Posts by: JN– aka, Jon Nehring
Otters
Took this picture of two otters at Trout Lake in Yellowstone National Park. The one on the right is chowing down on a good-sized cutthroat trout:
{click pic for full-size 80K image)
History of Video Compression
Kind of a breathless take on the wonders of video compression and the progression over the last 15 or so years, but interesting if you’ve ever wondered how they cram all that crap programming into such a small space, Ars Technica “From Cinepak to H.265: a brief history of video compression“.
Hulu
Had to check out Hulu.com after reading about it. It’s kind of like YouTube Pro. Given that they’re doing limited commercials and putting things on there that people actually want to watch without being hunched over the screen, the TV industry might avoid the RIAA’s fate. The video quality is pretty good. At full-screen, I could sit back six feet and it looked fine. Want to watch Saturday Night Live clips or full-length The Simpsons or whole movies like “The Big Lebowski” or “The Usual Suspects.” Hulu is “joint venture owned by NBC Universal and News Corp [Fox]:”
Hulu offers U.S. consumers a vast selection of premium video content, on demand, free and ad-supported: full episodes of TV shows, both current and classic, full-length movies, thousands of clips, and much more.
There’s also short films, like from the Sundance series The Art of Seduction, “Not Pretty, Really:”
Bill Heinz
Wilfrid Charles Heinz, sportswriter and M*A*S*H co-author, passed away at 93. Sez WSJ: “Bill Heinz Was a Writer to Relish.” A memorable W. C. Heinz excerpt:
There were 39,827 people there and they had paid $342,497 to be there and when Graziano’s head came up out of the dugout they rose and made their sound. The place was filled with it and it came from far off and then he was moving quickly down beneath this ceiling of sound, between the two long walls of faces, turned toward him and yellow in the artificial light and shouting things, mouths open, eyes wide, into the ring where, in one of the most brutal fights ever seen in New York, Zale dropped him once and he dropped Zale once before, in the sixth round, Zale suddenly, with a right to the body and left to the head, knocked him out.
–The Day of the Fight, 1947
Amputee Advantage
Regardless of whether this guy gets to compete in the Olympics, you have to be impressed both by him and the advancements in prosthetics technology (not a bad primer on running mechanics either): New York Times, A double-amputee seeks to compete in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “An Amputee Advantage? Comparing An Amputee And An Able-Bodied Runner.”
Baitoushan stratovolcano
Was just looking at North and South Korea because I picked up David
Halbersham’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War today and saw this:
Massive Baitoushan stratovolcano, also known as Changbaishan and by the Korean names of Baegdu or P’aektu-san, is a relatively unknown, but volcanologically significant volcano straddling the China/Korea border.
A 5-km-wide, 850-m-deep summit caldera is filled by scenic Lake Tianchi (Sky Lake). A large Korean-speaking population resides near the volcano on both sides of the border. The 60-km-diameter dominantly trachytic and rhyolitic volcano was constructed over the Changbaishan (Laoheidingzi) shield volcano. Satellitic cinder cones are aligned along a NNE trend. One of the world’s largest known Holocene explosive eruptions took place from Baitoushan about 1000 AD, depositing rhyolitic and trachytic tephra as far away as northern Japan and forming in part the present caldera. Four historical eruptions have been recorded since the 15th century.
Kara Walker Silhouette Exhibition
Usually when you think of silhouettes, the images conjured up consist of rabbit heads on the wall or the quaint illustrations in old historical novels. That’s not the case with this exhibition at the Whitney:
“…a danse infernal of sex, slavery and chitlin-circuit comedy.”
