I was born on Wednesday, November 1, 1961 at 9:45 in the morning.
That means that today, I will be 50 years according to the calendar.
But how old am I really?
The tropical year,
the time that it takes for the seasons to return, is said to be 365 days,
5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45.19 seconds. Today, around 12:23 in the
afternoon, it will be 50 tropical years since I was born.
But the tropical year is shorter than the sidereal year, the time taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun once with respect
to the fixed stars, namely 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.76 seconds.
That means that, tomorrow night (November 2) at 5:23 it will be 50 sidereal
years after I was born.
The average anomalistic year, the time taken for the Earth to complete one revolution
with respect to its apsides,
is 365 days, 6 hours, 13 minutes, and 52.6 seconds. That means that, tomorrow
morning at 9:19 it will be 50 average anomalistic years since I was born.
At 12:06:08, I bought the book De Tijd Zelf (Time Itself)
by Harry Mulisch, ISBN:9789023468042, from De Bijenkorf for € 17.90. This is a posthumous publication of
an incomplete novella of only 20 pages, followed by essays, notes, facsimile
of documents, and diary notes. In the evening, I first started reading the
essay by Marita Mathijsen and found some remarks about another never finished
novel by Mulisch De Ontdekking van Moskou (The Discovery of Moscow).
Today, is again one of these special dates. First of all it is a
same number date. But it is also
a Palindrome date according
to the formats DD-MM-YY, MM/DD/YY, and YY.MM.DD. Here in the
Netherlands, but also other countries like Germany it is also
the opening of the carnival with the elferrat having their first meeting at 11:11 in the morning.
This evening, I downloaded the Voodoo Camera Tracker (which involves Structure from
Motion) and tried to make it work with the pictures of
some plant that I took on September 13.
So far, no success, but maybe the pictures are simply too hard for the feature
recognition and matching algorithms.
This afternoon, I tried some other Structure from
Motion tools. I found some interesting leads in the "Turning photo into 3D" thread on the Blender artists forum. I downloaded
Insight 3D and played with it
for a few hours. The nice thing is that you can run the camera calibration on
manually created feature points. But the method for entering and editing
features points is still somewhat clumsy. This could be strongly improved by
adding some simply shortcuts. I also tried Autodesk 123D Catch, which offers a 'cloud' service for creating a 3D
model. I have uploaded a video on YouTube that follows the a path along the 7 original pictures
I took. I also tried ARC 3D Webservice: A Family of Web Tools for Remote 3D Reconstruction.
The results could be watched in MeshLab, but it seems that something has gone
wrong with the texture generation for the mesh. All structure from motion
systems I have tested so far, are rather weak at detecting edges. What I am
looking for is a kind of reverse ray-tracing system, that would allow you to
model, like for example Blender, but would shown the pictures projected on it,
so that you could see if the model matches the pictures. For example, on the
leaves in the pictures there are several pine needles, and I would like to
model these as such. The tool should somehow help me to model these, and then
also take these in account when generating the texture of the leaves beneath
them. They should not be visible on those textures. Maybe some commecial
packages do have these kind of abilities.
This morning, I made an attempt to repair Anne-Ester, the Samsung NC10 netbook according to the instructions given on Wikipedia
to fix the "white screen problem". This problem already has been occuring for
some time, but lately it was happening more frequently. FJF, my Samsung NC10 netbook also suffers from the "white screen
problem", but not as much and mostly only the first ten minutes after start-up.
The news item Quantum theorem shakes foundations on Nature.com refers to the preprint
The quantum state cannot be
interpreted statistically on arXiv. I tried to read the introduction,
and although I do not understand it fully, the basic argument seems to be
rather simple. Sometimes this is a sign that the article is flawed, but later
on the maths in the article gets rather complicated, and especially the
appendices are full of very complicated mathematical formulea. The paper
is written by Matthew F. Pusey, a PhD student at Imperial College in London, and his
two supervisors: Jonathan Barrett (Department of Mathematics, Royal Holloway, University of London),
and Terry Rudolph also at Imperical
College. Also the remark by Antony Valentini, theoretical physicist and a professor at Clemson University,
stating "I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely
to apply to this paper," supports the fact that this might be one of those
classical examples of a clever PhD student by approaching a subject from a novel
point of view, make a remarkable discovery. Does this support my idea that
reality consists of waves which interact like particles?
Yesterday afternoon at 14:03, I bought a Samsung
S24A350H 24 inch LED monitor to replace our Samsung SyncMaster 223BW, because the latter one now takes 10 minutes to start-up.
It looks like the high-voltage power supply of the 223BW is broken. When I tried to
connect the new monitor, I discovered that it has a HMDI connector, and not a HDCP
as is being used with the old monitor. The video card of johan has a HMDI output, but I could not find a HMDI cable. I guess
that although there might be one in the attack somehere, it should buy one tomorrow.
Today, Annabel tried out the new monitor with Anne-Ester, her Samsung NC10 netbook. The resolution of the monitor is
1920x1080, which is higher than 233BW, which is 1680x1050. The NC10 netbook does support
1920x1080 on an external monitor.
At 12:59, I bought the book Brieven aan Olga (Letters to Olga) by
Jan Wolkers, ISBN:9789023455141,
from bookshop De Slegte for €9.95. This book
is about the letters Wolkers wrote to Annemarie Nauta, the women who stood as a model
for the character Olga in his book Turkish Delight, one of his most famous
books, of which a film with the same name was made.
At 11:43, I bought three books and one DVD for € 2.50 each from the sale
at bookshop De Slegte. These are Met een begering oog,
co-written by the monozygotic twins Marije and Merel Wessels, ISBN:9789059113558,
Een glas melk (original title Et glass melk takk) by
Herbjørg Wassmo, ISBN:9789044511476, De Geheime taal van dingen
(Snoop. What your stuff says about you) by Sam Gosling, ISBN:9789050189408 and Max and The City by/about Max Westerman
in New York.
This months interesting links
