out of the blue

There's an amazing rain/slush/hail storm going on right now. It is glorious.

I usually listen to music song-by-song. I'll go through a bunch of music and throw whichever songs appeal at the time, trying to place them in a pleasing order. But for the past few days I've been listening primarily to full albums. It's not unprecedented, but it is atypical. Here's a list:

• Decemberists – Picaresque
• New Pornographers – Challengers
• Calexico – A Feast of Wire
• Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
• Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
• Chris Thile – Not All Who Wander Are Lost
• Gosling – Here Is….
• Belle and Sebastian – The Boy with the Arab Strap
• The Velvet Underground and Nico – The Velvet Underground and Nico

Good stuff. I think it's time for Carbon Leaf – Echo Echo. You can mentally add that to the list. It's starting to play.

I was using a Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 1309, a perfectly-formed spiral galaxy, as a background image. But it was a square image, and it had a watermark, and I didn't like the colors. So I found a higher-quality image that didn't have a watermark, and set to work.

Transformation: I made a new canvas of the right dimensions (1280 x 800 for my widescreen laptop), and copied the full-size image in. I converted it into a smart object (so I could keep playing with various sizes/rotations without losing quality from multiple transformations in a row). I decided on a position/size/rotation for the galaxy.

Reconstruction: This resulted in there being some blank space, so I had to reconstruct it by copying from another part of the image and messing around with the colors. I got rid of the more obvious duplicates of the smaller galaxies and stars using the clone tool.

Filter-ation: I sharpened the image twice, then applied a smart blur (this leaves some of the more prominent details, while smoothing out some of the less-contrasting parts). I faded the smart blur so it didn't completely remove the texture. Then I adjusted the curves and the color balance to my ultimate satisfaction (darkened the image considerably, added blue and cyan to the midtones, added a bit of magenta to the midtones, and added yellow and red to the highlights). Then I saved it.

(Eric complained that there wasn't a 1280 x 1024 version, so I made one. It's higher quality than the others.)

I'm currently reading a book called The Golden Strangers, by Henry Treece. It is set in Britain during the Bronze Age, at the time of the first coming of the Aryan horsemen. Here is an excerpt from the introduction. It was written by Rosemary Sutcliffe, who was a British writer of historical fiction.

"We tend to think how simple life must have been when it only meant the basic things, being born, mating and dying, hunting when one was hungry, tending the odd plot of barley, fighting the occasional eleven-a-side war with the next village. In actual fact, our modern, daylight world, for all it's complications, its myriad acretions from international politics to nuclear fission to the problems of what to do with aged relatives, is almost simple when compared to the complications of life in any Stone Age society, whether it be the Pygmies of the Kalahari to-day, or the little dark people of our own South Downs 4,000 years ago. Simple, because it is a daylight world, concerned mostly with things physical and mental. Stone Age world is a twilight world, with no clear line, no line at all, between things spiritual and things physical. And Henry Treece understands this, not only in his mind, but in his very bones."

I'm halfway through, and this seems like a very apt description.

Paff sent me a link to a comic yesterday. It made my night. I quickly read through the archive, with weekly comics stretching back to February of 2006.

Minus, created by Ryan Armand, follows a girl who is unequivocally magic. She can change her hair color at will, go back in time, and even spin entire worlds out of nothing. Against traditional belief, her omnipotence doesn't render the comic unreadable. Armand draws tension through Minus's own personality, through her lack of understanding of other people. Her personality is shaped by her power, stunted in some ways but freed in others. It's an interesting take on the whole cliche of ultimate power. Plus: beautiful artwork.

My favorite of the comics is a standalone piece dealing with apocalypse by asteroid. If you want to read more, here's the first. There are 119 comics as of today, so it might take a while to read them all.

Enjoy.

I'm back from Amsterdam. I brought with me two packages of ontbijtkoek (a Dutch spice cake), only one of which is for me. I promise I won't eat yours, Anne, no matter how tempting.

I really need to find somewhere that sells it, or figure out how to make it myself.

In other culinary news, in the Schiphol airport there was a place that had lots of tasty cheeses, meats, cookies and candy. They had samples of a cheese called "Old Amsterdam" (here it is on cheeseline.com), which is one of the tastiest cheeses I've had. I would tell you that I didn't greedily take three samples of it, but that would be lying. Please forgive me if each of those samples were among the largest on the tray.

Sarah sometimes mocks me for wishing too often that I had more money, but I can't help it. If I had more money, I would spend it on deliciousness.

I had a picnic lunch in a Dutch park today with some Danish guys whom I met this morning. Then we climbed trees for an hour or so, and talked to a Dutch mother who was watching us (and her kids) climb trees.

I leave in a couple minutes for the Peach Premiere. I am very excited. Won't be back until quite late. More later.

I'm safely and happily in Amsterdam now. It was an interesting trip, despite my sleep deprivation.

The walk to the airport was great. I wasn't quite dead tired, so I was able to enjoy the cold morning air, the blue light and silhouetted clouds, the birdsong, and the sun as it peeked over the horizon. I got a cornish pasty from a bakery which had just opened. Quite tasty. Then I got to the airport and felt the tiredness hit me. I shook it off and read a book to pass the time before we boarded.

The flight was beautiful. We quickly rose above the puffy white clouds. I caught a glimpse through them at the Norfolk coastline before we were over the open sea. Every once in a while there would be a large break in the clouds, and you could see the rippled texture of the ocean with the fuzzy cloudprints shadowed upon them and the clouds themselves above (but still below). As we approached the Netherlands we flew alongside a towering mass of clouds and could just see into the gray beneath it as we skirted its edge.

Funny thing. My first glimpse of the Netherlands was a very brief view through a break in the clouds. What did I see? The stereotypical green fields crisscrossed with canals, and two windmills. Then the clouds came back together and I haven't seen a windmill since. Lots of canals and wind turbines, but no windmills. It was somewhat mystical.

Nathan met me with hugs at the airport, and we took a train to Amsterdam Centraal. We walked through an impressive rainstorm to the Blender Institute, where I met most of the Blender team and ate their sandwiches. Mmmm.

It was less rainy when we walked to Nathan's apartment. My bag (and some of the clothes inside) was soaked, but everything dries out eventually. We ate New York Style pizza for dinner, then took a crazy walk along midnight canals. Lots of good conversation throughout, and warm tea upon our return. Now Nathan is sleeping, and I'm making a quick post before bed.

Goodnight.

It's my turn to visit Nathan. That's about a week in Amsterdam, starting in two hours when I begin the six-mile walk to the airport. Then up, across the Channel, and down into Schliphol where Nathan should be waiting. Lots of pictures when I return.

xkcd is great today, but most of you probably won't understand. I wouldn't either, except my combinatorics teacher last year told us stories about Paul Erdos. (Look at the hover text on the comic image.)

Paul Erdos was a mathematician famous for being prolific. He wrote (according to Wikipedia) over 1,500 articles with 511 individual collaborators. If you wrote a paper with him, you have an Erdos number of 1. If you wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him, you have an Erdos number of 2.

This just in: Tom Lehrer and Noam Chomsky have the same Erdos number. (Here is a tool for calculating Erdos numbers; it is not exhaustive.)