On a whim I did this time lapse out our front window yesterday. I didn’t plan it out very well and I shot it through the half of the window with a screen, but it turned out ok, I think. Look for the tree branches springing upwards as they lose snow, car tire tracks evaporating, and the shadows and clouds moving as time progresses. The frames are separated by about 1 minute for the most part, but I was adjusting the interval in the beginning so not all frames are separated by the same amount of time. For the best effect, make sure the “HD” option is turned on (it should be blue and is toggled on/off by clicking on the letters) and the video is viewed in full screen. It’s 1m20s long.

A few days ago, on Saturday September 10, I attended the collegiate American football match between the University of California Golden Bears and the University of Colorado Buffaloes. Although we’ve lived in Boulder for over a year, and I work in the football stadium, this was the first Buffs game I have attended.

The game was an exciting one. The Bears led for most of the game, but the Buffs tied the game in the last minute of regulation, sending the game into overtime. Quite surprisingly, the Bears managed to win in overtime, something that as a True Blue, I am not used to seeing from my Bears.

This is the first season where the Buffs are a member of the Pac-12. I think they are not quite up to the standards of the Pac-12. Here are some of my observations from the game.

• The security getting into the game was a perfect example of security theater. They patted people down in a very cursory way searching for who-knows-what. Once inside the stadium, I didn’t see security officers in the stadium at all until the end of the game. In the closing moments they were positioned in front of the student section in a weak attempt to prevent the students from rushing the field. How are 20 people in yellow jackets going to stop 4,000 drunk undergraduates? In the end, because the Buffs lost, the students stayed put.
• Note to self: For the next game I attend, I’m putting all kinds of goodies in my office the day before the game. No one seemed to notice when I went inside to get my water bottle this time (to avoid paying $3.75 (!) at the concessions for water), so I figure I can store even more stuff.
• The stadium feels a bit dated, kind of like Memorial was before reconstruction. The isles are tight and the access gates are narrow. The loudspeakers are located at one end of the stadium, meaning that they have to be extra loud to reach the other end. The head referee’s microphone didn’t work, so we had to guess what penalties were or catch the hand signals (which was difficult because he faced the other way during announcements). However, the views of the front range and flatirons are supreme.
• I noticed several times during the game that the PA people are, frankly, rude. I always thought that music is required to be turned off during plays, but the PA people would let it continue into the beginning of plays. Also, at least once when the Cal Band started to play after a Cal score, the PA played music over them. It’s one thing to play over the 183rd playing of “Tribute to Troy” when playing U$C, but it’s unacceptable to play over the Cal Band.

The only cool thing about CU is the running of the buffalo, Ralphie. I think there should be the running of the bear. How about a 800-lb grizzly bear running across the pitch at Memorial Stadium?

Dirt Jumps in the foreground, Boulder in the background.

The park is quite extensive and the designers have taken advantage of all the space they had available. Each trail feature is accessible by shared bike/walk trails, so parents can keep an eye on their kids even if they aren’t on a bike. Running down the middle of the park are two irrigation ditches (which is a crude description of them, they are much nicer than that) which splits the park into smaller sections. The smaller sections keeps things more intimate which is good in a park that will tend to get very busy. Nearly all of the single track trails are one way, which is very nice. Right now the vegetation is low so it actually isn’t a huge problem, but it is always very startling to come around a corner upon someone coming the other way.

A small section of the park. Click for the full PDF of the trails.

To be honest, much of the park makes me feel like I have no skillz (yes, that’s skills with a ‘z’). Even the Skillz Loop, which is designed to be a place to learn skillz without being pressured by better riders to get out of the way challenges me. I tried most of the trails today, but not all of the technical options, especially stuff like this:

The park has two pump tracks, and I had fun riding one of them (Mesa Top) many times. The other one (Creekside) I did once, but it was very muddy and I didn’t want to ruin the pump track or get any dirtier than I was already.

The Mesa Top Pump Park

I’m really excited about this new facility, and I hope to slowly improve my skillz over time at the park. It’s only a couple kilometers away from where we live, so it’s really convenient even if I only have an hour free. My only complaint right now about the park is it’s clear they haven’t quite figured out how to do the drainage from the sprinklers, because there are more than a few muddy spots around the park that contribute to trail destruction at an accelerated pace.

The Corkscrew, with steeply banked corners, viewed from the top.

The Slopestyle aerial trails area.

Someday this could be me!

The first movie is a slow rotation around the entire volume of a simulation at a contemporary epoch, which means that this image is produced from the state of simulation at its end, 13 billion years after it started. The colors correspond to the density of matter in the volume, from dark blue to white as density increases. The simulation is a periodic cube with dimensions 20 Mpc/h on a side. In comparison, the diameter of our galaxy is somewhere around one thousand times smaller. This means that the whitest areas correspond to clusters of galaxies, and our galaxy would be just a small part of one of the white blobs. Be sure to watch the movie full screen!

(Quicktime version)

Below shows the time evolution of the simulation from beginning to end. This is a thin slab of the center of the simulation (10% thickness) viewed from a corner of the cube. Notice that early on the matter is very clumpy everywhere, but rapidly forms dense knots connected by thin filaments. This is how the real universe looks! After about the half-way point of the movie you’ll notice that not much happens. Again, this is how the real universe looks! Much of the large-scale evolution of the universe was finished about 7 billion years ago. This movie uses comoving coordinates, that compensate for the expansion of the universe. If I were to use proper coordinates, which are the kind we use every day to measure normal things with rulers, the movie would show the simulation starting very small and then blowing up. Again, use the full screen option for the best image.

(Quicktime version)

Yesterday, Melissa and I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We were met there by my brother Adam and his lady friend Shinji, who not coincidentally decided to also see the aquarium on the same day. The aquarium has expanded since my last visit. There is now a northern wing that has fresh water otters, an “outer bay” tank and a seahorse exhibit (that was under construction, sadly). More than the last time I was there (or maybe I was too young to pay attention to things not cute), the aquarium really pushes conservation and ethical seafood consumption. They have a set of cards you can carry to help guide seafood and sushi purchases in stores and restaurants.

But what about the cute animals? (These links go to movies.) Fresh water otters gamboling! Feeding the penguins! A huge wolf eel in the kelp forest tank!

There are lots more photos here.

Play Quicktime version

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

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.

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.

Play Quicktime version

View Larger Map

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.

Found while cleaning my computer, above is a short movie I made a long time ago showing me on TV at the 2002 Tour de France. I’m near the top of the Col du Galibier, which is one of the highest passes in Europe and is used by the Tour de France nearly every year. In the above still image I’m on the left of the frame in a Cal Cycling kit with my yellow Cal hat on. You can hear me yelling ‘¡venga! ¡venga!’ as Santiago Botero (who is Columbian) sprints by for maximum mountain points. Here are one and two and three different views showing how I looked that day. Oh, and here is me and Laurant Jalabert, a two-time Polka-dot jersey winner. I’m pretty happy with how that photo came out.

Above is a video I put together documenting the 2007 Collegiate Track Nationals. I put this race together over the last 10 months (along with a great deal of help from others, especially Chris Nekarda). Held at the San Diego Velodrome, over 100 collegiate cyclists from around the country competed over three days. My team, UCSD, did quite well, and at least one UCSD rider was on every podium.

You can watch the video by clicking on the image above, or if that’s giving you problems, right click here and select ‘save link as…’ (or something similar depending on your browser). Then you will play the movie off your hard drive. You’ll also need the most recent version of Quicktime on your computer for either method. If you have a reasonably fast connection, clicking on the image above will start playing the video right away.

Some notes: If I had planned my video a bit more before the event, I could have had done a better job (imagine that!). In particular, a few of my teammates are under-represented in the video, which was purely accidental. I would have liked to have a more even coverage of everyone.

I hope you enjoy the movie. Thanks to Chris Schroeder for letting me borrow his DV video camera, and Chris Nekarda for a few still photographs in the movie.

Here is a neat time lapse of the drive from my apartment to Melissa’s maternal grandmother’s house in Newport Beach. I set my camera up on the tripod in the rear section of my Volvo station wagon. I held the tripod down with a few bungee cords, but you’ll notice that the camera moves slightly through the duration of the movie. I’ll have to devise some sort of better securing mechanism for future efforts. In particular, I’d like to figure out a solid way of having the camera point forward on the dashboard. I cropped the images to remove the majority of the inside of the car as it isn’t very exciting.

Playing exclusively on the computer doesn’t give me complete confidence that I can actually apply these skillz to the real world. There’s no reset button in the real world. A confidence-builder is how much better I can fly the Blade CX2 now (which my father bought for Christmas last year). The last time I flew the CX2, nose-in (when the controls are backwards) flying was a bit sketchy – now I can fly in all orientations. To that end, check out the video below (16.85mb, 1m 11s) of some heli gymnastics.

The width of the skylight is about twice the diameter of the blades, so there’s not too much wiggle room.

Because there is so much going on here, I find it’s nice to look at just one flower open up at a time. As the overcast conditions gave way to sunshine, intermittent clouds covered the sun, which lead to the change in brightness during the movie. As is the case with many of my time-lapse movies, the higher resolution version is well worth the download. Of course, either version is much better than anything you’d see on YouTube.

I also took some close-up images of the flowers, and the honey bees patronizing them. You can visit the gallery by clicking on the image below. A couple of the bees had very impressive collections of pollen on their legs.

After the internet provided no clues about the twitching, I took it to a local shop. The shop tech guessed I had a bad crystal in the receiver. As soon as he popped in a new set (in the transmitter too, of course) the heli was as good as new.

Since then I’ve bought a new Lithium-Polymer battery that allows nearly 20 minutes of flying time, compared to the 5-7 from the included Nickel-Metal Hydride battery. I also bought a different motor which the helicopter manufacturer recommends for maximum flight time. The old battery still works, but it is not as satisfying as the new one.

Below is a video of me taking the heli up to about eye level, (well out of ground effect) hovering for a few seconds, and bringing it back down safely. I think the heli looks far more stable that it did in my last post on this topic.

Since I made the above movie a few weeks ago, my helicopter is again on the fritz. This time, it’s the tail motor which no longer works. The tail blades very easily strike the ground, and this causes the tail rotor to slow down (obviously). In order to speed the tail rotor back up, a quick burst of current is required, which repeated enough times eventually burns out the motor. The symptom is a nearly uncontrollable heli. I have burnt out two tail motors.

Since I don’t want to continually buy new tail motors ($10 a pop), I went ahead and bought myself the RC simulator I yearned for only two weeks ago. As you can see in the movie below, crashes in the virtual world are much less devastating:

In this movie I’m flying using the night mode, which puts lights at the tips of the rotors so you can see the orientation of the heli. Red and blue on the main rotors; yellow on the tail rotor. Please excuse the poor quality of the video as I made it with my (relatively) antiquated digicam. I would have used a software video capture program, but they’re (very) not free and cause the computer to slow down so much that the aircraft is uncontrollable. Below is a video showing a bit more flying skill and no crashes:

My goal with the simulator is to improve my instincts and reflexes, so when I return to the real world, I’ll have mastered all the basic skills. It’s also fun to fly and not have to worry about real world consequences.

Quicktime movie, 3.70mb, 3m 11s playing time
1917 frames, 7h 39m, ~13s between frames
1s playing time ~ +2min real time
from SERF, 4th floor, looking west
March 20, 2007
Recommended: Large Version, 1000×260, 25mb

Perhaps it’s the nature of pouring concrete, or union jobs, but the middle of this time lapse is pretty boring. Sorry about that. The beginning is fun enough; and the end, with the inch-worm workers and the vacuum-like concrete massager, is cool, too.

Please note the right 1/3 of the image is slightly affected by the reflection of the building façade on the window. Let me repeat, the large version is worth downloading.

Roll your mouse over the whitespace above and click it on it. Your challenge is to figure out what the image is as quickly as possible. I’ll wait…

Some of you may remember my photo mosaics I played around with a while back. This is exactly that, but this time, I took a screen shot every 20 seconds or so as the program refined the image.

This mosaic is made up of a bunch of ‘glyphs’ which are a colored square with a colored letter/symbol in the middle. The colors and symbol are randomly chosen. The movie above compresses about 8 hours of real time into under two minutes. In that 8 hours the program tried over 330,000 glyphs for the 2500 tiles on the image. The interesting thing is the basic shapes in the image resolved themselves quickly, while the colors took much longer, and never really matched the original image.

Here is a link to a composite photo, showing the original photo and the final mosaiced photo. I don’t think the mosiac really captures my tongue accurately.

Quicktime movie, 3.72mb, 1m 40s playing time
1000 frames, 3h 40m, ~13s between frames
my neighbors deck, looking north
February 22, 2007

This time lapse was shot before, during, and after the passing of a rain front. See if you can tell when the rain starts. The most interesting thing to follow are, of course, the clouds, which change direction & speed. The clouds really get moving on the backside of the front.

I hope you like the new, inline quicktime movie presentation.

The Blade CP is an electric helicopter with separate main and tail motors. It features Cyclic/Collective Pitch Mixing that uses three servos which move in concert to raise and tilt the swashplate. The swashplate is connected to a flybar, which is then connected to the main rotors. This is called the Hiller control mechanism. The electronic throttle is linked to the collective, so as the throttle increases, the overall pitch of the blades gets steeper. The helicopter also features a gyro that helps keep the helicopter stable and pointing in one direction (yaw). If I get proficient enough with the helicopter, I can upgrade several parts which will enable aerobatic & inverted flying.

Here are a few photos of the bird in action, with a couple examples below.

In the first part of the movie, the cube is rotated about its center. Next, while looking along the z-axis, the volume of the cube plotted is reduced until only 1/10th of the cube is shown. Then, this 1/10th thickness is scanned through the entire cube, and then the volume plotted is replenished back to full.

The things to notice are how the dark matter form areas of high density, which are connected by filaments. Between these are areas of relatively few particles, which are called voids. This is how our universe really looks, with huge collections of galaxies clustered together, separated by huge expanses of nearly empty space. I should point out that there are many more galaxy haloes in this box besides the yellow boxes.

What I was looking for was one of those yellow boxes which is fairly isolated from areas of high density dark matter. I picked one, and now I am doing this same simulation again, but with higher resolution boxes centered on the area of interest. The simulations I’m doing right now are fairly cheap (in computer time currency). I want to be sure that when I run big, time-intensive simulations in the future that I’ve picked a good area to focus my attention on.

I did this visualization with Visit, a stereo, 4D visualization tool out of the Livermore National Lab. The ‘stereo’ means that it can create two images of the same data that are slightly offset, which create a 3D effect if viewed correctly. The fourth dimension is for time, as it can handle time-ordered data sets. I then used Visit’s Python scripting features to output 800 individual PNGs, which I then stitched together (exactly like my time lapse movies) to make this movie.

Quicktime Movie, 7.44mb, 3m 1s playing time
Larger Version (worth the wait!), 42.83mb, 1000×655 pixels
1087 frames, 3h 36m, ~12s between frames
music: Comfort Eagle, by Cake
SERF building roof looking west
February 1, 2007

I would have liked this time lapse to cover more time, but the internal camera battery died because I didn’t fully charge it. I did have my external battery plugged in, but the camera cannot run off that alone. Also, since these images are very complex, even JPEG compression cannot reduce their size too much, and I nearly filled my 1gb card. For example, my previous time lapse project, Airport Sunset, I took over 600 more photos than this time. The difference is those frames had nearly half devoted to the sky.

Quicktime Movie, 9.80mb, 4m 47s playing time
1723 frames, 1h 44m, ~3.2s between frames
Laurel and Union streets facing nearly west
January 15, 2007

The external battery pack and ‘intervalometer’ are connected to the camera. I was hoping to capture the Comet McNaught but I should have read that linked article first, as it has become too close to the sun now. Next time I have a freeway in a time lapse I’ll situate it longitudinally so apparent motion is clearer.