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Sirens.

Posted 18:22 CET Thursday March 11th, 2010 (yesterday). 36 views. No comments. Tagged with Miscellaneous.

On the first Saturday of March, last Saturday that is, I had a little get together at my humble apartment. Naturally, I had to clean the apartment before people showed up. Even though I like to keep a clean house, it really didn’t hurt to get everything to sparkle a little extra. In between finished the living room and start work on the kitchen, I decided to watch a little TV. Cleaning might be a necessary chore, but damn it’s boring. So I needed a break.

Half way through an episode of South Park, I suddenly heard a lot of sirens that came closer and closer and then stopped not too far from my apartment building. I got up and looked out the living room window and saw this:

The fire brigade pulled two people out of the burning apartment, rescued two or three others from other apartments in the building with two ladder trucks. For me it looked like the firefighters were in total control, the time that passed between the second and third picture above was maybe 2 minutes and then the fire was more or less put out. My heroes! Seriously.

So, there you have it. Bad idea: Set fire to your apartment. Good idea: Don’t set fire to your apartment.

Three Weeks.

Posted 18:25 CET Tuesday March 9th, 2010 (3 days ago). 79 views. 4 comments. Tagged with Personal, Ramblings.

A while back I saw a TV documentary on the Discovery Channel about space and Einstein’s theory of relativity, in particular special relativity. This is fascinating stuff, most of which is way beyond what I am able to wrap my head around, however. One of the things that comes from special relativity is that the time of a rapidly moving object seems to slow down. This is also something that makes my head hurt if I think about it too much. To summarize, it means that if you jump on a spaceship that travels with a speed close to the speed of light, time will move much slower for you relative to the people who is still stuck on Earth.

This is called time dilation and sounds like science fiction and theoretical mumbo jumbo, but it’s actually possible to prove in everyday life. The clocks on board the GPS satellites orbiting Earth are intentionally set wrong to compensate for time dilation. If they were not, GPS simply wouldn’t be as precise as it is. It’s also possible to see this if you get two very accurate, synchronized clocks, go to an airport, leave one of the clocks there and fly around the world. When you get back, you’ll notice that the clock you brought with you on the journey has actually slowed down a bit relative to the one you left on the airport. You’re probably also fed up with airline food.

Pretty funky stuff right there. I’m venturing a bit outside my normal domain here, so the clock-on-an-airplane story might not be entirely accurate, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it somewhere before. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Continue reading "Three Weeks." →

Druse.

Posted 20:27 CET Monday March 8th, 2010 (4 days ago). 71 views. No comments. Tagged with TV Series.

If you are able to watch the Norwegian TV channel TV3 on your television, I hope you are prepared for tonight. Once again, TV3 is airing the Crème de la Crème of TV entertainment as the season premiere of the Norwegian version of Paradise Hotel is finally coming on. 10 good looking people locked up in a Mexican hotel, their only real task being to get laid on national TV. How can this possibly fail as entertainment!? I doubt it can.

All right, if all we want is to see people getting it on, there are certainly easier ways to see that than to watch a TV show where you know it won’t really happen. The movements you see under the covers might as well be one of the participants having a seizure. But there is actually one reason to watch this show: To get a very good laugh. It’s a phenomenal social study. Let’s have a look at this year’s lineup! Continue reading "Druse." →

Hairy HDR.

Posted 20:21 CET Sunday February 28th, 2010 (12 days ago). 150 views. 2 comments. Tagged with Personal, Photography.

As per popular demand, here are a few picture of me with two and a half weeks worth of facial hair. I have the impression that I might have created an illusion of actually having a massive beard, but, as you can see from the pictures, that is far from the truth. As you probably also notice, I’m not very comfortable in front of the camera, at least not when I have to take the pictures myself. Don’t I look all jolly and excited!?

Since I was going to force myself to take some portraits, I decided to try to take some high dynamic range, HDR, photos. It’s an interesting technique I’ve been sniffing at for some time, but I’ve never gotten around to try it until now. Done right, HDR can produce some stunning results. To create an HDR picture, you take several picture of the same scene with different exposure and magically (or “mathematically”, if you will) merge these pictures to create a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas in the resulting image. Continue reading "Hairy HDR." →

All Clear.

Posted 08:53 CET Sunday February 28th, 2010 (12 days ago). 116 views. No comments. Tagged with Internet, World News.

After watching the live coverage from Hawaii yesterday I think we can safely say that tsunami prediction is not an exact science yet. At some point in time, Mother Earth will fuck us up real good. We’re not capable of predicting any of the things she can throw at us without even breaking a sweat: Earthquakes, volcano eruptions, floods, tornadoes. We can’t even predict the weather correctly twelve hours in advance. That cute weather girl tells you the sun will shine the next day and you wake up to a blizzard. Of course it will all accumulate in December 2012 when everything is supposed to go to hell. I, for one, would really like to experience 2013 and the years to come after that, so I’m leaning towards the Wulfmorgenthaler explanation to the whole Mayan calendar thing. See the comic above. Click to enlarge or find a good magnifying glass.

In terms of technology and the internet, the last 24 hours have been very interesting. After the earthquake in Chile, land line and cell phone networks went black in many areas, while the internet continued working. Because of this, people were able to communicate with the outside world, send pictures, messages and even connect video calls through Skype and other voice over IP services. The same thing happened to some degree after the Haiti earthquake. Continue reading "All Clear." →