Stephen Skory

Voltron retrieving:

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As a computational astrophysicist, I can work pretty much wherever there is an internet connection (except the San Diego public library, but that’s another story), so at least a day or two a week I work from home. And when I do, I have a little work buddy who sits by my chair waiting for me to throw a foam ball across the apartment so she can fetch it (seriously!). I try to ignore her so I can get work done, but as soon as I even look at her:

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She’s cuter than my work buddies at school, of course.

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My beard experiment has ended. As part of the journey, I did an experimental time lapse, above. As you will see, I slowly shaved my beard and rotated the chair. I should have thought more about exposure consistency between frames. Doing it inside would have worked better but I thought the outside view was more interesting.

I admit that a few hours later I am still occasionally reaching up to stroke my beard, and finding nothing there.

I took a break when my mustache was in full flight and posed with Melissa. As you can tell by her expression, she loved the ’stache.

Two days ago Melissa and I drove from Berkeley to San Diego. We drove on US 101 for most of the way, but used Hwy 1 between Monterey and San Luis Obispo. The weather was fantastic and the scenery beats I-5 any day, even on 101. It does take longer, but it’s worth it if you don’t have arrive at the destination at any particular time. I wanted to record the journey, as I have before, but this time looking forward. Using the Canon A620 my father gave me and my laptop connected to it using USB, I managed to do this without too much interference. However, the batteries on the camera died early on, so I didn’t capture the whole trip, or even the most scenic parts of it. In the future I’ll need to use an external power source.

I am sharing it because there’s no harm. It’s not very good, so I didn’t bother to add any music. Below the video you can see rough route the video covers on a Google map.

The video lasts 1 minute 44 seconds, is 5.6 MB in size, and the frames are separated by eight seconds.

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This is the first time lapse that I’ve time-stamped. I felt it was useful as without the time-stamp, it’s hard to tell exactly what time it is, especially at night. It also allows you to see how traffic changes with each rush hour.

I think this time lapse would have worked pretty well with a very short interval, perhaps a second or less. Obviously, I couldn’t have run it for nearly two days, but it would have converted the traffic from random noise to the main subject. The most interesting stuff happens in the second evening when various mists and clouds come in, so feel free to fast-forward to that.

The biggest problem with this time lapse is the huge number of frames don’t actually contribute to the study. I could shorten the 10 minute running time by increasing the frame rate (or by not including all the frames), but at higher rates the traffic just looks even more random. Things would work better if the view changed much more smoothly.