Adam Schabtach's Blog
It seems that Hatsune Miku, arguably the world’s first completely synthetic international pop star, is five today. There’s a staggering collection of tributes to mark the day here, including 20 minutes of video from what’s apparently her special anniversary performance in Yokohama:
I looked back a bit and found that my first post about her was just a few weeks less than five years ago. If you search this blog for leek you’ll find a few other mentions.
Okay, so, I’ve been thinking about this backlog of stuff I have to blog, since I’ve not been blogging much at all in recent times (what? you noticed?), and I was going to put up a photo of a big modular origami project I completed some time ago, but now I can’t find the stoopid photos of the thing. So here, instead, is a neat timelapse video which Chris brought to my attention–watch it fullscreen if you can:
NightFall from Colin Rich on Vimeo.
If you’ve been here before, you’ll now see that I’ve given the site a cosmetic makeover. The main motivation for this was to get rid of the 450-pixel width imposed on photos by the old layout. Naturally I got a little carried away, and ended up with a new layout, a new color scheme, and a new banner photo. (The photo is of the river next to Uji, Japan, as seen from the bridge.) There are also some nifty HTML5 features such as on-the-fly scaling, which means that this site will adjust its size gracefully if you happen to look at it with a cell phone or other small-screened device. Unfortunately I carefully tagged most of the photos and videos I’ve posted in the past to constrain their width to 450 pixels, so they won’t automatically get bigger in the new layout. Henceforth, though, photos will be considerably larger.
That is a photo, taken late last night, of the Curiosity Mars rover descending to the planet’s surface, as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Think about that for a moment: NASA sends a robot to land on Mars, and manages to fly it past the field of view of an observatory that’s already orbiting Mars.
That, my friends, is some amazing engineering.
(The photo came from NASA’s site, where you can find coverage of the Curiosity rover and other amazing things.)
The fire near Boulder is now mostly under control and the pre-evacuation notices have been lifted. Little fires keep starting anew because of lightning strikes but so far they’ve all been extinguished rapidly.
So, for now at least, the worst is over. Here’s what the arealooked like last night–click it to get a full-sized, un-truncated version:
Thanks for wondering. We’re fine; the nearest fire, although only 1.5 miles from the edge of Boulder, is on the far side of Boulder from us. We also live away from the mountains and hence away from wooded areas (i.e. large collections of flammable material). Yes, it’s scary; no, we’re not in any immediate danger.
Here’s a video of fire-fighting aircraft at the nearest fire, taken today:
I knew a commercial pilot who used to fly fire-fighting runs like that. He said it was the most-fun flying he’d ever done; I can kind of see why.
Chris posted another copy of the Donna Summer video on his blog here; in the ensuing discussion it was pointed out by “Vaihe” that there is a copy with the original audio intact on YouTube, wherein you can hear that the band actually is performing the music. This came as something as a surprise to me; I had only seen various copies with the audio replaced, and hence assumed that the Midnight Special appearance was a massive just-for-show lip-sync fest. Turns out I was wrong. Here’s the complete version:
It’s a nice live performance by Donna Summer, as well as being an interesting live rendition of a track that was never actually played live in the studio. I can’t help but think the guitarist looks a little pained, however.
I’m terribly saddened by the all-to-soon death of Donna Summer, who died today at 63. Her song, “I Feel Love”, has become one of my all-time favorites over the years. (Yeah, I’ll admit it freely.) While one could accurately say that most of my obsession with this song has to do with Giorgio Moroder’s synthesizer work, arguably this song wouldn’t have happened in the first place if she and he weren’t collaborating, and her vocal talent puts it head and shoulders above any number of other tracks of the era (or since). She was still singing, recording, and performing until recently, and it’s very sad that her life, and her stellar career, was cut short by cancer.
While watching this, I had to keep reminding myself that I was seeing live action and not edited video:
I’ve just put up my first post-vacation set of photos here on Flickr. The theme for this set is trains: photos of trains, photos taken from trains, photos of people near trains, etc. It’s probably a little difficult to understand my fascination with the Japanese shinkansen (bullet trains) are unless you’ve seen them in person. I won’t try to explain it; I’ll just say two things: first, they make every form of mass transportation in the US look like a hapless joke; second, even on our seventh visit to Japan, we like them so much that we spent an evening hanging out on a platform in Kyoto station watching them come and go (and taking pictures).