Monthly Archives: February 2007

Feb23

Fun with Pictures

Posted on by
Standard
Toledo-Mosaic-thumb.JPG
Photo Mosaic of 5th Third Field in Toledo — Click to see details

I recently came across a program called Andrea Mosaic which allows you to make photo mosaics out of your own photo collection. After messing around with the pictures I happen to have on my laptop, I came up with a pretty cool photo mosaic of 5th Third Field in Toledo (from my minor league excursion last July) which is now my current desktop background. I set it up to use only baseball related photos, which includes ballgames I’ve been to, pictures from Cooperstown, and action shots from the batting cages we went to during Jenn’s bachelorette party. If you’ve been to a ball game with me in the past two years, chances are you’re in there somewhere. Overall, I’m pretty impressed with it — for comparison, the original image is here. I can’t explain why it likes the Red Sox logo so much, but refuses to use the Twins logo at all — I had both in the collection, I swear.

A few warnings if you want to try it yourself… you need a fairly large image collection if you want to make a good mosaic (or in some cases, if you want the algorithm to find an appropriate set of images at all). You can help that a little by allowing it to rotate, flip, and “alter” the images (which I think it does by changing the brightness and/or tint) and there’s also a neat extension which allows you to use frames from .avi files. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t clarify which codec and it’s clearly not all of them since it wouldn’t let me use a video Amrys took of Fenway.) It’s also a huge memory and CPU hog, and can take 20 minutes or more to complete, so don’t expect to multi-task too much while you’re playing around. But it’s a fun tool to waste time with.

Feb5

The Gender Gap

Posted on by
Standard

There’s an article in today’s Michigan Daily about the gender disparity in computer science — the most male-dominated undergraduate major at the university with an 8-to-1 ratio. (I think the numbers for the graduate program fare a little better, but my perception might be skewed because there are three women in my office, a complete abnormality for the building.) The article covers your standard stuff — one of the 21 women who do major in CS giving the typical, “At first things were intimidating but I got over it,” response that such women usually give and one of the men talking about how strange it is to come in contact with a female. (His exact quote is “Maybe we are afraid of them.”)
But then came the quote that made the article different from every other gender-in-the-sciences article I have read. When asked about the disparity, Randall Brown, a sophomore, responded:

“Computer science is mostly male because after guys are done looking at porn, we’re too lazy to leave the computer, so we find other stuff to do.”

I invite any male computer scientists to confirm or deny this statement by leaving a comment (anonymously if you’d like). And if men in other fields were drawn to their profession through porn… well, I really don’t want to know about it.

Feb1

Doppelganger

Posted on by
Standard

This was sent to me by a friend. Despite the fact that the movie was filmed in my home state (and is even subtitled “Say Goodbye to Minnesota Nice”), despite the fact that there is an Erin Rhode listed in the cast (as “Karate Student”), and despite the fact that I have been known to act in the occassional production named after a piece of genitalia… no, I was not in a movie titled “Prick.”
But I sure would like to know who that imposter is.