Archive for the 'Lists' category

Hollywood in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s created a long string of cheap horror movies that never reached the top rating lists. However, some of them, despite being left mostly abandonned by their authors, are worthy of some renewed attention. In this context, it is interesting to notice that the Internet Archive has recently pointed to a nice list of these B horror movies. In there, you will find (available for free download):

• Attack of the Giant Leeches
• Attack of the Killer Mushrooms
• Horrors of Spider Island
• Killers from Space
• Bloody Pit of Horror
• The Satanic Rites of Dracula
• Werewolf of Washington
• Killer Shrews
• The Giant Gila Monster

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month. [1]

Interestingly, this statement allows to believe that by June 2008 the list will have grown to 1 million terrorists in the US of A. I believe that Americans can be silly, but I doubt that one out of 230 is a dangerous moron attempting to end western civilization next time he or she will take a plane.

I suggest that you have a look at the astonishing list of “unlikely suspects” displayed in this article from ACLU. It includes US Senators and US Congressmen (and their spouses), war heroes, John Does with a common name, dead 9/11 hijackers, foreign presidents (dead as Saddam Hussein or alive like Evo Morales), pop star singers and toddlers.

Everybody keeps hearing that those buildings built in Abu Dhabi are the most extraordinary ones because the architects have huge amounts of money flowing to build them. But, actually, it’s a world wide competition to create the most astonishing sky-scrappers and buildings. Here are my best finds in this huge category:

Vertical urban farm

Imagined by the environmentalist researchers of Columbia University. More details [PDF].

Cubes piled in Singapour

More than 1000 flats for Singapour. Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
(more…)

If you are interested in GNU/Linux and want some useful e-reading, you should jump to this list of free ebooks related to Linux from LinuxHaxor.net.

Hollywood! Movies! There’s no other place where:

1. If the hero starts dancing, suddenly, everybody around knows the steps and dance with them.
2. Any car hit by a bullet immediately explodes in a cloud of flames, a mere rivulet of oil turns into a fire ball.
3. An ugly girl only has to remove her glasses and untie her hair to transform herself into an iridescent beauty queen.
4. If you look languorously into the eyes of a woman, music always starts to play (even if there is no stereo in the room). Ain’t it handy?
5. In car pursuits, you only have to zip through crossroads for all others to halt in tire shrieks. No need to check the traffic lights…
6. In car pursuits, you just need to speed up to fly over wide gaping spaces (gravity seems nullified provided that you can push the pedal hard enough!)
7. The first truncheon hit systematically sends the bad guy either to sleep or flying through the room like a ball on a pool table.
8. The hero will only yield to baddies after dozens of hits by a large group of hulking champion weight-lifters.
9. All computers are fifteen years ahead of current technology and blinkingly beautiful (no dull grey boxes, but nice blinking lights or impressive 3D graphics interface).
10. Baddies are always easy to recognize in a crowd. They are ugly, dirty and grimacing (if not with a scar on the face). Why doesn’t the police use this kind of clue in movies while the same kind of profiling is used routinely in our streets?
11. When the hero enters an unknown derelict space ship, he has no difficulty finding and operating the door lock, the ship’s controls and the hyper-space radio.
12. When we see a distant explosion on screen, the sound is never late (is speed of sound as fast as speed of light in movies?).
13. Radio-activity makes objects glow in the dark (it’s useful since we wouldn’t see it - Many scientists including Pierre and Marie Curie would have wanted to know that they just had to switch off the light in their laboratories!)
14. In the void of empty space, sounds are deafening: Shrieking spaceship rockets can be heard from the other end of the galaxy despite the total lack of atmosphere to transmit it.
15. A detective cannot solve a case before he has been suspended for insubordination
16. Even when the road is straight, if you drive a car, you must continuously swing the wheel right and left
17. The wounds of the hero will not make him even wince, except when a gorgeous woman is trying to clean them

You may not have the time and money to go to University lectures. But there are other open options that the Internet is now offering. Many universities and famous institutions provide free online lectures. Let’s browse a few of the best ones I could find:

• Collège de France : the most famous French scientific institution has free-access lectures all year long. Most of them are available online too (from Mathematics to Philosophy through Archeology).
• The MIT publishes a number of lectures in video-on-demand (and has a large web site named OpenCourseWare).
• OpenYale is presenting seven free introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
• Courses of all levels from the Washington University (introductory, undergraduate, graduate).
• PodCasts from UC San Diego
• Lectures from Vanderbilt.
• Computer and Computer Graphics, from University of British Columbia or from Virginia U.
• Webcasts from Oxford Internet Institute.
• Webcasts from Rice University.
• Podcasts from York College (NYC).
• Harvard at Home.

I could also advise you to check the Lecturefox Blog with a lot of information about these free lectures.

The stars of show business and other stars are chased all around the world by paparazzis. Sometimes even catch them in X-ray photos. Here are the evidences:

Pamela Anderson

Homer Simpson

Mickey Mouse

(more…)

I recently stumbled upon several good ideas for the photographer (and cinematographer) with a limited budget. They seem quite simple and interesting to apply.

Ring Flash for a penny

For macro-photography and proxi-photography, a flash is often needed. But it is difficult to obtain a nice light not simply coming from the side (and casting ugly shadows). This is why exist those ring flashes that are usually so expensive.

Today, Strobist provides a neat little idea to make nearly free ring flash out of a common cobra flash. Just use a circle (more precisely, an ellipse) of cardboard or white metal to reflect the light of a more common flash light (see the image below). In seconds, you’ll get most of the advantages of a ring flash without changing your equipment.

The flash light comes from the side and is reflected toward the scene while the hole in the middle allow the lens to peer naturally into the scene.

Poor man’s steadycam

You may know that a steady-cam is a simple rig that allows to stabilize a video camera for use while walking or running. It is so essentially simple that Johnny Lee made one out of three metal pipes and a weight. It is much nicer than the expensive pro ones and you can easily copy the design if you do not want to pay for the 39$ he asks for it.

Older issues

If you have been attentive, you can remember that there were similar other ideas popping up in these pages before.

• Poor man’s light photo tripod
• Poor man’s fish eye lens

After having shot a few hundreds (er… a few thousands) photos in Brazil, I ended up with a stack of images. Some were easy to label. Some were less esay to label. Particularly, for wild birds, the problem is to quickly determine the species that is appearing on the photo. Several solutions are open to an amateur photographer like me to avoid making too many big mitakes when trying to differentiate two species of brown hawk-like creatures, to greyish little birds, or even two small greenish parrots.

The first solution (and certainly the best one) is to ask experts. You can go to the nearest University, but the Internet made it even easier with the appearance of many amateur forums with an impressive collective knowledge. Some are so precise and helpful that the best experts may pale in comparison. We’ll come back to it. There are other solutions too.

First, I decided to work all by myself. Failing to write down all the information provided by the guide during the safari (note to myself: next time, bring a small paper notebook), I had to find a large and good source of reference images for the animals I was interested into. With a minimal knowedge and some personal work, a lot of identification can be done like that without too many errors if you stayed concentrated on checking all details in bird feathers and colors (and, sometimes, note : “Right! Noam told us this one was a…”).

For Brazilian birds, I used mainly two good sources: Arthur Grosset’s Birds and Oiseaux.net. The first is in English and contains an astonishing amount of data, surprisingly coming from one guy only. The second is in French and is the result of cooperation on a common project where there are description, photos, living regions, etc.

Like so many collaborative Internet sites, there are surprising holes and it is a work-in-progress. But for all common species, endemic species and even some rare ones, the information is very detailed and precise. Often enough to cross-check and identify firmly the animal. Text comments may be needed to support the small differences between two similar birds, when it all lays in photo details not easy to spot.

Let’s add a remark: recent changes in classification categories and names, recent splits and regrouping of existing species often create some added diffiulties. Finally, names are quite different from one country to the next (not only from one language to the next). So, it may happen that a single birds has several names. Beware!

If you are a gamer (as in video games), if you like the challenge of confronting other players in FPS shootouts, if you are using GNU/Linux, you will be interested to find the comparison brought by LinuX-gamers.net: Comparison of Free Software Shooters with:

• Sauerbraten
• OpenArena
• Alien Arena
• Nexuiz
• World of Padman
• Tremulous
• War§ow

List of the best file-oriented utilities for Windows:

• Restoration
• Double-Killer / Easy Duplicate Finder
• TeraCopy
• WinMerge
• Foldershare / SyncToy
• DriveImage XML (already presented here w few weeks ago)
• WinDirStat
• Xplorer²
• SyncBack
• TrueCrypt

According to LifeHacker.

A backup, this is nearly nothing. But it can help you, it can save you, when disaster will strike. Since when didn’t you backup?

Some ideas:

• Remember to copy the contents of your Flash memory card (even more if you store a lot of JPEG images on your big Flash card)
• Copy the data files from your PC onto an external drive
• Send yourself your important data on a separate email account (and let them there)
• Use WP-Database-Backup to backup your WordPress web site database
• Use free DriveImage XML to backup a full-drive image of a disk drive

It’s time to prepare yourself for a better-backed-up year.