Picnik AutoFix
Thought I’d give Picnik a try.
Hmm…
This is actually not bad.
Shot on my Nikon D2x, here is the Exif. (I like to use the least amount of in camera processing and do all the tweaking in post)
After running thru Picnik AutoFix & Sharpening (kinda went overboard on the sharpening)
After PhotoShop CS2 using my typical workflow
Vernor Vinge’s “Focus” Becomes Reality
One of my favorite sci-fi authors of all time, Vernor Vinge, wrote about an advanced form of slavery in A Deepness in the Sky (a prequel of sorts to his most excellent A Fire Upon the Deep… which you should read first, btw). The slavery involved virally inducing a form of autism in an individual, Focus it was called, in order to have them operate at beyond-OCD like performance in their jobs. Individuals would be so focused on their work that they wouldn’t care about freedom, personal hygiene, eating, etc. Scary stuff.
Now imagine having the ability to induce that sort of autism by taking a pill, and then taking another pill to turn it off. Need to do some serious number crunching? Trying to meet a huge deadline?
What do you think?
“Canadian” Is a New Racist Euphenism?
This is news to me. Has anyone heard about this elsewhere?
From Boing Boing:
The Canadian National Post looks on with mild horror as American linguists report on the growing trend in the American south to use “Canadian” as a masking euphemism for black people, so that white racists can say socially inappropriate things without tipping listeners off about the cancer in their souls.
Convert a 2D Image Into a 3D Fly-through
Pretty snazzy stuff.
From Stanford:
Make3D converts your single picture into a 3-D model. It takes a two-dimensional image and creates a three-dimensional “fly around” model, giving the viewers access to the scene’s depth and a range of points of view.
It uses powerful machine learning techniques (more details here), to learn the relation between small image patches and their depth and orientation. This allows it to model 3-d structures such as slopes of mountains or branches of trees.
After uploading your image, you can “fly” in the 3-D scene (requires VRML viewer or Adobe Shockwave), or watch a rendered 3-d movie (flash required).
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