Hi, my name is Matt Rude, I’m a 31 year old guy, living in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. I have worked in Information Technology for over 15 years. During that time I have worked for business sectors as diverse as Public Schools to Auto Part to Health Care.
A few friends of mine and I went up to the cabin this weekend. It was a perfect, cool, weekend up north, compared to in the Cities. We had a nice…
To a cat/dog’s mind, when the people leave, the house gets colder and colder as time goes on, and bottoms out as they lay in the cold house. Then it starts warming back up as it gets closer to when the people get home until, the house is nice and warm and the people are home once again.
Most camera’s focus on a single point in your shot and the rest is only sort of in focus or not at all. But those days may come to an end. The new Lytro technology allows the picture to be refocused after the picture is taken, forever, like a living photograph.
Light field technology captures all the light rays in a scene, which allows photographers to focus a photo after it has been taken. In traditional photography, photographers have had to focus the camera first and then snap. Lytro cameras, the company claims, will be able to be perfectly focus photos after the fact, forever into the future.
Below are a few samples of how it works, try clicking around on the pictures to refocus the shot.
And you can’t release or even talk about a new product without a video for it:
Christmas with the family.
Here a Son & Father launched a balloon from Newburgh, New York, and it climbed at a rate of 25 feet per second to 19 miles above the surface of the earth, high enough to see the curvature of the earth. Once at altitude the balloon burst and the craft containing the iPhone and the camera fell back to the ground on a parachute.
They were then able to track the craft via the iPhones on board GPS.
You can see more images of their flight or support their effort on their website brooklynspaceprogram.org.
We had Thanksgiving with the family as always this year. The whole family was there. I was a pretty uneventful day, but it was cold out, just the bitter cold, so…
Today was my Father’s 59th birthday.
Excerpts from a column on the Wall Street Journal, which is in turn an excerpt from “The Grand Design,” by Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, to be published by Bantam Books today.
“…the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.
Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth’s human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. But today we know of hundreds of other solar systems, and few doubt that there exist countless more among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Planets of all sorts exist, and obviously, when the beings on a planet that supports life examine the world around them, they are bound to find that their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist…
Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed “in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design.”
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many…”
My mind has difficulty wrapping itself around the concept that a “universe” can be one of many. I don’t disagree with him, but I think I need to defer any ponderings about astrophysics and concentrate on the more prosaic aspects of life.
As im sure you all know and are aware. There is currently a controversy started by some very uneducated conservatives about wither Muslims should be allowed to build a community center near the location of the World Trade Center.
What I feel is important to remember is that we are Americans. We are members of a country that was founded not as a Christian country, or a Jewish one, but instead as a place for all to come and be free. Free of this sort of persecution.
Threw out our own history, we have started walking down this path before. The path of forgetting who we are and why we are all here. We destroyed the Native Americans, we enslaved the African people, we even went to war with the Mormons. All in the name of what, Freedom.
What is Freedom when we are not all free. Why should freedom be reserved for some, but not all?
In the famous words of Martin Niemöller 1:
When [they] came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
I feel Keith Olbermann sums it up very nicely, tho I don’t agree with every thing he says. His main point needs to be heard.
So what are WE going to do about it?
