Tonight, I was coming home from a sign painting party for the Campaign for Liberty, here in the Twin Cities. I stopped at Walgreens and saw a police car in the parking lot. It said, "Federal Protective Services" "POLICE" "Department of Homeland Security". I had never heard of this organization before now. There is an article on them here:
What I find chilling is the words "Federal" and "POLICE" put together. And this was not any typical FBI-style black unmarked job. It was a police car in every way. Lights and all.
Yes. In eight short years, we have been transitioned into a police state. Mind you, there have been many attempts over the last several decades to in one way or another federalize the local police. These efforts have been resisted by grass roots organizations. Through the Patriot Act, this has now been accomplished. All local police are now arms of the Federal government. And we have bona-fide Federal Police running around.
It Will Only Get Worse. And it does not matter one whit who wins in November. Either candidate will work to extend and consolidate federal power, and further restrict liberty.
I have determined the source: The vertical spikes are caused by the sky. A simple sampling of that portion of the image would have told me this originally.
This begs the question: What is it about the atmosphere of Mars that would cause it's color values to appear in three narrow bands? The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, with a bit of nitrogen, and a bit less of argon. These gasses would impart no color at all on their own, meaning that the only thing which would color the atmosphere of Mars is its refractive index, and dust. The refractive index of an atmosphere, if too great, would be a milky white, and if too little, would be black. In between, it's blue. We are talking the same light source here mind you - the sun. Nothing between here and Mars that is changing the character of the light, other than there being a bit less of it.
That leaves dust. The only possible thing that can be refracting the RGB light into three areas of the spectrum which almost do not overlap at all, is dust.
Now, what is that dust made of? Silicon, Iron, Calcium, Aluminum, Magnesium, and Sulfur. Totally non-exotic stuff. Furthermore, stuff that, note this carefully, does not refract light into three separate bands.
Ok, then, given an atmosphere that is not in any way exotic, and atmospheric dust that is equally non-exotic, can you explain to me, in any rational manner, how atmospheric dust could cause the color of the light which reaches Mars to be refracted into three separate bands which hardly overlap? There is only one answer: It Can't. Period.
There is only one other possibility: NASA is not using RGB filters to take these images. Now, that would be exceedingly strange all by itself, given that the panam camera in question certainly has RGB filters and NASA claims that these images which they are posting are full-color images. What ELSE would they be using than the RGB filters?
I stand, firmly, on my original statement: NASA deliberately shifts the RGB histograms of these images to make Mars look exotic. Why? I don't know.
Two things: In all the rover color images, the histogram shows a triple R,G,B hump. For a monochrome CCD with filters, that's not normal. I dare anyone to try to duplicate this with natural lighting in any scene, to arrive at such a histogram. I don't think it can be done (but I've been wrong before).
Second: This image has a giveaway. The histogram, has a wide vertical spike right-center of the bell curve, in all three channels. That spike, likely caused by a CCD artifact, should line up in all three channels. When I adjusted the histograms so that this happened, the result, while not as bright, was very similar. The blue sky is more of a dingy blue-grey, with a tinge of red (I'm working off of a device-calibrated monitor).
Alright. Answer me this, please. Why is it that every single rover image, has an R, G, and B hump in an entirely different range? Every single image.
I have looked at thousands of histograms, and I have never seen this pattern anywhere else. I can easily reproduce the effect of course, but never have I ever seen the typical bell-curve of a histogram be consistently different in each channel, image after image, EXCEPT with NASA Mars images, in normal images.
It is particularly obvious in this image because of the blow-out in the channels (the vertical columns on the right of the hump in each histogram). I made another version where I did nothing but adjust the three channels so that that vertical column lines up on all three channels. Not quite as bright, but probably more accurate.
Since this camera is, I believe, using a monochrome CCD with filters, that column, present in all three channels, is likely an artifact of the CCD or in the image processing. Since it is the same CCD, with three different filters, those three channels should line up on the column. They should not be in entirely different thirds of the image.
All I did was pull the clipped channels back to 100%. When I say clipped, I mean clipped. I did nothing else to it. Seriously, nothing.
Furthermore, I have seen images from NASA with soil that looks the same color as the "corrected" image. I'll leave the conspiracy theory junk for others. I don't believe in all the intelligent life on Mars / Cydonia junk.
I believe Mars is red. But I don't believe it is as red as these pictures show.
And yes, I understand image histograms very very well, as I work with them every day. I understand white balance. This is not a case of biasing. This is a case of clipping, by different amounts, in each channel.
I will be interested to hear your response after you have actually looked at the per-channel histogram.
Interesting site, but totally irrelevant to what I note. Check the per-channel histogram. He does not explain how an image can have a histogram such as this, and other similar images have.
I am not claiming any conspiracy. I am claiming NASA stupidity. Check the histogram. You will see what I am talking about.
Typical knee-jerk reaction. For the record, since you obviously seem to know everything about me: I don't believe in aliens are or have ever been on Mars or anywhere else in this solar system. Cydonia is just a pile of rocks. We really did land on the moon. There. Satisfied?
Did you look at the histogram? No? Didn't think so.
I agree that that sucks, but, dude, that keyboard does look like a bomb. I mean, home-made - stretchy looking material with embedded electrical contacts - battery - circuit board - no case or shell. I have a feeling you would have had the same problem before there was a TSA.
There is little to nothing you can do to convince clueless executives who can't see beyond J2EE. That is besides the point.
Also, a 1 year lead on something as new and fresh as RoR is huge, I mean, really friggin' huge. Fact is, it's taken about three years for Rail's hype to die down enough for people to realize that, just maybe it isn't "all that". It is at this point that development decisions become less starry-eyed and more pragmatic.
So perhaps that explains why Django is on the upswing now. That, and it's used for such excellent sites as:
— all things that you can show a CEO/CIO to make clear that Django is a player. More are coming rapidly. As for business sites, there are a plethora of them that are beautiful and functional.
I'm calling you on this one. Your premise is silly. Rails has some very visible killer apps, not because Rails is intrinsically better, but because Rails was first with many new, innovative, and tightly integrated ideas that created a large and well-deserved fan base.
And, guess what? When those developers signed on, there were no killer apps on Rails either.
There is nothing intrinsic in either Rails or Django that makes either more likely to be the platform for the next "killer app", except for one thing: hype.
Django is a very successful framework, which is just hitting its growth curve. It also has a more muted philosophy of hype - meaning that most of the time you will never know you are using a Django site, because businesses who use it aren't advertising the fact, and really don't care to.
Now, I also think that Django is better than Rails. It's better for me. It may not be for you. In that case, stick with Rails. It's a great framework.
I will add to my above post, that in Django, it is very easy to extend / override almost any part of the framework. Within a week of using it, I was writing my own custom HTML widgets, compound data fields, and even custom added support for custom DB column types. Now, I know that ActiveRecord allows you to do some of these things, but it's not at all easy or intuitive.
But, hey, if you love Ruby, use Rails.
The thing everyone has to remember about Django vs. Rails, is that this is really more a Python vs. Ruby debate. The nature of the languages has affected the design of the corresponding framework in dramatic ways.
That said, I think that, if Rails were done all over again, it could learn a lot from Django.
Check out Snakes and Rubies. (Google video version.) It was a pair of presentations on Django and Rails. Good stuff. This was in December of 2005. Yeah, Django's been around for a while, despite the comments about it being a "young" framework.
Rails also has many problems. There is far too much magic. It's code is a mess. It is slow, and difficult (though not impossible) to scale.
Django has little or no magic. It's code is extremely clean, organized, and readable, and scales very well. It is also very fast.
It is not correct to say that Django is Rails for Python (in the same way, say, that CakePHP is for PHP). There are some similar ideas, but they have very different implementations.
Mostly because Django was originally written to use mod_python. It works extremely well, even for high volume sites.
It will run on on mod_wsgi also.
Second, there are a few bits that are not fully wsgi compliant, but they are presently being fixed (and will probably be committed in the next few days).
Like most web frameworks, Django uses a template library to generate HTML. That is to say, it includes special tags and helper functions to wire your UI into request/response objects and database models. You still need to know HTML/CSS, etc. You have to provide your own JS/AJAX libraries, as Django, as a matter of philosophy, does not endorse/support/provide any JS libraries of any kind.
It does have something called "generic views" which can provide basic CRUD and various common views (such as date-based views). However, these are more for prototyping, and would generally be replaced in a production app with something more custom.
Yes, this whole article, I think, misses the point. The cloud, by its very nature, forces you to develop a solution that is intrinsically scalable. It doesn't develop it for you. Who the heck imagines that it is the responsibility of a hosting provider to make your platform scalable? Give me a break!
EC2 is not your typical co-hosting service, nor should you ever treat it like one. To properly implement a platform upon it, you, the programmer / admin need to implement machine images which have the ability to come up, plug in, and start handling requests - all without further intervention. It's a lot of work to get to that point.
No cloud service should be judged by how much engineering this requires, because it's not their responsibility. You can run crap on the cloud, and that's not the cloud's fault. But - you do the hard work first, and the cloud opens up a whole new world. Imagine - the ability to automatically scale your capacity up or down, based upon load. Pay only for what you use, and not a penny more - something that traditional colocation/hosting cannot possibly give you.
I don't know about you, but if I were running a.com start-up, with the potential for huge growth, I would really the thought that I am ready for almost any amount of traffic, no matter what.
And I agree completely with every one of the points you just made, but none of this has anything to do with HD - except in so far as HD can be used for more effective mind-numbing propaganda. But that's as bad as blaming the gun instead of the guy who pulled the trigger.
The HD switchover has nothing to do with the Internet, unless you are really worried that HD will kill the free press online. Sorry, but you are making some very bizarre connections here.
I ask you again - how does the HD switchover, in any way whatsoever, limit people's ability to broadcast on the internet? They can broadcast at SD quality today. They will be able to broadcast at SD quality tomorrow, which will work just fine on future equipment. People will broadcast in whatever quality they can afford, and the quality of the content, not the picture, will decide whether anybody tunes in.
Oh, and by the way, nobody is being forced to upgrade their SD hardware to HD. That's why they are selling the converter boxes - so that nobody has to buy a new TV or VCR.
Slashdot Mirror
Tonight, I was coming home from a sign painting party for the Campaign for Liberty, here in the Twin Cities. I stopped at Walgreens and saw a police car in the parking lot. It said, "Federal Protective Services" "POLICE" "Department of Homeland Security". I had never heard of this organization before now. There is an article on them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Protective_Service
What I find chilling is the words "Federal" and "POLICE" put together. And this was not any typical FBI-style black unmarked job. It was a police car in every way. Lights and all.
Yes. In eight short years, we have been transitioned into a police state. Mind you, there have been many attempts over the last several decades to in one way or another federalize the local police. These efforts have been resisted by grass roots organizations. Through the Patriot Act, this has now been accomplished. All local police are now arms of the Federal government. And we have bona-fide Federal Police running around.
It Will Only Get Worse. And it does not matter one whit who wins in November. Either candidate will work to extend and consolidate federal power, and further restrict liberty.
Typical moral equivalence BS.
Also, see above: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=914967&cid=24795173
Here's the I believe:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft_instru_pancam.html
Now, as to the likely.
I have determined the source: The vertical spikes are caused by the sky. A simple sampling of that portion of the image would have told me this originally.
This begs the question: What is it about the atmosphere of Mars that would cause it's color values to appear in three narrow bands? The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, with a bit of nitrogen, and a bit less of argon. These gasses would impart no color at all on their own, meaning that the only thing which would color the atmosphere of Mars is its refractive index, and dust. The refractive index of an atmosphere, if too great, would be a milky white, and if too little, would be black. In between, it's blue. We are talking the same light source here mind you - the sun. Nothing between here and Mars that is changing the character of the light, other than there being a bit less of it.
That leaves dust. The only possible thing that can be refracting the RGB light into three areas of the spectrum which almost do not overlap at all, is dust.
Now, what is that dust made of? Silicon, Iron, Calcium, Aluminum, Magnesium, and Sulfur. Totally non-exotic stuff. Furthermore, stuff that, note this carefully, does not refract light into three separate bands.
Ok, then, given an atmosphere that is not in any way exotic, and atmospheric dust that is equally non-exotic, can you explain to me, in any rational manner, how atmospheric dust could cause the color of the light which reaches Mars to be refracted into three separate bands which hardly overlap? There is only one answer: It Can't. Period.
There is only one other possibility: NASA is not using RGB filters to take these images. Now, that would be exceedingly strange all by itself, given that the panam camera in question certainly has RGB filters and NASA claims that these images which they are posting are full-color images. What ELSE would they be using than the RGB filters?
I stand, firmly, on my original statement: NASA deliberately shifts the RGB histograms of these images to make Mars look exotic. Why? I don't know.
Yes, I understand this. Deal with it every day.
Two things: In all the rover color images, the histogram shows a triple R,G,B hump. For a monochrome CCD with filters, that's not normal. I dare anyone to try to duplicate this with natural lighting in any scene, to arrive at such a histogram. I don't think it can be done (but I've been wrong before).
Second: This image has a giveaway. The histogram, has a wide vertical spike right-center of the bell curve, in all three channels. That spike, likely caused by a CCD artifact, should line up in all three channels. When I adjusted the histograms so that this happened, the result, while not as bright, was very similar. The blue sky is more of a dingy blue-grey, with a tinge of red (I'm working off of a device-calibrated monitor).
Alright. Answer me this, please. Why is it that every single rover image, has an R, G, and B hump in an entirely different range? Every single image.
I have looked at thousands of histograms, and I have never seen this pattern anywhere else. I can easily reproduce the effect of course, but never have I ever seen the typical bell-curve of a histogram be consistently different in each channel, image after image, EXCEPT with NASA Mars images, in normal images.
It is particularly obvious in this image because of the blow-out in the channels (the vertical columns on the right of the hump in each histogram). I made another version where I did nothing but adjust the three channels so that that vertical column lines up on all three channels. Not quite as bright, but probably more accurate.
Since this camera is, I believe, using a monochrome CCD with filters, that column, present in all three channels, is likely an artifact of the CCD or in the image processing. Since it is the same CCD, with three different filters, those three channels should line up on the column. They should not be in entirely different thirds of the image.
All I did was pull the clipped channels back to 100%. When I say clipped, I mean clipped. I did nothing else to it. Seriously, nothing.
Furthermore, I have seen images from NASA with soil that looks the same color as the "corrected" image. I'll leave the conspiracy theory junk for others. I don't believe in all the intelligent life on Mars / Cydonia junk.
I believe Mars is red. But I don't believe it is as red as these pictures show.
And yes, I understand image histograms very very well, as I work with them every day. I understand white balance. This is not a case of biasing. This is a case of clipping, by different amounts, in each channel.
I will be interested to hear your response after you have actually looked at the per-channel histogram.
Interesting site, but totally irrelevant to what I note. Check the per-channel histogram. He does not explain how an image can have a histogram such as this, and other similar images have.
I am not claiming any conspiracy. I am claiming NASA stupidity. Check the histogram. You will see what I am talking about.
Typical knee-jerk reaction. For the record, since you obviously seem to know everything about me: I don't believe in aliens are or have ever been on Mars or anywhere else in this solar system. Cydonia is just a pile of rocks. We really did land on the moon. There. Satisfied?
Did you look at the histogram? No? Didn't think so.
Here is a before and after, if anyone cares:
http://tinyurl.com/5mon9r
Once again, another BS color image from Mars.
Anyone who cares to, do this: Open the image in Gimp or Photoshop.
Look at the per-channel histograms. You will see that someone compressed the Blue and Green channels before posting the image.
To fix:
Normalize each channel individually so that 0-255 spans the full channel range.
The result? Mars as Opportunity actually photographed it.
Does NASA really think that we are so simple-minded that we would be too confused and disoriented to see a Mars without red sky?
How stupid would you have to be to see something that looks like a bomb, and say, "Nah. Nobody would be stupid enough to put a bomb in their luggage."
I agree that that sucks, but, dude, that keyboard does look like a bomb. I mean, home-made - stretchy looking material with embedded electrical contacts - battery - circuit board - no case or shell. I have a feeling you would have had the same problem before there was a TSA.
There is little to nothing you can do to convince clueless executives who can't see beyond J2EE. That is besides the point.
Also, a 1 year lead on something as new and fresh as RoR is huge, I mean, really friggin' huge. Fact is, it's taken about three years for Rail's hype to die down enough for people to realize that, just maybe it isn't "all that". It is at this point that development decisions become less starry-eyed and more pragmatic.
So perhaps that explains why Django is on the upswing now. That, and it's used for such excellent sites as:
Revver
Dpaste
curse.com
SuggestionBox
Lefora
Mixin
— all things that you can show a CEO/CIO to make clear that Django is a player. More are coming rapidly. As for business sites, there are a plethora of them that are beautiful and functional.
I'm calling you on this one. Your premise is silly. Rails has some very visible killer apps, not because Rails is intrinsically better, but because Rails was first with many new, innovative, and tightly integrated ideas that created a large and well-deserved fan base.
And, guess what? When those developers signed on, there were no killer apps on Rails either.
There is nothing intrinsic in either Rails or Django that makes either more likely to be the platform for the next "killer app", except for one thing: hype.
Django is a very successful framework, which is just hitting its growth curve. It also has a more muted philosophy of hype - meaning that most of the time you will never know you are using a Django site, because businesses who use it aren't advertising the fact, and really don't care to.
Now, I also think that Django is better than Rails. It's better for me. It may not be for you. In that case, stick with Rails. It's a great framework.
I will add to my above post, that in Django, it is very easy to extend / override almost any part of the framework. Within a week of using it, I was writing my own custom HTML widgets, compound data fields, and even custom added support for custom DB column types. Now, I know that ActiveRecord allows you to do some of these things, but it's not at all easy or intuitive.
But, hey, if you love Ruby, use Rails.
The thing everyone has to remember about Django vs. Rails, is that this is really more a Python vs. Ruby debate. The nature of the languages has affected the design of the corresponding framework in dramatic ways.
That said, I think that, if Rails were done all over again, it could learn a lot from Django.
Check out Snakes and Rubies. (Google video version.) It was a pair of presentations on Django and Rails. Good stuff. This was in December of 2005. Yeah, Django's been around for a while, despite the comments about it being a "young" framework.
Rails has those things.
Rails also has many problems. There is far too much magic. It's code is a mess. It is slow, and difficult (though not impossible) to scale.
Django has little or no magic. It's code is extremely clean, organized, and readable, and scales very well. It is also very fast.
It is not correct to say that Django is Rails for Python (in the same way, say, that CakePHP is for PHP). There are some similar ideas, but they have very different implementations.
Mostly because Django was originally written to use mod_python. It works extremely well, even for high volume sites.
It will run on on mod_wsgi also.
Second, there are a few bits that are not fully wsgi compliant, but they are presently being fixed (and will probably be committed in the next few days).
Like most web frameworks, Django uses a template library to generate HTML. That is to say, it includes special tags and helper functions to wire your UI into request/response objects and database models. You still need to know HTML/CSS, etc. You have to provide your own JS/AJAX libraries, as Django, as a matter of philosophy, does not endorse/support/provide any JS libraries of any kind.
It does have something called "generic views" which can provide basic CRUD and various common views (such as date-based views). However, these are more for prototyping, and would generally be replaced in a production app with something more custom.
Yes, this whole article, I think, misses the point. The cloud, by its very nature, forces you to develop a solution that is intrinsically scalable. It doesn't develop it for you. Who the heck imagines that it is the responsibility of a hosting provider to make your platform scalable? Give me a break!
EC2 is not your typical co-hosting service, nor should you ever treat it like one. To properly implement a platform upon it, you, the programmer / admin need to implement machine images which have the ability to come up, plug in, and start handling requests - all without further intervention. It's a lot of work to get to that point.
No cloud service should be judged by how much engineering this requires, because it's not their responsibility. You can run crap on the cloud, and that's not the cloud's fault. But - you do the hard work first, and the cloud opens up a whole new world. Imagine - the ability to automatically scale your capacity up or down, based upon load. Pay only for what you use, and not a penny more - something that traditional colocation/hosting cannot possibly give you.
I don't know about you, but if I were running a .com start-up, with the potential for huge growth, I would really the thought that I am ready for almost any amount of traffic, no matter what.
Hah! The Slashdot theory of origins. Love it!
And I agree completely with every one of the points you just made, but none of this has anything to do with HD - except in so far as HD can be used for more effective mind-numbing propaganda. But that's as bad as blaming the gun instead of the guy who pulled the trigger.
The HD switchover has nothing to do with the Internet, unless you are really worried that HD will kill the free press online. Sorry, but you are making some very bizarre connections here.
I ask you again - how does the HD switchover, in any way whatsoever, limit people's ability to broadcast on the internet? They can broadcast at SD quality today. They will be able to broadcast at SD quality tomorrow, which will work just fine on future equipment. People will broadcast in whatever quality they can afford, and the quality of the content, not the picture, will decide whether anybody tunes in.
Oh, and by the way, nobody is being forced to upgrade their SD hardware to HD. That's why they are selling the converter boxes - so that nobody has to buy a new TV or VCR.
Yeah. And of course, because I can now watch CNN in HD, I have absolutely no desire to read or watch any news at all online.
Just settle down, a bit, ok?
Note that I said "buy" a Das Keyboard.