He seems pretty rad, that image up the top is the work I saw in the gallery. It looks awesome in the flesh, not that awesome in the screen. A dude to examine definitely.

Just before the glorious day of poultry, a paper was published where I am the first author.

Check it out here

It’s called “Using Smartphone Camera Technology to Explore Stellar Parallax: Method, Results, and Reactions”. Which is official-ese for getting high school students to use their Android or iOS phones to play around with the method behind stellar parallax. Stellar parallax,… in a very short explanation …, is measuring how far a star is away from us by looking at how the star ‘wobbles’ in the sky over the year…. the closer the star, the bigger the wobble. Its fundamentally how we know the distance to anything outside of our solar system, and it is how we define the distance unit in astronomy, the parsec. So its pretty essential stuff to learn about astronomy. BUT the way it is usually taught in high school is by giving the students a very abstract definition…. which really only makes complete sense after you understand the definition… so this method of instruction is really just a illusory pile of circular uselessness. You can, however, use some type of camera…. a smartphone with large screen is a tool that seems custom-made for this…. to run through the method in a classroom on the small scale before trying to explain to the students what the definition means on the astronomical scale. The image above is from my early test run where I had a fake star blu-taced to a stapler and took images with my iPhone as it ‘orbitted’ around the fake sun. Its been used in quite a number of classes now to great effect… once the apprentices have some noisy wobbly fun with their cameras then they are in the perfect spot to actually understand the abstract definition… which is no longer abstract but can be directly linked to what they just did with their phones. The next step for the students is to actually do this for real with a real star using real data with real software astronomers use. I have finished the design for running this in class and this will be tried and tested in first term 2012 where they look at a star, Proxima Centauri, for which I have been collected data from for nearly two years from the LCOGT.net telescopes. Watch this space!

What I thought was gonna be pretty awesome actually knocked it to the next category ‘excessively rad’. My first time at Cockatoo Island, and it was pissing down creating quite an awesome atmosphere (especially rain smashing onto iron) to experience some amazing street art. I have minimal criticisms of it all. Only thing that stuck out was the actual bit that looked like an actual gallery…. sorta didn’t gel with the rest of the experience which was seamlessly embedded into the giant tinshed structures around the place. Having said that, everything in the gallery was friggin’ tops. And of course the sponsors area…which is always a little tacked on!

Go there (http://outpost.cockatooisland.gov.au/). Go there in the rain… less people, more atmosphere, wetter footwear. Heres a little vimeo I whipped up using data from my DSLR and iPhone mic.

Pretty cool little gallery opening with 4 new exhibitions from 4 artists. There was nothing I didn’t quite like! My pick of the litter was Cath Robinson – Thought noise/wave form preludes, which is the first image….. Initially I thought it was way cooler than it actually is, but it is still mega-cool. (I’m being a bit cryptic methinks). And what is the next image? Well, you should just go check it out eh?

Whenever you take an image with a telescope, it is never really automated. Sure, modern telescopes, like the ones I use, you just go… Hey mate… couldja.. ya know… point over there at some point and take a little snappy snap? I’ll be asleep, you just do yer work eh? Thank you robotic slave! They ain’t all like that… but thankfully mine are!

Depending on what mood its in, you’ll get what you want in a week or a month or next year… but whatevs… while the process is generally automated and mechanised, and the cameras themselves are not essentially different than the cameras in iPhones or SLRs, albeit with ocean-floor deep pixels and needing to be cooled to -180 degrees C… there is still a human element. It is very very easy to make a crap astronomical colour image. I’m happy to say that kids under my tutelage get to make awesome colour images from an awesome telescope….. BUT it still needs human input. You need to align, colour, stretch, balance, do cartwheels and a jig to get a really nice astronomical image out.

That… and the telescope doesn’t know where its pointing… it doesn’t really know anything.. so I thought I’d see what kinda of image a computer would make if I just told it to grab a whole bunch of images and stitch them together as best it could. So I coded up a little pattern matching routine up using some common astronomical tools that get the computer to analyse, pattern match and balance the images automatically.

The first conclusion I came to was that computers are very inefficient… it took 2 weeks per image running on 2 cores of a modern computer for the computer to match it all up nice and sweet…. where it may have taken me an afternoon or so. But ya know… their brains run in serial rather than parallel like ours, so we have to give them a break…. I didn’t quite know what to expect really because usually when you make an image, the human is involved at some point and ends out looking how you want it, albeit hopefully accurate representing something that exists.

But here you are… what a computer sees when it looks at the sky without the help of a human……

Its a sad day when you meet the girl at the end of the internet.

Reminds me of this also.

Yeah, well, ya know. Yet another stunning article involving me and my high school escapades. Slowly I’m trying to get students to get really into science and do real ‘stuff’. Lauren is up there at the front forging new ground. RIP favourite jacket wherever you may be…. *sigh*

While it was never my intention for this site to be a microblogging site (unlike utopiantrace.tumblr.com), I feel that this video, having fundamentally altered the course of my experience of humanity, deserves it own special post. Hopefully it infects you with happiness for the future as much as it did I. Enjoy.

Before I talk about the topic, I do have to say one thing…. god-damn theres a lot of art events in Sydney! At least one, if not five every night of the week (excluding Monday). I’ve been tettering around the periphery for a long time, going to particular ones that interest me here and there on the odd monthly occasion. Now though, that I have achieved a high rate of fl0w per unit hour worked at my 9-5 desk jobette, I’ve been looking to broaden my horizons, and have always wanted to have a good decent extended ‘hook-in’ to the art world… I find it fascinating, I try to make art myself, but the artworld has its own social quirks and artwork criteria that is, as yet, somewhat alien to me. At its basest level I’ve at least decided that art openings are “Drink free booze, meet colourful people and experience things, for better or worse, that you have not been seen before!”. On this raw level I heartily approve… why go to a bar and try to tune out pokies or sport or some obnoxious people or simply just the ubiquitous poor deco when you can drink booze at an art opening in a Kings Cross carpark while staring into a small cavity at some really tiny model human dioramas?

Well thats what I did tonight… but wait… I will digress again…..

I really LOVE Kings Cross. Its got such a bad reputation… but why? As long as you can handle scantily clad women with the possibility of seeing them even more scantily clad, occasional throngs of ignorant but ignorable wankers, greasy greasy ass-food and wearing a hazmat suit on saturday and sunday mornings, I think it has a lot going for it. As well as the bad, there are some really really good food places and bars with no hazmat entry requirement (Goldfish is worth a mention here, as well as that dumpling boutique, the name of which eludes me for the moment). The actual layout of the streets is actually quite nice… not too thick, not too thin, the housing density is absolutely spot on, you can easily walk to the city and there are a lot of ‘surprises’ to be found. I wish I had the foresight to get an image of it, but like on the TOP of the carpark where the art event was held was this really nice park… you wouldn’t have known about it at all if you didn’t get a little explorey like I did… but it was sweet… I did get a pic of the view from it, but it doesn’t really illustrate my point at all….

But anyways back to the point, which is this :

Thats the entry sign to the Alaska Projects first art show. It was on the front of the entry to an otherwise non-descript carpark entry… but as you went in…….

BAM. Lots of people getting boozy, having a chat and looking at art! Woo! Even if you don’t like the art, I sorta like the art opening format…. although I do have my criticisms…. I’d sorta prefer it to be equally boozy and social…. BUT with an added element of formal presentation, like I’d reeeeeaaaaallllyyyy like to see each of the artists do a 5 minute slapdash presentation (ppt even) of what their art was, what their thoughts were behind it, where it is situated in their field… etc. etc. etc…. I mean I have seen this to a minor extent before at other openings, but I find at art events that I am looking at a piece of art with questions generating themselves in my mind about what I am experiencing/viewing, but no clue of who the artist is to hunt them down and pick their brains…. Apart from that though it was cool I’m still a n00b I guess….

Anyways the art wasn’t that spectacular really, either that or I was really tired. Both of which are equally good explanations for my lack of engagement. At the same time I’m not at art critic at all, so I’m not going to go into any detail on that! For me I think I find the whole sociological idea of “Bust yer ass to do some awesome shit, then present it and get a little boozy” absolutely %^&$ing GOLD. As I said before… I’d probably prefer a bit more of a semi-structured talk or introduction early on so you could bug the artists… but I digress ….

I really liked Phil James’ stuff, currently unavailable at this link… hopefully it pops up soon…. but he juxtaposed like old classic paintings with A) an Xwing from starwars, B) A sidewinder missile from an F16 (That I knew what this was with no prompting is showing my well hidden plane nerd roots) and C) the monkeys from 2001 a space oddyssey… now I’d love to show you some photos of this, but I didn’t feel right taking them in front of the other gawkers, so if they turn up I’ll post them, but otherwise, here’s this :

Probably the biggest surprise, me and this dude were going “What the $$%# are those chicks doing?” looking into a little gap in the wall which seemed like little more than a defunct ex-powerpoint….. until we got closer and got surprised. There was a cute little diorama on the inside with some dudes doing something with some miniature paintings on the wall against the backdrop of ex-powerpoint wires giving it a bit of a Half-Life/Cyberpunky feel. Gave me quite a cack!

Anyways, yeah it was pretty slick Hope to infiltrate more of these little random art events… I like the idea, I like the booze, I like the people…. I’d like to see a little bit more communication on the art rather than the simple representation…. especially cause it is way out of my league of expertise, but perhaps I’m just a n00b and haven’t found the good s%$t yet? If you know of it in Sydney town, let me know!

Till next time, Fitzbot Maximus out.

The cat is on the dog. The dog is in front of the quail. The quail is in front of twelve mice. Ten rabbits are on the cat. The ground is yellow. The sky is beige.

Very cool! My image doesn’t even rate on the same scale as some of the images other people have made… Check it out! It’s a project, currently being developed and researched, that turns your text into a 3D image.

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