First there was Obama taking on Hilary Clinton. Now this. Whatever next?
Robotic panoramas
Hmmm… I’d like to try one of these…
A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.
Viewers can explore a panorama in detail when it is displayed on a computer screen, clicking on any part of the image and then zooming in for crisp close-ups. You can move from an overall shot of the forest, for instance, to an image of one small moth resting on the side of a single tree trunk.
Examples here. They’re claiming a price under $500 for the production model. It’ll sell.
On this day…
… in 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.
Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link to the background on how this image was ‘prepared’ for publication.
It was taken with that famous Hasselblad that they left behind (to save weight). According to this source it was a special version of the 500 EL strapped to the astronaut’s chest (and without a viewfinder). The film was a variant of Ektachrome 160.
Say ‘Cheese!’ for Google
This morning’s Observer column — about Google Street View…
In a way the issue is not whether this Google innovation is permitted or not, but the general direction we’re headed and the role Google might play in our collective future. Last week I wrote about the legal ruling which compelled Google to hand over to Viacom its computer logs of every single viewing of a YouTube video, including those by UK residents. The privacy implications of that ruling have since been mitigated by agreement that the data can be ‘anonymised’ by Google before handover. But, again, the direction is towards a world in which everything we do is monitored and logged – mostly by one company.
Google’s mission, according to its corporate website, is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. What we perhaps haven’t fully realised is that these guys really mean it. Their ambition is at least as megalomaniacal as Bill Gates’s vision of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. So it’s time we started thinking about what a world dominated by Google would be like. As it happens, some people have – and they’ve been publishing the results on YouTube. Have a look — and then pour yourself a stiff drink.
Dubya’s energy policy
“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”
Al Gore, in a recent speech.
Obama’s State Department
The New York Times claims that Obama has a huge foreign policy back-up team.
Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is likely to be asked about international relations during the day.
One recent Q. & A. asked, for example, whether Mr. Obama supported the decision by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to include a timetable for American troop withdrawal in any new security agreements with the United States. The answer, provided to Mr. Obama with bullet points, was yes — or “a genuine opportunity,” as he put it in a speech on Iraq this week.
Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters…
No wonder he needs to raise $50m a month.
The financial crisis, US-style
Plain speaking from this week’s Economist.com
Capitalism rests on a clear principle: those who get the profits should take the pain. For the system to work, bankers sometimes need to lose their jobs and investors their shirts. Yet were a collapsing Bear Stearns or Fannie Mae to sow destruction for the sake of a principle, it would impose a terrible price in lost jobs and output on everyone else. The unpalatable truth is that by the time a financial crisis hits, the state often has to compromise—to impose as much pain as it can, of course, but to shoulder a large part of the losses nonetheless.
That formula comes at a heavy price. Fannie and Freddie were supposed to help Americans buy their own homes, by making the mortgage market work better. But it has been an awful deal for the taxpayer—a Fed economist calculated the implicit debt-guarantee was worth a one-off sum of between $122 billion and $182 billion. Because Fannie and Freddie barely lowered the cost of borrowing, little of this subsidy went towards boosting home ownership. Instead, just over half—about $79 billion—went straight to their shareholders.
Normal financial-services firms should have been dealing in the safe, middle-of-the road mortgages that Fannie and Freddie specialise in. Except that they were crowded out into subprime mortgages. Fannie and Freddie should never have grown so large. Except that they wanted to exploit the margin between the government-guaranteed borrowing costs and the commercial lending income. They should have been stopped by Congress and their regulator. Except that they spent some of their subsidy on a fierce lobbying machine.
Which is how we wind up with a system in which profits are privatised and losses are nationalised.
Google’s Streetcam
The Register is compiling a lovely mash-up involving plotting sightings of Google’s Streetcams on Google Maps.
50 megapixel sensors are here!
From Technology Review…
Last week, Kodak launched the first ever 50-megapixel camera sensor. While such high resolution goes beyond the needs of most consumers, for professional photographers the new sensor will enable photographs to be taken at an unprecedented level of detail.
For example, in a picture taken of a field one-and-a-half miles across, the sensor would make it possible for a viewer to detect an object measuring just one foot across.
This sort of resolution is only really essential for and targeted at high-end professional photography, in which high-quality images often need to be blown up large. But it could also be useful for some other applications, such as aerial photography as used for services like Google Earth. “The ability to have more pixels lets the plane fly higher, so you don’t need as many pictures,” says Mike DeLuca, marketing manager for Kodak’s Image Sensor Solutions, based in Rochester, NY.
The sensor, which produces an array of 8,176-by-6,132 pixels, further closes the gap between traditional film and digital photography. “We’re really close to how film was operated,” DeLuca says. “It’s very close.” Now, he says, it’s just a matter of the photographer’s personal preference.
I want one! But just think of the RAM, storage and processing power we’ll need downstream of such a sensor.
UPDATE: Richard Earney emailed to say that Phase One have released a 60 megapixel 645 back for medium-format cameras.
Wonder who’ll be first to 100 MP?
Good advice
Spotted by Tom on an Art trip to London.