, 50 millisecond resolution, both audio and video.” “I can get stills from the video, sir! It’s our man! But the audio is choppy.”

“Redo the audio with a 20 millisecond resolution. Send it all in! Good work, team.”

Damn! That thousand dollar software is awesome! I gotta get me that… then I can Enhance! video coverage of politicians I dislike. Yeah, I’ll go blind.

Sugimoto Kousuke video update

The number of layers in my previous post reminded me of that fourth-wall breaking video I mention now and then-- it's available now in HD. This time, I realized how much it's synced to the music, and I tracked at least part of where the cyan wig went.

This is new work-- a rock anthem with beautiful video. I'd embed it, but youtube doesn't allow. I like the music, but I'm probably just as glad I watched for the first time without the English subtitles (the cc button on the video).

More video from Sugimoto Kousuke. I like the music quite a bit-- it's sort of like Israeli folk music with electric guitar, and the video is rather in the spirit of the sixties never having died.

We can haz handy anti-matter?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/science-environment-14405122?SThisEM

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.

The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) - launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System - so-called cosmic rays.

These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth's atmosphere, creating showers of particles.

Many of the cosmic ray particles or these "daughter" particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth's magnetic field traps them.

Among Pamela's goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.

Link thanks to haikujaguar

Skyscraper fandom

squid314 wrote:

As all good skyscraper enthusiasts know, the tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 2717 feet tall. Keep in mind that there is never any good reason to build anything that large. Just getting to the top is such a production that the elevators have TV screens to keep you occupied during the journey - although if you don't like them, you're welcome to take the 2909 stairs. Cleaning the windows takes a team of forty people three months per clean. And it's not like it's such a spectacular economic success either. Not only did the entire city of Dubai go bankrupt while the tower was being built - the Burj Khalifa is named after the sheik who bailed them out - but over 90% of the tower's apartments just sit there, unused. The only reason to build a tower of that size, honestly, is to send a message. And the message is: "Look! I have a really big tower!"

So the obvious reaction to this astonishing display of human vanity and shortsightedness, or at least obvious if you are a man, is to try to build a tower that is much, much bigger. The most exciting news in the world of skyscrapers this month was that Saudi Arabia has approved the construction of the Kingdom Tower. The Saudi kingdom touts the building as an attempt to diversify the Saudi economy: now instead of just being based on oil, it can be based on both oil and on having ridiculously large buildings. The Kingdom Tower was supposed to be a mile high, until someone did some tests and realized that the ground literally could not support the weight of a building that large, causing them to scale it down to only 3300ish feet.

The article has been forwarded to reddit. Worthwhile comment from mindbleach: "It's a problem I regularly experience on reddit. I'll make a comment and see a reply to the effect of "not so!" and it takes five minutes of back-and-forth to figure out of the complainant is a nitpicking genius or a cocksure moron.".

Problem or solution?

One of the cats has discovered that she likes eating cockroaches. Does this mean it's a bad idea to put down cockroach traps?