Facebook in the 90's

Have you ever wondered what Facebook would have looked like if it had been invented in the 90's - no me neither, but this video showing what it might have looked like is pretty funny

And google in the 80s' -

Both from http://www.squirrel-monkey.com/

Nerdy photo things for a wet weekend

Have been getting more and more interested in different forms of photography recently

Started out with High Dimensional Range (HDR) which is based on the concept that the dimensional range of a photo is much less than your eye, so that in any single photo a few bits are optimally exposed while while most of it is either too dark or too light. With HDR you take several photos of the same view, bracketed around the optimal exposure and then sample the best exposure from the set. This can be done manually but is best left to a piece of software. I use photmatix pro - details here and the results are awesome. There are lots of examples of the results at my flickr site such as these from Utah.

Then I got interested in timelapse - my first efforts were with a web cam pointing out the window. I captured a winter week outside the lair. The result can be seen here. The movie was made with a photo taken every 10 minutes and then combined into a movie using some free software at 15 frames per second. It was ok but the quality is pretty shitty.

Next stage was to try and get better quality, so I dug out an old Nikon D70 and started experimenting with that. To get the time lapse it needs to be linked to a laptop and have some controlling software. First I tried to use Nikon capture control which is apparently very good but is also rip-off expensive. When you have spent 2000 quid on a camera the least they could do is give you the software to run it! Anyway I tried to use the trail version but it kept bombing and I wasn't about to spend 120 quid on software that may not work, so back to the interweb.

Then I found DIYphotobits from here which does everything I wanted and is FREE - yes you tight arsed bastards at Nikon - take note! Its a great piece of software and I can't understand why it is not more widely known about.

So then I set up the D70 and experimented. The camera battery only lasts a couple of hours which is a major bummer because it means you need an external power source (another £85 from rip-off Nikon). That is on order.

Apart from that it works really well and it is possible to do time lapse and bracket as well, opening up possibilities for timelapse HDR. So yesterday morning (saturday) I set it all up on the window sill , to take 1 shot every two minutes, bracketed +/- 1 stop. So that is 30 shots per hour (with 90 exposures). This ran for a couple of hours before the battery ran out at lunch time.

Photomatix has an excellent batch process mode which combined the three exposures in to 1 shot, I then stacked them up into a movie at 10 frames per second. The result is here.

I am not super happy with the results. First of all the view was pretty crappy. It was a dull overcast day and not much happening. Secondly the software that has stacked the images into the AVI didn't do a particularly good job this time, it's jerky. I need to have another go at compiling it. When I was loading it up to youtube I realised, as with many great ideas, someone else had beaten me to it and done a better job. Check this and this out.

Finally photo-nerd of the decade must go to this guy who put an old canon into a box, wrapped it up in duct tape and sent it into space on a weather balloon. Awesome! Total respect and great results. Check out his website.

Now time lapse, HDR from space... pass the gaffer tape

Technowank...

In the beginning we used a notebook, a photocopied base map, a compass and a pencil to do fieldwork. In 1994 I was given a GPS to use, it was the size of a brick and after it repeatedly placed me several hundred meters away from where I knew I was on the map, I gave up on it.

In 1996 I was in Nambia with Nige Mountney and, due to the total lack of maps we used a GPS, which by this time was only the size of a beer bottle. These were actually useful! In 1998/9 we started our first reservoir modelling of outcrop projects. These were in Patagonia and in Utah. In Patagonia a man from Statoil appeared with a crate of boxes, cables and antennas and then wandered about the field looking like a spaceman. In Utah we tried to use a total station to shot points on bed boundaries. In both cases the technowank failed to produce anything useful, but reservoir models got built anyway.

At this point it was realised that you could not just borrow or hire the gear and head to the field. So the next project I was involved with in South Africa we got so heavy duty help and proper training. The Nomad project involved lots of dGPS rovering which meant a couple of guys wandering around the field with GPS receivers. It was hard work (for them) but produced some great data, a lot of blisters and some very fractious incidents.

Once I moved to Norway my budget was somewhat curtailed so we went low tech. Data was collected with a hand held GPS, a digital camera and a florescent ball on a string. It was low tech but it worked and we got 3 masters students and a couple of papers out of it. At the same time I started working with some photo-realistic data collected for Norsk Hydro by the University of Texas. A couple of masters students later I realised that this was the way forward but unfortunately certain very short and angry individuals in the cornershop decided that they didn't like me, so it was time to build my own virtual outcrop system.

So I went and got a very large grant, bought a ground based laser scanner (lidar), the first of its kind in Europe, and found Simon. Now we are getting hi-tech and we had someone who knew what he was doing. Progress! The scanner sends out a laser beam that calculates the position of a point. It does that 10000 times a second and collects a couple of million points, marries them with digital photos and produces a Virtual Outcrop - like google earth but with cm precision!

Several groups got into Lidar at the same time but we focused on doing our own thing and working our methods for data collection, processing and utilization. A couple of PhDs and several publications down the line we branched out in to the hyper spectral scanner to see if we could marry space remote sensing technology with ground based lidar. If I had realised how hard it was going to be I would probably not have bothered trying - but ignorance is bliss! Fortunately we drafted in Toby ze German who is nothing if not tenacious. So now we can map the geology in 3D and remotely map the mineralogy (as long as its sunny).

All working well but a bit slow and cumbersome. So we found some Swiss guys who had put a similar lidar system together with the gyroscopic inertial navigation system from a cruise missile and produce a scanner that could be used from the side of a helicopter. They were using it for mapping rock fall hazards and power lines So we got another big grant and hooked up with them to collect a series of geological datasets.

And that is where we are today - a guy dressed as a ninja, hanging from the side of a helicopter collecting data at a rate of 10 km per hour and producing huge virtual outcrops. Its getting close to the ultimate in technowank and its the future of field work.

Five years ago we were dangling fluorescent balls over cliffs and taking pictures with a digi camera! Things move fast - what's next?

100 things to do as a Geologist

A Geological meme (from Geotripper via Hypo-theses)
The ones I have done are in bold, was going very well until the Great Barrier Reef, in the end I scored 68 which I guess isn't too bad - A couple of good ones to aim for!

1. See an erupting volcano (Arenal Costa Rica)
2. See a glacier (Norway, Svalbard, New Zealand)
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland (Yellowstone)
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. (Utah and on the Isle of Wight)
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage (Numerous times)
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia) (Utah, South Wales, Peak District)
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile. (Several including Chuqi)
8. Explore a subsurface mine. (Several)
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (Oman and Troodos).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (Harris).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.(Utah)
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere. (Norway)
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada. (Half Dome, Granite Tors, Devon)14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland. (St David's Head Sill, Pembrokeshire)
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website). (Chile)
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic. (Keele Uni)
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Several in the field but not the modern ones)
18. A field of glacial erratics (Norway)
19. A caldera (Utah, Navada, Chile)
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high (Namib Desert)
21. A fjord (I live in one!)
22. A recently formed fault scarp (Chile, Houston)
23. A megabreccia (Gwna Melange, Anglesey)
24. An actively accreting river delta (Numerous)
25. A natural bridge (Utah)
26. A large sinkhole (Gaping Ghyll, Yorkshire)
27. A glacial outwash plain (Norway, New Zealand)
28. A sea stack (several, even climbed some)
29. A house-sized glacial erratic (Norway)
30. An underground lake or river (Several)
31. The continental divide (Colorado, Pyrenees and Alps)
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals (Only in the lab)
33. Petrified trees (several, in the field in Argentina and Namibia)
34. Lava tubes (Argentina)
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back (on a raft).
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth’s fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil’s Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land’s End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant’s Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic “horn”.
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the “father” of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ (several in Utah, UK)
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) (lots of dinosaur bones and even a few trilobites)
85. Find gold, however small the flake (panning in Wales)
86. Find a meteorite fragment (Namibia)
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm (Namibia)
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand.
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century (Hale-Bopp)
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane
99. See noctilucent clouds (in Svalbard)
100. See the green flash (What is that???)

Nerdy things to do with a GPS and a kayak in Western Norway

The degree confluence project is an attempt to document all the land or near-land intersection points of cardinal lines of latitude and longitude.

Basically it means lots of nerds go and take photos of the exact point in space where 6 degrees North crosses 54 degrees East etc. Then they post them on the web...

Why? Buggered if I know, but it beats watching shitte tv or worse, football. Its also a good way to spend a day and visit a point on the Earth`s surface that has no other merit, ie it is not a summit or especially pretty or anything. It just happens to be where two arbitary navigation lines cross.

Essentially its an excuse to get out the house and visit somewhere random.

So last year when I found out that 60N/5E had never been visited and it was just off the coast to the south of us it seemed a good way to waste a day, infact a whole weekend.

You can read the account here ...