Category Archives: Interesting

Collection of Cool Photos and Photoshop Work

Photo Manipulation At Its Finest

Photographer Compares Aging Faces Across 60 Years

Hilarious Couple Creates Matching Engagement Photos

Observing Generation Gaps

Click each link to see more photos from the gallery.

New SmugMug

SmugMug just released a huge update to how their photo galleries are displayed. It was built from the ground up and looks gorgeous. You can read about the details of that here: The New SmugMug Is Here

My old SmugMug page I thought looked decent and was functional. However, when compared with the updated gallery layouts that are available now, it seems extremely outdated.

Here is what my main page looked like before:

Old SmugMug Main Page

Old SmugMug Main Page


Continue reading

Interesting North Korean Links

I recently read an article talking about Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s, trip to North Korea. His daughter, Sophie, kept a blog: Sophie in North Korea

Other interesting pages:
Kim Jong-Il looking at things
The North Korean Traffic Girls of Pyongyang
Information about travel to North Korea
HD YouTube video: Inside North Korea by an American Tourist

Don Walsh Describes the Trip to the Bottom of the Mariana Trench

The Virgin Oceanic adventurers currently vying to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench are following in the path of two trailblazers who took the plunge in a peculiar underwater vehicle 52 years ago. IEEE Spectrum recently interviewed Don Walsh, who was a U.S. Navy lieutenant and a submariner when he made the journey down with Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard in 1960. To date, those two men are the only human beings who have laid eyes on the Mariana Trench seafloor—and in an ironic twist, they didn’t see much of anything.

They made the trip in a vehicle called a bathyscaphe, which looked something like an underwater dirigible. The crew cabin, a cramped steel sphere, was suspended from a massive tank holding about 130 000 liters of gasoline—which, with less density than water, would provide the buoyancy necessary to lift the craft from the chasm. Piccard and his father designed the vehicle together and sold it to the U.S. Navy in 1958.

Continue reading this incredible story (with multiple sound clips from an interview) on ieee spectrum.

Why we have leap days

It’s been awhile since I posted and just wanted to link to a few interesting articles that I recently read.

Here’s the first one:

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose birthday was on February 29th. I used to rib him that he was only 3 years old, and he would visibly restrain himself from punching me. Evidently he heard that joke a lot.

Of course, he was really 12. But since February 29th is a leap day, it only comes once every four years.

And why is it only a quadrennial event?

Duh. Astronomy!

Continue reading on Discover Magazine

Racquet-breaking Outburst

Tennis player Marcos Baghdatis has become quite the Internet sensation after destroying four of his tennis rackets during a temper tantrum in his second-round loss to Stanislas Wawrinka in the Australian Open on Wednesday.

Continue reading: Manufacturer comments on Marcos Baghdatis’ racket-breaking outburst

I used to really like Marcos Baghdatis. He’s from Cyprus and came on the tennis scene in 2006 in a big way with some terrific playing in the Australian Open. He beat Andy Roddick, Ivan Ljubicic, and David Nalbandian, before finally losing to world #1 Roger Federer in the Australian Open finals. Less than two years earlier, I had gone on a 3-week class trip during college to Cyprus. So, while pulling an all-nighter with friends to watch the finals, I was really cheering for Baghdatis. I guess I can see breaking a single racquet in anger…but sitting down, pausing between each racquet, and even breaking two while they are still in their bags is just crazy.

Other tennis players also have had trouble with emotions getting in the way of playing. Here’s what McEnroe said:

In his autobiography, You Cannot Be Serious, McEnroe contested his anger was condoned by tennis officials because it was good for the sport – a sort of comic sideshow of spit and bluster. ”They had a show to put on and my presence put behinds in the seats,” he wrote. ”If I went home they lost money. The tournament directors knew it, and the linesmen knew it. I knew it. The system let me get away with more and more.”

Read more: Tennis brats: temper tantrums nothing new on court

Son Of Strelka, Son Of God (narrated by Obama)

Hey y’all. Long time no see. For the past four years, I’ve been working slowly but obsessively on a very odd project. Bit by bit I’ve dissected Obama’s self-read autobiography into thousands of very short phrases, usually one to ten words or so, and have used these snippets to tell a completely different story from the original. I’ve then set the story to music. The story is called Son Of Strelka, Son Of God. Broadly speaking, it tells the story of an ugly dog-faced demigod who recreates the world after it is destroyed. It’s about thirty minutes long, and lies in some weird grey area between audiobook and electronic music.

The Something Awful Forums

Head to the forums on the link above to download the work in its entirety. According to yalelawtech.org, the “use of Barack Obama’s voice is fair and allowed according to the law.”

Animations that people made to go along with the first two chapters of the audio book are available here. It must have been a lot of hard work, but the end result is amazing. You can’t tell at all that the words are out of order.

Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

Below is a great article on the origin of one or two spaces after a period. I think I finally learned this while writing a research paper for a biology class in college.

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.


And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. * You’d expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you’d be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for “Dear Farhad,” my occasional tech-advice column, I’ve removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I’ve received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).


What galls me about two-spacers isn’t just their numbers. It’s their certainty that they’re right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the “correct” number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space “rule.” Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. “Who says two spaces is wrong?” they wanted to know.

Continue reading: Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

Super expensive hard drives & some cool price trackers

I was searching Amazon for reviews of the Synology 4-bay Network Attached Storage devices and noticed that hard drive prices were very high. Remembering that floods in Thailand in October may have contributed to this, I found this article, Hard drive prices showing rapid decline, on Google. This article stated that “the floods in central Thailand in October wiped out more than 25 percent of worldwide hard drive production.” Here’s what that site had to say:

An example: The Camelegg chart, which tracks prices at Newegg, shows the Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green Western Digital20EARS hit a low of $69.99 just before the flood. A month later, on Nov. 10, it had soared to $249.99 — an increase of 250 percent. Today the drive sells at Newegg for $162.99, which is 35 percent less than it cost a month ago. The pricing trend is clearly down — although how far down and how fast are points of conjecture.

Wow, a huge price increase! This chart on Camelegg shows a graphical representation of its price since January 11th, 2011. It looks like I will be waiting awhile until I buy a NAS or get new hard drives! But, I did find same really sweet sites to track prices at Amazon, Backcountry, Newegg, and Best Buy.

You can even sign up to receive email alerts when products go on sale.

Amazon – http://camelcamelcamel.com/
Backcountry – http://camelcamper.com/
Best Buy – http://camelbuy.com/
Newegg – http://camelegg.com/