It's not so much the images themselves, as the colouring. It looks more like they scanned in a poster than took data from a satellite. I don't question that these are real, just why they have such a crappy finish close up. I'd have prefered them just giving us the black and white images, rather than this media token. But they will want to keep the science data to themselves - ESA are a little more closed mouthed than NASA when it somes to this kind of stuff.
Funny that - it sounds exactly like my idea for making planes safe. The advantages of this idea are huge, and you would never need air marshals.
Basically, you have naked flights. OK - Maybe you could be given hospital gowns or something, but for all intents and purposes, the flights would be naked, with none of the passangers being allowed to carry their own clothes or belongings on the flights. Money saved on security could be spent on providing better entertainment, more magazines, hell maybe even a check-in check-out library service.
All the baggage could be flown on a separate flight, just to make things all the more confusing, so that you get no threat to passangers of bombs on the plane.
If you think it's an infringement of personal security, you should try being frisked three times on a journey and being made to repeatedly open up your bags. Having people leaf through your stuff. Shoes on - shoes off. I tell you, nakedness is only a short step away, and it would cure all security problems in seconds!
I used to go back to my C64 and play Jet Set Willy every so often for years till one year that damn 20x20 colour square thing had ripped in half, and I couldn't get into the game.
How is it different for me to assigned myself the web address tom@mywebsitename.com, *and* the subdomain tom.mywebsitename.com - or to do it for friends and family; and for a company like register doing it. Or anyone doing it. There must be a million examples of prior art on this. It's not just a common thing to do; it's the obvious, natural thing to do.
Of course it is colourised - the image was taken with a filter that doesn't properly read the red wavelength part of the spectrum. They have been using an infrared filter to map out the landscape because it produces much better details, and at this stage of the mission, details are far more important than natural colours. If you want real colour, you need the L4, the L5, and the L6 filters, for R,G,B respectively. Try these:
The colours are close to those taken on Earth, you can try fiddling them a bit to get them closer if you want, but the timing and light conditions on Mars may be different for the landscape and the Color Wheel. If you do the same with the standardly used images, the L2, L5 and L6 filters, the Color Wheel is clearly wrong.
The resolution itself is much less important than other things, like sensitivity to light, to the weight/power ratio. The CCD they are using has to cover a wider wavelength range than the average digital camera. If you look at all the professional telescope instruments, they are just now reaching into the 2 megapixel range, but I've used IR instruments with 256x256 pixels effectively. These instruments can count photons individually. I imagine that the Spirit cameras are found somewhere between this extreme level of accuaracy and the average digital camera.
The other main reason for keeping the resolution down of course, is that all this has to be beamed back, and the higher the resolution, the longer it takes to send an individual picture.
No - these calibration images are taken with the L4, L5, L6 filters. There are images of the color wheel in all the filters (L1-7, R1-7), but very limited ones of the surface/sky in anything but L2, L5 and L6. In fact, there are now L4 images available. The true colour sky looks white, but does seem to have a greenish tinge to it.
You can try this yourself if you have an imaging program that lets you use RGB colour channels. If you put color wheel images using L2 in red, L5 in green and L6 in blue, and move back to full colour, it looks nothing like the images you linked to. Blue looks bright pink-purple. If you use L4, L5, and L6, the colours come out just like that image you showed. Most of the posted colour images are colourised using the three main imaging filters (L2, L5, and L6), because those are the mainly used ones. It makes sense, the image quality is better, but one down side is that it doesn't give you as close a real colour as the L4 filter does.
I urge you to try it, as it's great fun... but then I'm a dork.
OK - taken from the link you gave are the timescales involved in processing 1Gb digital images...
# Time required to capture component images: 13 minutes
# Time required to set control points: 2 hours # Time required to optimize project: 2 days # Time required to stitch project: 4 days # Time required to blend seams / correct misalignments / finalize image: 3 days
So that's 9 days to set up and take one picture. A fantastic picture, no question, and it poses the possibility of integrated systems in the future, but your average 8x10 camera does the same in a lot less than 9 days. Digital is wonderful, is all I use, but there are a lot of ways that film remains superior, and will do for at least the near future.
I live in perpetual fear that someone else with my name will become hugely rich and famous, and try to take my website away from me, and that me in my geeky science-guy and poor way, will be able to do nothing to stop them. What if the next boy-band happen to have someone with my name in the band, and he starts dating Brittany, and gets in a fight with Justin, and *boom* immeasurable fame and wealth come his way. The next thing you know he Trademarks his name and I not only lose my website, but I can never write, produce, sing, or artify small blocks of cheese in my own name.
Rather than "InfoSonar.com Targeted Advertising Network", which is what you do get if you go to nasa.com.
I hate these sites, but what if, rather than a sitter site, it was "Negligee and Sexy Allures", with a full-page ad for ladies underwear? There are plenty of legitimate sites that potentially deserve nasa.com more than NASA do, since NASA are a government agency, not a corporation. Just because it's what you first think of when you hear those letters stuck together, doesn't mean that everyone in the world thinks of that first.
True - but these are individually marked DVD's especially made for the oscar's voting. Every one is individually marked. You'd imagine that they would spring for a specialised courier, let alone some form of registered mail.
But Mann has sensitive and perceptive motives for his electronic immersion, which began 25 years ago. He believes that wearing computers and cameras will give people more power to maintain their privacy and individuality.
For one thing, Mann touts the power of wearable computers to filter out advertising and other elements of daily experience he finds objectionable.
This is all very well, except how many people are going to use MannCorp OpenWare Glasses, and how many are going to have AOL InfoWare Glasses. Mann might think these will block adverts, but you can bet your bottom dollar that most corporations picking up on this kind of technology are going to have a field day with the advertising. Can you imagine a GatorWare pair of glasses? Every advert you see is overlain with a new one.
I think I'll stick with my current glasses. The only way these obscure the truth is if I haven't cleaned them properly.
I've done a bit of experimenting with these files, comparing the colour wheel to the images taken on Earth, and in order to get a reasonable approximation of the 'true colours', you need the L4, L5, and L6 filters, for red, green and blue respectively. Ironically, the main problem is that there aren't yet pictures using the red filter. A lot of the images triplicated with the blue green and infrared images. (L6, 480; L5 530; L2 750)
The use of the L2 infrared filter means that the blue colours are oversampled (at least on the colour chart). Once the L4 filter images are used on the planet, full colour images will be ours.
Surely it's more like stealing the right to ride your bike. Isn't taking the produce (CD, case, paper sleeve) and addition to the copyright violation? This enforced seizure could easily be seen as blackmail. At least to someone like me with my oh so delicate sensibilities.
If we dress up as RIAA agents, doesn't that mean we can go round getting a lot of free CD's by intimidating people selling copyright infringed works on the streets, and stealing their products (it would be volunatry, so it's not so much theft as blackmail). We'd never have to buy another CD again.
Why is this any different to what the RIAA did? Oh yes, we would only be impersonating the police by proxy.
I whole-hearteedly disagree. Certainly it is easier to reduce the threat of terrorism than cure cancer, but to 'prevent', as in cure terrorism?
There are already ways to cure cancer, they are painful and expensive, and don't necessarily stop the cancer coming back eventually, but they exist. There has been a huge degree of advances in the field over the years/decades people have been searching. A real holy grail is a cure for terrorism. The only way to completely cure it is either to kill absolutely everyone who isn't you - terrorism to cure terrorism - or to resolve all the disputes in the world, so that everyone is happy and pleased within their lives.
How easy are those options? Easier than curing cancer?
Interesting, but ulitmately fairly useless. The detection algorithum searches for skin tone, and if the picture has more than 20%, that's a naked picture. So a close up picture of your grandmother could be flagged as pornographic, while a thousand real porn pictures get through because of the white space along the edges or something.
The real difficulty in detecting pornography is that in our human rational, we see a picture of almost-naked people as not pornographic. It takes very little to change a picture into pornographic. Ultimately, you would need some kind of genitalia detection algorithm, and how accurate could you make one of those? The human mind is a tricksy thing.
I think that this is a good example of the way the way google has become corrupted, because if you do the same search on alltheweb, the first non-commerical hit, right there at number one, is a full in-depth review. You're right that thinking before you search makes the process a lot more efficent, but in more difficult cases it can be hard to know exactly what to use as an alternative. It's much better if it just works.
You're kidding right? This has everything to do with christmas. A festival of lights to brighten the darkest part of Winter, marking a transition to the new year. It's an ancient right that links us with our forebearers, that has been celebrated over millenia. If this has nothing to do with the spirit of christmas, we truly have succumb to the commerialism that generally overpowers the holiday.
About the size of one of the Creative MP3 players perhaps? Or that of the Archos? These are cheaper, and take AA batteries, and yet people buy I-pods, because of their slim line. And then they get pissed when the battery dies. As with everything in life, it's a trade off.
If you want the slimmest player, you pay more, and have to accept that you'll continue to pay more. It's not like there aren't alternatives out there.
I did that. I actually started it in Write, when all I had was a throw-away 486, and just started putting formating in. In the end I used Word because I was too lazy to go through the hassle of redoing all the formatting stuff with my submission deadline bearing down on me.
My experience is that word sucks for this if you don't have plentiful memory. My thesis now opens quite happily, but at the time, on 64Mb, it was a pig. And the Master/sub-doc stuff failed horribly, so I ended up with a single file. If I were starting again, I'd be tempted by latex, but it's just so much easier to make a pretty thesis in word. And that's what is important, naturally!
Slashdot Mirror
Must not mention Venus. Must not mention Venus.
Doh!
It's not so much the images themselves, as the colouring. It looks more like they scanned in a poster than took data from a satellite. I don't question that these are real, just why they have such a crappy finish close up. I'd have prefered them just giving us the black and white images, rather than this media token. But they will want to keep the science data to themselves - ESA are a little more closed mouthed than NASA when it somes to this kind of stuff.
Look here:
i t. html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spir
An image file is names like this:
2P127603030EFF0309P2542L2M1.JPG
That L2 at the end shows that this is an L2 filter, and you need to find three pictures that looks the same, but have L4, L5, and L6.
Funny that - it sounds exactly like my idea for making planes safe. The advantages of this idea are huge, and you would never need air marshals.
Basically, you have naked flights. OK - Maybe you could be given hospital gowns or something, but for all intents and purposes, the flights would be naked, with none of the passangers being allowed to carry their own clothes or belongings on the flights. Money saved on security could be spent on providing better entertainment, more magazines, hell maybe even a check-in check-out library service.
All the baggage could be flown on a separate flight, just to make things all the more confusing, so that you get no threat to passangers of bombs on the plane.
If you think it's an infringement of personal security, you should try being frisked three times on a journey and being made to repeatedly open up your bags. Having people leaf through your stuff. Shoes on - shoes off. I tell you, nakedness is only a short step away, and it would cure all security problems in seconds!
I used to go back to my C64 and play Jet Set Willy every so often for years till one year that damn 20x20 colour square thing had ripped in half, and I couldn't get into the game.
Hey - now there's a good idea!
How about having the email address cnn@com route to the owner/webmaster for www.cnn.com? No more looking up webmaster addresses!
Hurrah - in twenty years this very post may be used in a prior art court case.
Hello son, tell your mother I love her!
How is it different for me to assigned myself the web address tom@mywebsitename.com, *and* the subdomain tom.mywebsitename.com - or to do it for friends and family; and for a company like register doing it. Or anyone doing it. There must be a million examples of prior art on this. It's not just a common thing to do; it's the obvious, natural thing to do.
Of course it is colourised - the image was taken with a filter that doesn't properly read the red wavelength part of the spectrum. They have been using an infrared filter to map out the landscape because it produces much better details, and at this stage of the mission, details are far more important than natural colours. If you want real colour, you need the L4, the L5, and the L6 filters, for R,G,B respectively. Try these:
red
green
blue
Use an image program that lets you alter the RGB colour channels, and just stick them in.
If you want a comparison, use one of the sets of images from the Color Wheel, for example, these:
red
green
blue
The colours are close to those taken on Earth, you can try fiddling them a bit to get them closer if you want, but the timing and light conditions on Mars may be different for the landscape and the Color Wheel. If you do the same with the standardly used images, the L2, L5 and L6 filters, the Color Wheel is clearly wrong.
The resolution itself is much less important than other things, like sensitivity to light, to the weight/power ratio. The CCD they are using has to cover a wider wavelength range than the average digital camera. If you look at all the professional telescope instruments, they are just now reaching into the 2 megapixel range, but I've used IR instruments with 256x256 pixels effectively. These instruments can count photons individually. I imagine that the Spirit cameras are found somewhere between this extreme level of accuaracy and the average digital camera.
The other main reason for keeping the resolution down of course, is that all this has to be beamed back, and the higher the resolution, the longer it takes to send an individual picture.
No - these calibration images are taken with the L4, L5, L6 filters. There are images of the color wheel in all the filters (L1-7, R1-7), but very limited ones of the surface/sky in anything but L2, L5 and L6. In fact, there are now L4 images available. The true colour sky looks white, but does seem to have a greenish tinge to it.
You can try this yourself if you have an imaging program that lets you use RGB colour channels. If you put color wheel images using L2 in red, L5 in green and L6 in blue, and move back to full colour, it looks nothing like the images you linked to. Blue looks bright pink-purple. If you use L4, L5, and L6, the colours come out just like that image you showed. Most of the posted colour images are colourised using the three main imaging filters (L2, L5, and L6), because those are the mainly used ones. It makes sense, the image quality is better, but one down side is that it doesn't give you as close a real colour as the L4 filter does.
I urge you to try it, as it's great fun... but then I'm a dork.
So that's 9 days to set up and take one picture. A fantastic picture, no question, and it poses the possibility of integrated systems in the future, but your average 8x10 camera does the same in a lot less than 9 days. Digital is wonderful, is all I use, but there are a lot of ways that film remains superior, and will do for at least the near future.
Yeh - because NASA would never fail to use metric units would they?
I live in perpetual fear that someone else with my name will become hugely rich and famous, and try to take my website away from me, and that me in my geeky science-guy and poor way, will be able to do nothing to stop them. What if the next boy-band happen to have someone with my name in the band, and he starts dating Brittany, and gets in a fight with Justin, and *boom* immeasurable fame and wealth come his way. The next thing you know he Trademarks his name and I not only lose my website, but I can never write, produce, sing, or artify small blocks of cheese in my own name.
Rather than "InfoSonar.com Targeted Advertising Network", which is what you do get if you go to nasa.com.
I hate these sites, but what if, rather than a sitter site, it was "Negligee and Sexy Allures", with a full-page ad for ladies underwear? There are plenty of legitimate sites that potentially deserve nasa.com more than NASA do, since NASA are a government agency, not a corporation. Just because it's what you first think of when you hear those letters stuck together, doesn't mean that everyone in the world thinks of that first.
True - but these are individually marked DVD's especially made for the oscar's voting. Every one is individually marked. You'd imagine that they would spring for a specialised courier, let alone some form of registered mail.
This is all very well, except how many people are going to use MannCorp OpenWare Glasses, and how many are going to have AOL InfoWare Glasses. Mann might think these will block adverts, but you can bet your bottom dollar that most corporations picking up on this kind of technology are going to have a field day with the advertising. Can you imagine a GatorWare pair of glasses? Every advert you see is overlain with a new one.
I think I'll stick with my current glasses. The only way these obscure the truth is if I haven't cleaned them properly.
I've done a bit of experimenting with these files, comparing the colour wheel to the images taken on Earth, and in order to get a reasonable approximation of the 'true colours', you need the L4, L5, and L6 filters, for red, green and blue respectively. Ironically, the main problem is that there aren't yet pictures using the red filter. A lot of the images triplicated with the blue green and infrared images. (L6, 480; L5 530; L2 750)
The use of the L2 infrared filter means that the blue colours are oversampled (at least on the colour chart). Once the L4 filter images are used on the planet, full colour images will be ours.
Surely it's more like stealing the right to ride your bike. Isn't taking the produce (CD, case, paper sleeve) and addition to the copyright violation? This enforced seizure could easily be seen as blackmail. At least to someone like me with my oh so delicate sensibilities.
If we dress up as RIAA agents, doesn't that mean we can go round getting a lot of free CD's by intimidating people selling copyright infringed works on the streets, and stealing their products (it would be volunatry, so it's not so much theft as blackmail). We'd never have to buy another CD again.
Why is this any different to what the RIAA did? Oh yes, we would only be impersonating the police by proxy.
I whole-hearteedly disagree. Certainly it is easier to reduce the threat of terrorism than cure cancer, but to 'prevent', as in cure terrorism?
There are already ways to cure cancer, they are painful and expensive, and don't necessarily stop the cancer coming back eventually, but they exist. There has been a huge degree of advances in the field over the years/decades people have been searching. A real holy grail is a cure for terrorism. The only way to completely cure it is either to kill absolutely everyone who isn't you - terrorism to cure terrorism - or to resolve all the disputes in the world, so that everyone is happy and pleased within their lives.
How easy are those options? Easier than curing cancer?
Interesting, but ulitmately fairly useless. The detection algorithum searches for skin tone, and if the picture has more than 20%, that's a naked picture. So a close up picture of your grandmother could be flagged as pornographic, while a thousand real porn pictures get through because of the white space along the edges or something.
The real difficulty in detecting pornography is that in our human rational, we see a picture of almost-naked people as not pornographic. It takes very little to change a picture into pornographic. Ultimately, you would need some kind of genitalia detection algorithm, and how accurate could you make one of those? The human mind is a tricksy thing.
I think that this is a good example of the way the way google has become corrupted, because if you do the same search on alltheweb, the first non-commerical hit, right there at number one, is a full in-depth review. You're right that thinking before you search makes the process a lot more efficent, but in more difficult cases it can be hard to know exactly what to use as an alternative. It's much better if it just works.
You're kidding right? This has everything to do with christmas. A festival of lights to brighten the darkest part of Winter, marking a transition to the new year. It's an ancient right that links us with our forebearers, that has been celebrated over millenia. If this has nothing to do with the spirit of christmas, we truly have succumb to the commerialism that generally overpowers the holiday.
About the size of one of the Creative MP3 players perhaps? Or that of the Archos? These are cheaper, and take AA batteries, and yet people buy I-pods, because of their slim line. And then they get pissed when the battery dies. As with everything in life, it's a trade off.
If you want the slimmest player, you pay more, and have to accept that you'll continue to pay more. It's not like there aren't alternatives out there.
I did that. I actually started it in Write, when all I had was a throw-away 486, and just started putting formating in. In the end I used Word because I was too lazy to go through the hassle of redoing all the formatting stuff with my submission deadline bearing down on me.
My experience is that word sucks for this if you don't have plentiful memory. My thesis now opens quite happily, but at the time, on 64Mb, it was a pig. And the Master/sub-doc stuff failed horribly, so I ended up with a single file. If I were starting again, I'd be tempted by latex, but it's just so much easier to make a pretty thesis in word. And that's what is important, naturally!