Funny Faces

For my maternal grandmother's 80th birthday, we (all of her descendents) wrote down our favorite memory of her [1], which was then bound into a book and given to her. At the same time, we also downloaded the PrankMirror app on our iPads and took funny/bizarre pictures of ourselves (which she then had to identify). Some of ours were too hilarious not to share with a broader audience. Let me know which ones are your favorites!

Graphical Web Page Representation

Today I stumbled onto this website: http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/. It runs an applet (so you must have Java installed) that analyzes the html code of any website you submit (must start with http://) and creates a representative graphical output. The result is pretty neat. Below I'll show you some of the maps I've created using this website.

Logo Ambigrams

It's been a while since I posted any ambigrams.[1] That's partly because of how busy I was working on my dissertation last year. It's also because of some of the technical demands in this batch of ambigrams. I wanted to take logos that already existed and convert them into ambigrams. So not only did I have to make words that were mostly legible when read in either direction, but I also had to maintain, as much as possible, the visual style and integrity of the original logo.

NOTE: to pause the animated .gif images, simply hit the ESC key on your keyboard. To resume, hit the refresh button on your browser.

The End of Procrastination IV

Last year, as the deadline for my dissertation began to loom, lots of my personal projects got put on hold. A few weeks ago, when I went to Minneapolis for the 22nd North American Symbiotic Nitrogen Fixation Conference [1], I had lots of time on the bus. There was supposed to be wi-fi, but it was out more often than not. So I took the time to touch up some of the photos I've been meaning to upload to Wikimedia Commons.

Many Movie Reviews I

Well, dear readers, things have intervened in my life here and there and I now have a huge backlog of review posts. In order to trim this down I'm posting several at once. This saves me time because I'm not writing a full intro for each one. Hopefully you can still get something out of them. In this post I'll share my thoughts on Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which is about a kid who is just starting middle school and wants to improve his popularity—at almost any expense. After that is Driving Miss Daisy, a movie about an aging woman who has to start using a chauffeur even though she doesn't want to. Incidentally, it is also the last PG-rated film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture (in 1989). This is followed by a review of L'Illusionniste (The Illusionist), a 2010 French cartoon about an out-of-luck magician (not to be confused with the 2006 American live-action film about an audacious magician). Then I review I.Q., a romantic comedy about Albert Einstein's neice and an auto mechanic. This is followed by Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, a road-trip comedy about incompatible traveling companions. Next we have Pries☩, a 2011 post-apocalyptic film about vampirse and the Catholic priests who hunt them, based on a Korean comic book. After that I review the 2010 film RED, which is based on a comic book about a retired CIA black ops agent (the title of the movie stands for "Retired, Extremely Dangerous."). Next up is S1m0ne, a film about a down-and-out movie director who tries to pass a digital actress off as a real person. Then there's The Social Network, which tells the story of how Facebook came to be, followed by Unstoppable, which is based on the CSX 8888 incident of 2001.[1] The last review is for Yogi Bear, a live-action/computer-animated version of the classic cartoon show.

Little Learner

A few months ago, during my hiatus from blogging, Lilli taught herself the letter i. Since i and eye are homophones and the jot above the i is drawn the same way as the eyes on the cartoon characters in some of her books, especially Dr. Seuss's ABC [1], she initially thought they were the same thing. This inspired us to draw some letters on cardstock and tape it to the wall. It didn't take Lilli long at all to learn the first batch, so we added more. Then more. And then we took them down for the move to Wisconsin [2], and we haven't put them back up. But since then Leann has found an app for the iPad, called Endless ABC, that is helping Lilli learn all of her letters, both capitals and lower case. She's surprised us several times by identifying a letter we hadn't taught her. So here are some videos of Lilli playing Endless ABC.

Map Projection of Blue Jeans

I was sitting in Elder's Quorum [1] last week watching the fellow in front of me playing with his infant. The little baby boy was wearing a tiny pair of jeans. Just for fun, I began sketching in my notebook the pattern of yellow stitching. Since I was drawing in only two dimensions, I flattened everything. Rather than simulate three dimensions through the use of shading, I sought to capture the entire surface. As with rendering a two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional Earth, I was forced to introduce distortions in order to capture the details I wanted and present them in a particular way.[2] So, I present to you my map projection of blue jeans.

Custom Munchkin Door Cards

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at BYU I was a member of a book club. The president of that book club, my friend Jonathan, discovered the game Munchkin and introduced the rest of us to it. It is a spoof of role-playing games (RPGs), particularly Dungeons and Dragons, and to a lesser extent collectible card games, like Magic: The Gathering. In RPGs a Munchkin is a player that plays competitively, even though RPGs are inherently noncompetitive.[1] Thus the game Munchkin encourages you to play in that fashion—in fact, it's tagline is "Kill the Monsters. Steal the Treasure. Stab Your Buddy." In addition to the original games, there are also several expansion packs. This last Christmas [2] I got the sixth expansion pack, Demented Dungeons. It came with a few blank cards with the implication that I create my own custom cards. So I came up with a few.[3]

Make Your Own Miniplanet

After I'd been playing around with using the Hugin software to make panoramas [1], I discovered another way it can be used: to make miniplanets. Despite the name, this has nothing to do with real astronomy and everything to do with computer trickery. A miniplanet takes photographs from a complete 360° panorama and stitches them together so that they look like a tiny planet.[2] I've scoured the internet and found three different methods for making miniplanets. The first two require Hugin to make a regular panorama and then GIMP to make them miniplanets. The third method is all done in Hugin. For each method you'll need to shoot photographs all the way around you. To have enough ground that the whole planet isn't outrageously distorted, you'll need to aim your camera down a little and go all the way around again at least once (but the more the better).

How to Fill in Transparency in a Hugin Panorama

After I started using Hugin [1] to create panoramas, I quickly ran into a problem where I wanted to keep certain parts of the original photographs in the panorama, but because of the way everything lined up, they either had to be cropped or empty (transparent) areas had to be created in the image. The other graduate student in my lab, Ryan, showed me a video that showed a new feature in the latest version of Photoshop, called Content Aware Fill.[2] Basically it analyzes the surrounding pixels and creates similar content to fill in the target area. I didn't feel like forking out hundreds of dollars for Photoshop CS5, so I went looking for a way to do the same thing using the GIMP.[3] I found a plugin for the GIMP called Resynthesizer.[4] As it turns out, this feature has existed for GIMP longer than it has for Photoshop—and the Photoshop tool is derived from the GIMP tool! Now, let me show you the magic:

Movie Review: Tron: Legacy

If you read my review of the original Tron [1], you know that my primary motive for watching it was to see if it overlapped significantly with a story idea I have. I had seen fragments of it before on TV and the special effects looked downright disastrous. (We've come a long way since then.) The first movie didn't really match the story idea I have, but there was still the possibility that this one did. And it looked like it had higher production value.

Create Your Own Font

Sometimes when a class or a lab meeting isn't very captivating, I'll divert some of my attention to doodling.[1] Sometimes my doodles are abstract, sometimes they're of creatures (real or imagined), sometimes they're of faces or facial features, and sometimes I try to draw fancy scripts. It's this last I want to talk about. A few times, after writing a word with fancy or unusual letters, I'll think, "Man, this is pretty good!" It's certainly better than Comic Sans or Cooper Black or (dare I say it?) Helvetica.[2] Not only did I want to save these, but I actually wanted to try creating a computer font out of them. My earliest attempts were simply drawing the letters, pixel by pixel, using Microsoft Paint. This was tedious, inexact, and produced bitmap fonts instead of vector fonts.[3] So eventually I began searching for superior alternatives.

Make Your Own Panorama

On Sunday we had Stake Conference [1], so we got out of Church at noon instead of at two. With all that extra time on our hands, Leann and I decided to go for a drive. We ended up driving around Utah Lake since neither of us had been on the west side of it. I took some photographs while we were driving around that I wanted to stitch together into a panorama. I found some free software called Hugin.[2] It's really quite easy to use.

The End of Procrastination III

Last year I noticed that there is a paucity of information about nitrogen-fixing rhizobia [1] on Wikipedia. Since I had a lot of rhizobial strains available to me, I decided to photograph them and upload the photographs to Wikimedia Commons. As with the Siberian peashrub photographs [2], I wanted to clean up the background before actually submitting them. I also wanted to center them and rotate them so they didn't look crooked. They sat on the desktop of my lab computer until February of this year. Then I moved them to my jump drive and procrastinated again until now. This week when I had a little free time between experiments at work, I used the GIMP to touch them up.[3] Without further ado, here they are.

Hunting and Wildlife Management Maps

Apparently my obsession with drawing maps for Wikipedia hasn't quite cooled, yet. When I went to see Leann in her lab a few weeks ago, I spotted a map on the wall detailing the wildlife management units for Utah. Rather than tear it down and scan it so that I could make an .svg map out of it [1], I searched online for the same information. I found a version by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources [2] and a version put together by Utah State University.[3] At the USU site, I also spotted a map showing the regional hunt units for Utah. I made maps of both. So that county lines could still be visualized, I made the units semi-transparent. Then I went ahead and made maps for several other states.

Miscellaneous Maps

I told you I was done drawing distribution maps [1], but I found one more. At BYU's Bean Museum is a display of several animals from the North American taiga and tundra. It includes animals such as polar bears, arctic foxes, and caribou. Unlike most of the displays at the museum, these taxidermized animals had little signs that indicated their distribution. Most of them already had distribution maps created for them on Wikipedia. The only exception was the Rocky Mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus). So I made a map for it.

Distribution maps V: Hypsiglena torquata

Here is the final set of distribution maps from the posters on the sixth floor of BYU's Widtsoe Building.[1] This last one comes from Daniel Mulcahy, who is now a professor at Utah State University. He produced a poster about North American night snakes from the species, Hypsiglena torquata. It is comprised of several subspecies populations (though Mulcahy argues that several represent distinct species [2]). His poster included a map showing the ranges of most of the subspecies. The rest I was able to deduce or find on the internet.

Distribution maps IV: Bufo

Besides working with reptiles (lizards, in particular), Dr. Sites has also done some work on amphibians. One of the posters on the sixth floor of the WIDB is a study of toads from the genus Bufo (subgenus Incilius) found in Central America. It also showed the range of the tiny genus Crepidophryne.

Distribution maps III: Liolaemus

Down the hall from Dr. Crandall (whose crayfish maps I've recreated previously [1]) is Dr. Jack Sites. His area of expertise is herpetology (mouse over for definition). Several of his students have made posters about a South American genus of tree iguanas, Liolaemus. They are also known as snow swifts because they're often found in cold areas.[2] I drew distribution maps for each of the species mentioned on the posters (though this does not represent the entirety).

Distribution Maps II: Euastacus

In a previous post I presented the distribution maps I drew for the crayfish family, Parastacidae.[1] For one of the genera found in the Parastacidae, Euastacus (the "spiny crayfish"; see image to the right), there was another poster which showed the distribution of several of the different species. So, I made distribution maps for all of those, too!