Author: geoff

Sun memorabilia

Herewith three items of Sun memorabilia: two photos, and a video clip. The photos were scanned at 600 dpi from prints; you can click through to get the full-res images. The video clip is a 25MB MPEG4.
The first is a group shot taken at a country club somewhere in the Greater Boston area, with Scott McNealy and a bunch of long-time East Coast Sun folks. I can’t remember the occasion – 10th anniversary of ECD, perhaps? (That would make it 1995.)
sun group
The second is much earlier: a shot of the ECD staff including the larger-than-life Barry James Folsom. It must date from about 1987….
sun group
The final item is the video clip that was prepared for Phil Rosenzweig’s memorial, after 9/11. (I doubt that grommit will serve this fast enough for glitch-free viewing; you might want to right-click on the link and save the file before playing it.)
If you can supply precise dates and times, please leave a comment. (And of course I’ve been gazing at these photos, scratching my head and saying, repeatedly, “Dammit, I know that face, but I can’t put a name to it!!!”)

Random 10

Here’s the mix for this week (un-manipulated!). Some Hi-NRG stuff, and then there’s the crystalline elegance of Eddie Jobson’s Theme Of Secrets:

  • “Who Do You Think You Are (Saturday Night Fever Dub)” by Saint Etienne (from Who Do You Think You Are)
  • “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing (Wild Pitch Mix)” by the Pet Shop Boys (from I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing (Dance Mixes))
  • “The Pirate Of Penance” by Joni Mitchell (from Song To A Seagull)
  • “Inner Secrets” by Eddie Jobson (from Theme Of Secrets) personal favourite
  • “Amor Amor” by Nino (from Buddha Bar 2)
  • “Vertigo” by U2 (from How to dismantle an atomic bomb) personal favourite
  • “Betty Boop’s Birthday” by Al Stewart (from Between The Wars)
  • “Love Puppets” by the Legendary Pink Dots (from Curse) personal favourite
  • “Sam Hall” by Johnny Cash (from American IV: The Man Comes Around)
  • “Encore Une Fois [Dancing Divaz Club Mix]” by Sash! (from Encore Une Fois)

What the hell is happening to science education in the UK?

Per Boris Johnson in The Observer – but this isn’t a partisan issue: it’s a national crisis:

The figures are terrifying. In the 20 years from 1985 to 2005, the overall number of entries at A-level rose by about 100,000, from about 680,000 to about 780,000. Yet maths fell from 71,608 to 58,830. Physics A-levels slumped from 46,606 to 28,119. Chemistry fell from 40,337 to 38,851. There are some London boroughs where further maths is virtually extinct.

UPDATE: There’s a good follow-up discussion here.

Occam's Razor 1: Cherished mythology 0

Check out this piece by Richard Seager in American Scientist on The Source of Europe’s Mild Climate

If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea, you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico. That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe’s mild winters is widely known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.

And he does, using nothing more than existing data, clear simple models, and a healthy sense of skepticism. Beautiful work.

Strange how you can slip into the beginnings of a routine

I took Tommy back to his parents yesterday evening. It was odd: we’ve had him stay over for one night at a time, but after four days you start to find yourself slipping into a routine. It also brings back memories from 30 years ago: lots of fun, but so much work! At this age (13 months) kids are simply engines for converting food into energy, growth and waste products; your mission is simply to keep up.
Anyway, here are a few more photos for the extended family.

Alec Muffett

Just learned that my friend and colleague Alec Muffett was in a motorcycle accident in France. At this moment he’s in intensive care in Lille. Updates are being posted as comments to the most recent crypticide blog entry, and also at Chris Samuel’s blog. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Herewith a picture of Alec demonstrating his recumbent tricycle to me. I took it back on March 2nd, just after we’d had dinner. (That’s why we were indoors – it was too dark outside, and my Treo doesn’t have a flash anyway.)
Alec on the tricycle

Fixing pixel defects on my Kodak P850 camera

I just ran into a problem with my new Kodak P850 camera, and eventually managed to resolve it. I’m posting about it in the hope that it may be useful for others.
I was using the Kodak EasyShare software that came with my P850 to review a number of digital pictures for inclusion in my last blog entry (about Tommy). In several of the pictures, I noticed a white blob in the same place in each shot. At first I thought it was a stuck pixel on my laptop (no), then that it might be a bug in the EasyShare software (no). I opened one of the most obviously affected images in Photoshop Elements and verified the existence of the defect.
I was puzzled. Had the problem always been there? I looked back through my library. The early pictures were just fine. The problem showed up as a single white pixel in a picture taken on April 10, and over time grew to affect a small cluster of pixels. It was hard to see except with a solid dark background, but once you knew where to look it was present in everything. (For an example, look at the hi-res version of the picture of Tommy in the preceding blog entry. Look at the middle of his left ear and scan right towards the edge of the cushion.)
At this point, I wasn’t sure what to do. Was this a CCD defect, like a dead pixel in an LCD screen? What was the warranty position on such things? I surfed over to the Kodak web site and drilled down through consumer cameras, P series, P850. I wasn’t even sure what terminology I should be using. The web site offered an interactive troubleshooter, but none of the questions seemed to address my symptoms.
Eventually I found the FAQ. I didn’t know what question to ask, so I had to scan through the whole thing, 10 entries at a time. On the last screenful, the question
What are pixel defects and amplified digital noise?
appeared. This looked about right. The symptoms matched what I was seeing.
The solution was to upgrade the camera firmware from version 1.00 to 1.01, then use the Calibrate Imager function to, er, calibrate the imager. The firmware download was easy, but installation was fiddly: it doesn’t seem to work with a dock. Instead you have to use a USB cable, remove your SD card, copy the new firmware file to a suitable location*, transfer the firmware to the camera using EasyShare, restart the camera in order to update the firmware, restart the camera again, and reinstall the SD card. Then, and only then, I was able to run Calibrate Imager from the camera’s maintenance menu.
The final test was to take a few uniformly dark images to see if any pixel defects were lurking. So far it appears that answer is no – but I’ll be checking regularly. After all, this pixel defect just crept up on me….
Meanwhile, as the FAQ points out:

NOTE: Using the Calibrate Imager feature to reset the imager on the camera will not fix pixel defects in pictures you have already taken. You may be able to edit existing pictures with image-editing software on your computer.

Doh!
—
* I had to put it on my Desktop under Mac OS 10.4.7; the EasyShare application wouldn’t allow me to select the mounted DMG image.