Robot Dreams

This past weekend I spent the afternoon at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. From a human perspective it's personally old and historically old. Personally because it's been around before myself, my parents, and my grandparents where born. And historically because it stores for display Nature's history. Last time I was there, I went with my immediate family to both look at the dinosaur exhibits and to watch my nephew look at the dinosaur exhibits. This time around I, actually we but more about that later, went to see the Aztec exhibit before it closed. Unfortunately, there's no picture taking in the exhibit so I can't show that. Instead I have two panoramas of one of the Haida Totem Poles in the main hall, and of the main hall looking at the South entrance:

So that's the "old" stuff... The "new" stuff is whom I went with, my new girlfriend Cynthia! And since she reads this blog (hi Cynthia) perhaps she will grace it with a comment OK, so you may be asking what the two parts, other than going together to the Museum, might have in common. Well it turns out that Cynthia is an archeologist currently studying the Maya in Belize, although she's obviously not in Belize right now.

Today has been a busy day for me. But perhaps not as busy as Daniel Biss who had four parades to attend. First I went to the Democratic Party of Evanston (DPoE) picnic. Then right afterwards, went to my first Evanston 4th parade. I was helping hold a big banner, with the rest of the DPoE Board members:

I must say being in the parade, as opposed to watching it from the sidewalks, is much fun! Certainly something everyone should try once. Being whom I am, I took pictures along the way. And at night went to the lake beach, yes on the sand next to the water, to watch the fireworks.

Now that the primaries are "over" and we are all watching the general election I thought I'd point people to some of the online polling maps that show results in terms of the electoral vote totals.

Wikipedia has a lengthy page with a variety of individual poll results plus overall electoral counts. The maps at the bottom are the most digestible piece of information on the page. Unfortunately it's not clear what the counts are based on other than "using latest polling when available".

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statewide_opinion_polling_for_the_United_States_presidential_election%2C_2008

FiveThirtyEight has lengthy and detailed number and very clear maps and charts of both overall electoral counts and per state counts. They make it clear where the counts from and try to correct bias and instability in the polls the sample from. Of special note is the "Swing State Analysis" chart.

• http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Last on my list is the "easiest to read at a glance" page, from "Electoral Vote". The algorithm (a.k.a. method for those not mathematically inclined) used is explained. And the person running the site is nice enough to provide raw poll data for download.

• http://www.electoral-vote.com/

As can be expected from any polling they all arrive at different counts. But the also all put Barack Obama ahead.

There where two things good about today... The weather was much better than predicted yesterday. And I joined friends from the Evanston Drinking Liberally in the Oct. 27 Chicago Peace march. And there was one bad thing about today... Every public transportation train was a distressing mishap. The attempt to take the Metra train south failed, as the train that would get us on time was canceled because of a derailment (it derailed in the yard). Taking the alternate CTA trains was delayed because they are working on the subway, and hence it's rerouted on the L-line. And on the way back, the Metra now, was delayed without reason for half an hour. But with all that we still managed to enjoy the march from Union Park to Federal Plaza. I'll tease with what has to be the best "no war" sign in the whole march.

The rest of the pictures on the flip side...

I will never really understand how far the universe will go to strike at the least expected, yet most predictable if you have a perverse opinion of the universe, time. Here I was just getting back from the Hawaii vacation, getting back to the usual intermittent work and starting to talk about the ongoing Thot project, since nothing really pressing was going on, and I get called for the possibility of a huge amount of new work. The thing is that I just about rely on such things happening by now. As every time in the past that we try to get back to Thot stuff starts happen that prevents us from working on it. Needless to say I've been stressing out about this new work for the few weeks since then. And now that I get back word from our proposal, I'm even more stressed out. Thinking about the ramifications, and the planning, and much more. But then again I tend work better under stress... Needless to say I'm looking forward to tonights Drinking Liberally, seeing as I can use the drinking to relax a bit from the events so far. With that in mind I leave you with a bit of hilarity from last weeks Drinking Liberally...

Going back to the beginning... We where staying in the expensive side of the island. Not that there is anything non-expensive in any of the Hawai'i islands, but Kailua-Kona is the vacation, resort, multi-million dollar locale. It's also where the political center of the island has been before the U.S.A. came along and swallowed up the islands. Strictly speaking on the second day there, since we arrived late afternoon Wednesday, we did some errands and walked around town. What better way to start this set of photos than with the terribly numerous, and yet very hard to find, gecko's of Hawai'i.

A few days ago I got back from a week vacation to Hawai'i, the island and state. This is the second time to the state, last time going to Kauai. And this time I had the better planning and preparation to avoid the malfunctioning camera incident that hit me when I went to Kauai. There isn't much to say about Hawai'i other than if you have a very short list of places to visit before you die, put it on your list. Now since I took a lot of pictures, 447 just on my digital puny camera, it took a few days (5) to just process them into a shape I could post 138 of those. And obviously it's going to take some time to blog about them all. But if you are impatient you can find them all on the photo section of my home pages. The only warning about this set of images, is that they are big, so stretch your browser window as much as you can to really enjoy the views. So a big aloha, from the bottom of Honaunau Bay, to you and keep on reading to see the rest of the photos...

OK, I must admit the title of this entry is mostly random, except for the "Drinking Liberally" part. Tonight I went to my first drinking liberally "event". If it wasn't obvious, politically speaking, I'm a liberal by U.S. standards. But I guess it comes naturally from being a minority from a US non-state that has a tradition of political fervor. It was fun, and I look forward to repeating the experience. Mostly this is an exercise for me in realizing, given recent past political history, that just voting isn't enough to change things. And on to the programmatic, and unrelated aspect of this post, except maybe related in the drinking part... Here's another autostitch set of images. In this case of the garden in the Aspen Physics Center taken while at BoostCon07.

If I haven't mentioned it before, Evanston is full of churches. This one I pass every day on my usual cycling route. But this Summer it's undergoing some construction. This is another example of using Autostitch to combine, in this case six photos. For the photo experts out there, you might ask why bother with multiple images after all it seems easy enough to take that as a single wide angle shot. Well, it's not. The spire is tall enough that even with 8-24mm lens of the FinePix F31fd I would have had to stand on the roof of the building across the street. Autostitch is proving to solve the rather numerous problems of taking architecture pictures in a city environment.

A few days ago I posted a panorama of the Toronto skyline. It turns out it was done by hand by loading up the images, doing some blending between them, aligning them, and brightness+contrast adjustments. And today, while trying to do the same to another set of images I failed. And I thought maybe someone has written some software to make such things easy. Well they have, somewhat. It turns out panorama stitching is not exactly easy and just about all the solutions out there are manual in more ways than one. Except one tool, which comes from the AI lab at the University of British Columbia, Autostitch. So I decided to run it through some of the multi-shot panorama images I have, really only three sets since I'm not a panorama fan. Below are two of the results. The first from the same set of images as that previous Toronto skyline post (warning this image is even larger than before), and the second from an earlier set of phone images taken at Kauai. But it figures that the set of two images that started this endeavor, Autostitch failed to put together. Neither man nor AI could solve the problem, maybe I just need to wait for some extraterrestrial intelligence.