In LA

I say “Happy Halloween” today, but back when I was in grade school I remember receiving a different message, which went something like this:

Don’t celebrate Halloween. It’s a celebration of a day on which bad people used to go around burning Jews.

I did a bit of Google searching today and have yet to find any evidence that there was a general practice of burning Jews on Halloween. Communities in Europe did burn people who had been accused of witchcraft with alarming regularity¹, but I don’t know if they did so particularly on October 31. There does appear to have been a common practice in which black cats were burned on Halloween, which I don’t condone. Many sermons on the net claim that the predecessor to Halloween was a Celtic feast to celebrate a god of death named “Samhain”, and thus anyone of a religion that doesn’t recognize Samhain as a god should spurn the holiday –but it appears that this god of the dead thing is likely a translation mixup that started in the 18th century and according to academics Samhain is just the name of a festival and not a deity.

So I say as long as you’re not inclined to celebrate the flammability of humans of any stripe, feel free to go out and celebrate Spider Man or whoever your costume is supposed to represent. And if you’re driving, watch out for kids chasing candy into the street, and try not to get too distracted by all the women wearing sexy-whatever costumes².

1. but apparently not as often as many believe [↩]
2. “Sassy” Adult Cookie Monster Costume? WTF! [↩]

Sometimes Chinese parents show how they really feel about their child with a carefully-chosen bumper sticker.¹

What’s a “Tiger Mom”? If you have to ask, that’s good. You’ve obviously been studying math or practicing piano for hours and hours, keeping clear of the internet. I take back what I said about you being garbage.

When I saw this sticker I laughed aloud², then reflected on the fact that if my parents had sported this on their Toyota station wagon when I was growing up, I’d probably have been a better student. Fear of unknown unknowns³ is a great motivator.

OK, so the bumper sticker has nothing really to do with the “Tiger Mom” meme, but that phrase is all over the net and the whole concept alternately interests me and cracks me up. My theory is that any truth to Mrs. Chua’s newly-named stereotype has little to do with being Asian⁴, and much to do with the fact that it wasn’t easy for people to immigrate to the US from China in the 1960s-80s and the process disproportionately selected for the hard-scrambling type. Many of those immigrants later decided⁵ to imbue in their kids the same drive that served them in getting through that filter. It’s just like the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue“, but with the parental focus being toughness mental rather than physical.

But no need to be so serious; The best Tiger Mom jokes I’ve come across so far are the article “New Parenting Book Sparks Outrage” from The Onion, and Jen Kwok’s “Tiger Mom Rap!”.

1. Yes, I smudged out the license number, just in case China’s “Human Flesh Search Engines” are on the lookout for people with unharmonious bumper stickers. [↩]
2. …then I stopped laughing and wondered whether the driver could have purchased this sticker as a deliberate joke, which would still be funny but less so. Unlikely given that the median level of English literacy among locals of this area in nil. [↩]
3. Rumsfeld, Donald, “I never promised you a WMD”, Press Briefing (Winter 2002 Edition), GWB (ed.), URL = <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns>. [↩]
4. …except for the Orientalist-tinge to the naming of the meme. [↩]
5. …or had less choice in the matter than that, since people may often just use the same parental behaviors that were modeled for them when young, or maybe their nature trumps nurture and the filter selected for genetically-driven type-A peeps. [↩]

The most stylish (yet very shy around foreigners with iPhones) girl on the subway. Her very fashionable parents saw me try to take her photo and approved, and then her Dad took my phone away and proved himself with this photo the better photographer of this particular subject.

A sparkly owl coat, seen on the streets of Songjiang, Shanghai, China. If you’re ever curious if a given photo was shot in Shanghai, just look for guys carrying their girlfriends’ designer purses –it appears to be the local custom.

My new sweater proclaims that I am "having a Fine Time with your Friends" and exhorts all that "You Must be a Eiffel Knit Life". Word.

I threw together this little¹ damask pattern, which I’m using as my desktop, iPhone, and iPad background. Figure I’d share in case anyone else would enjoy it.

Click the thumbnail at right to get hold of a png image at the exact resolution required for the iPhone 4G’s “retina” display. 960×540. Perhaps you can spot the game of Pong in it?

If you feel like using it on your phone, click through to the full-size image, then click and hold on the image to save it to your library, then navigate to and choose it in the wallpaper settings. Neato.

To make your own damask pattern, sit yourself down in front of a computer running Adobe Illustrator and check out this great tutorial over at tutsplus.com.

1. Don’t you just love it when people are proud of an achievement, and they express their pride couched in diminutive adjectives and verbs that indicate the achievement took a minimal amount of effort. e.g.: “Oh, those little baubles I tossed off the other day? The full-scale model of the pyramids at Giza? It was nothing.” In this case, I think I’ve come up with a pattern I like (partly due to subject matter) but the pattern will probably please very few, (partly due to subject matter). I’m using the diminutive out of respect for those who hate retrogaming or hate damask patterns or just hate life in general. [↩]

The greenscreen shoot. That 16:9 frame at right represents the frame of the video player that’s part of the facebook page. Clamps hold breakaway blocks with tracking markers.

If you have a facebook account, you might¹ enjoy checking out this bit of Jackass 3D promotion that I helped plan and coordinate. It was a pretty complicated greenscreen shoot, put together on an extremely short timeline. The Jackass guys were hilarious and game, and their crew was great (special thanks Tripp and Barry). The creative team at Paramount, Picture Production Company, and the folk at Powster did a bang-up job initiating, commissioning, planning, and putting the whole thing together. It’s nice to see the finished result online and to be able to tell people about it. It is an app, you have to give it access to your entire life, but it’s² no more insidious than Farmville³.

A small section of a final result, composited live in a web browser.

Also part of the same shoot, this baseball-themed game.

All’s well that ends well eh? Now go see the film. How else are you going to see excrement fly at the camera in 3D?⁴

1. Or you might not. There’s no accounting for taste. [↩]
2. As far as I know. [↩]
3. And far far less annoying. It also doesn’t spam your friends with every smiling sheep you’ve mulesed or smiling automated milking machine you’ve installed or whatever people do in that Farmville thing whose updates drove me from Facebook. And seriously, what’s better, virtual happy farming, or dudes hitting baseballs into each others’ nuts? The world’s answer to that question can be found in the box office receipts for Jackass 3D. [↩]
4. Neither a trip to the zoo, nor the blue Navii “tribal bio-expelled tactical paste” seen in the upcoming director’s cut of Avatar count. [↩]

I’m loving this infographic/comic from xkcd:

Found via swisscheeseandbullets.com via themadeshop.tumblr.com. That’s a lot of attributions for one comic whose most direct link is provided above, but they’re worthwhile, as swisscheeseandbullets has a web design I quite like, and themadeshop’s logo becomes a red-cyan anaglyph on mouseover –how cool is that?

I stumbled upon a great website of old letterhead images yesterday. You should check it out if you like such things. At the moment, it features historic artifacts such as Marie Curie’s letterhead, that of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and “Python (Monty) Pictures Ltd.”, among others. Well worth a look. Go.

I thought this screenshot might amuse. Click the photo to see it at full-size. At the top of the image are photos that include Chow Yun Fat, cropped to just the automatically recognized face. Below a line are photos that Aperture 3 thinks may be the same person. To refine the computer’s idea of what his face looks like and tag more photos with the appropriate name I had to select all Chow Yun Fat photos from the bottom part of the screen and drag them to the top, above the line.

For more info on the facial recognition feature in Aperture 3, check here on Apple’s website.

I have about 16,000 photos in my archive, and though the process isn’t completely automatic, the facial recognition feature made it much more feasible to tag all the people in these photos. Even just the fact that the application can display an entire set of photos cropped and resized to only show faces alone would be a huge help, the fact that Aperture 3 makes decent guesses is a bonus.

Test of NeatVideo plugin; Noise removal from Canon T2i 6400 ISO clips from ZachFine on Vimeo.

if you’re on a fast machine, I’d recommend watching this full-screen with HD set to “on” –if you’d like to download the original QuickTime file rather than watch it embedded in a web page, there’s a download link low on the right side of the movie’s Vimeo page.

I shot some 1080p video in low-light with my Canon Digital Rebel T2i set to its 6400ISO setting, which resulted in very noisy video.

I tested the demo version of the NeatVideo for FCP filter to see if it could remove or minimize the noise. The results were encouraging, so I bought the “Pro” version of the plugin for $99.

This clip shows the results of the application of this filter to a couple of my more dramatically noisy clips. The filter renders very slowly, compounded by the fact that I’ve set the temporal filtration to use 3 frames.

You’ll see portions of the clips both with and without the noise removal, and split-screened sections for comparison. I think the result is pretty remarkable and usable, though the noise is peeking through the darker areas of the frame in the first clip. I wonder if I can smooth that out if I build a better noise profile or if I increase the temporal filtration?

Music:
“Do The Global Twist” by “The Neatbeats”, from the awesome album “japanese groupsound”.

I had to chop the song in half. Go buy the song or album to hear the very enthusiastic jam session in the middle of the track. Fun stuff.