New Look
Friday, May 2, 2008, 11:33 pm • 1 Comment »
You may notice a new look for mikero.com. I recently saw a website that used a blog software theme called Vostok, and really liked how it looked, so I essentially stole all of its good ideas and adapted it for my site (and since it was GPL-licensed, I don't have to be ashamed to admit it). Then I made a lighter version of the theme since the dark one might be a bit of a downer for some people. I've only tested things out in Firefox, so hopefully it looks ok in your browser too.
This also gave me a chance to roll out the logo that I doodled in my notebook last year. I like it! I just realized I haven't posted any pictures in 6 weeks, so hopefully I can do something about that next.
Addendum: if you were having trouble with the stylesheet not loading, either try loading the site again (I have changed the style-switcher javascript, hopefully for the better) or click the "light" or "dark" links at the top of the page to set a correct cookie.
Astronomy Pictures
Wednesday, April 30, 2008, 1:35 pm • 1 Comment »
Everyone should look at this collection of images from the Cassini mission to Saturn. That link will take you to the highlights, but elsewhere on the site you can see basically every picture taken from Cassini, as well as Voyager and Gallileo. Most of the good ones are available in very high resolution, and would look very nice printed out in a large format and hanging on your wall (I assume all the images are public domain -- the JPL pictures from Mars are).
My favorite is in Saturn's shadow (especially the 2nd one on that page). The amazing part about this image is that Earth is visible as a tiny dot through the rings. Some other nice ones are on the final frontier, the other side of Iapteus, ring world, odd world, classic appeal.
You can also get all the pictures from the Mars rover. Most of them are pretty stark Marsy landscapes, but some of the panoramas are pretty nice, like this one of Victoria crater.
Late addition: Finally, check out all the Hubble telescope images that are fit to print. They actually encourage you to print them out yourself.
Skelecast
Tuesday, April 1, 2008, 5:24 pm • 2 Comments »
I got a new cast last week. It is a real cast, not a splint, and so I was finally able draw on it. I won't bore you with the technical details, but you can be assured that this drawing is as close to medically accurate as I was able to achieve. I think of it as an homage to Nigel Tufnel's shirt (fast-forward to 1:04). In retrospect, I should have tried harder to find a green marker.. maybe I can still do that before the cast comes off.
I also recently found out about MLB player Jayson Werth, who had the same surgery. See here, here and here. These articles confirmed a few suspicions I had: namely, that Dr. Berger is the only person on the planet who knows about this injury (let alone knowing how to fix it); that anyone who has a split tear in their UT ligament will end up on a several-year wild goose chase; and that if you don't have any doctor-friends who can randomly suggest, "hey, you should check out this guy at Mayo," then you will never find out about it.
Surgery wrap-up
Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 8:07 pm • 2 Comments »
Some of you may know that I had surgery yesterday. In case you were out of the loop, here's the run-down: I had a tear in one of the ligaments in my left wrist, which was caused by my improper guitar technique. After about a year and a half of looking for a diagnosis, I finally found a specialist at the Mayo Clinic who knew what the problem was and how to fix it. You can see a nice informative video about the problem and its surgical fix here. Yesterday was finally the big day. Apart from some excitement when I fainted from the IV being inserted, everything seemed to go according to plan. Now we are back home and I'm doped up on Vicodin and starting to adjust to the one-handed life (I have a big cast that goes up past my elbow!). In six weeks, the cast comes off and hopefully everything will have been worth it.
Wondering how I typed all this with just one hand? I found out about this very interesting program called Dasher, which lets me type by just "steering" the mouse cursor. I don't know whether it's faster than just typing with one hand (doesn't seem to be for me yet), but it definitely takes less movement (so I don't risk overworking and injuring my other hand) and is definitely more like an arcade game, which is always a plus... Check out this video demo. I used it to type this whole post!
MPC in the wild
Friday, February 22, 2008, 1:34 pm • No Comments »
So much for me being a theoretician! Secure multi-party computation was actually used in a real-world scenario! See the overview here.
In Denmark, several thousand farmers produce sugar beets, which are sold to the company Danisco, which is the only sugar producing company on the Danish market. Farmers have contracts that give them production rights, that is, a contract entitles a farmer to produce a certain amount of beets per year and deliver them to Danisco. These contracts can be traded between farmers, but trading has historically been very limited and has been done only via bilateral negotiations.
In recent years, however, the EU drastically reduced the support for sugar beet production. This and other factors meant that there was now an urgent need to reallocate contracts to farmers where productions pays off best. It was realized that this was best done via a nation-wide exchange, a double auction. ... Briefly, the goal is to find the so called market clearing price, which is a price per unit of the commodity that is traded.
In such a double-auction, both sides are reluctant to reveal their bids to the other side. So a multi-party computation protocol was deployed to calculate the appropriate market equilibrium while maintaining the bids' secrecy. They opted to go with a relatively weak protocol that assumes there is no active malicious adversarial behavior. This seems to be motivated by the needs of the problem: any malicious deviation by the bidders would either be detected, or else would be not to their financial advantage (e.g., bidding to buy more as the prices went up). Such protocols have been known for at least 10-15 years, so it's surprising that this is (or so they claim) the first major deployment. I guess we should work on getting the word out...
Eclipse followup
Thursday, February 21, 2008, 12:44 am • 1 Comment »
Things that conspired against my inaugural encounter with eclipse photography tonight:
- I knew I would need a scarf to brave the cold, so I had to run to the store to buy one. They only had one scarf left in the store, so now I have a stupid camouflage scarf. Technically, this isn't something that conspired against photography, but I did feel ridiculous.
- The 300mm lens I borrowed didn't work on my camera; I got a software error every time I tried to take a picture, locking up the camera body for a minute or so.
- It's hard to use a camera with thick winter gloves. I shouldn't complain because I'll bet it's harder still if you can't feel your fingers.
- With cheap lenses, you get special effects for free, like lens flare and ghosting. And not fancy, artsy lens flare (if there is such a thing), but the whoops, eww, cheap-lens-looking lens flare.
- Frankly, I was expecting it to be a little colder than 12 degrees out there. But it was plenty cold to suck all the willpower out of my batteries and/or camera . I have never before had a fresh battery apparently die after 30 minutes.
So basically, in case you haven't guessed by now, the night became a lost cause about 45 minutes into the whole affair -- disappointingly, 30 minutes before totality.
My first instinct for shooting the eclipse was to include some interesting foregrounds, but it was just too dark outside and the moon was just too bright. I think trying to go to a dark secluded place was a mistake. Light pollution is not really a factor when it comes to seeing the moon, and an illuminated foreground might have actually registered in the camera when exposing for the moon. I can definitely see the appeal of an eclipse near sunrise/sunset, where the ambient lighting evens things out much more. Also, the kind of shots I had in mind might have worked better during totality when the moon is a lot darker. A 2500mm telescope with tracking mount would have been nice too ;)
I did manage to get a few different kinds of shots in, but most of them were just test exposures, trying to figure out some reasonable exposure settings. The picture shown here is the best of the bunch. I know you'll look at it and say, "hey, that isn't bad at all -- what is he complaining about?" I agree, it looks quite nice, but it's not a resized image, it's a full-frame crop. So what you are seeing is as much resolution as there is to show. Maybe it will make a nice wallet-size print.. ;)
Well, even without the logistical problems, eclipse photography was still a humbling experience. I felt like this is probably what it would feel like if I tried photographing a wedding, only much colder. You only get one shot, and if you don't know what you're doing, the results aren't good. I won't get the chance to practice lunar eclipses (unless I move to the eastern hemisphere) for another 28 months. I think I will be content snapping pictures of trees in the meantime.