Robot Dreams

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...

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.