Calico (AutoStitch for Mac OS X)

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Panoramic photography is something I’ve been playing with for years — long enough that Prairie was amused to see that I was taking multi-shot panoramics back when I visited Europe during my high school years, long before I had any way to assemble them together with anything more sophisticated than scissors and tape.

Unfortunately, the state of panoramic software on the Mac has been less than I’d like for quite some time now. Apple’s excellent Quicktime VR Authoring Studio is long out of date, without any sign of it being updated for OS X (in fact, searching for it on Apple’s site only returns references to it, with no official product page listed). Canon’s Photostitch is used fairly frequently, but I’ve never been that thrilled with it. Functional, but it doesn’t really “feel” like a true OS X application, and it doesn’t allow for much tweaking or fine-tuning. Other Mac OS X panoramic tools are either commercial and expensive, or command-line ports that I’ve never taken the time to investigate fully (such as Panorama Tools). For a time when I had a working PC I used The Panorama Factory and was quite happy with its range of options, but since my PC finally gave up the ghost, TPF’s performance under Virtual PC wasn’t good enough for me to continue using it.

For the past year or so, though, I’ve been keeping an eye out on AutoStitch. It looked to be the “holy grail” of panoramic creation software: originally created as a research project at the University of British Columbia, it produces truly automatic panoramic photos, stitched from multiple photos that don’t even have to be aligned or all taken with the same exposure (a 57-shot example is shown on the AutoStitch page). The problem, of course, was that AutoStitch is PC-only. Still, I kept seeing incredible panoramas that AutoStitch had produced, so I’d occasionally check in to see if a Mac OS X port had popped up yet.

This morning, my persistence paid off. I’m not sure when it first appeared, but Kekus Digital has produced a pseudo-port of AutoStitch for Mac OS X (licensing the AutoStitch technology in a Mac OS X package) called Calico.

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Penguin Floozies

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The shocking truth about penguin’s sex lives, photo by downtempo, found on Flickr today.

For years penguins have been regarded as the conservatives of the avian world. Always attired in formal evening wear, they have become symbols of literature and family values.

Recent studies, by Otago University lecturer Lloyd Davis and colleague Finoa Hunter of Cambridge University have shown this veneer of respectability to be a sham. During a summer camped on the ice watching Adelie penguins mate around the clock, Dr. Davis and Dr. Hunter observed prostitution and wife-swapping.

The most bizarre aspect of penguin sexuality is the female’s penchant for prostituting herself to acquire pebbles to line her nest. In the ice and snow of Antarctica pebbles are useful insulation, crucial for survival of broods, but they are at a premium.

Often the only way to get pebbles is to take them from other nests at the risk of severe pecking. Females have figured out that a good way to get pebbles is to swap sex for them, says Dr. Davis, who has been studying the penguins since 1977.

“Occasionally females who have pair-bonded with a male will go off for a quickie.”

Dr. Davis says penguin prostitutes usually manage to get a stone without having sex. In many instances females will go through a courtship ritual, then abscond with a stone after the male gets out of his nest, expecting them to lie down on it.

Natural history documentaries have always described penguins as mating for life. Dr. Davis says that is clearly not so.

“My work shows they swap partners regularly, often in the same season.”

Fresh Hare / All This and Rabbit Stew

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Some days, it’s really surprising what you can get for a dollar. Prairie’s long been a dollar store shopper, as it’s a convenient and cheap way to pick up little bits and pieces for around the home. Last Christmas as part of my stack of presents, she picked up a good-sized stack of dollar store DVDs. None of this is high-quality stuff, but that’s not really the point: it’s fun stuff. Old, bad movies make up a lot of it (we had fun watching The Lady and the Highwayman, an old TV movie featuring Hugh Grant in a mullet), but she also picked up a lot of compilations of old cartoons: Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, and quite a few others.

A couple of nights ago, we popped in Cartoon Craze presents: Bugs Bunny: Falling Hare, mostly a collection of Bugs Bunny cartoons, with a few other non-Bugs cartoons as well, and settled back for a fun evening of cartoon silliness.

What we didn’t expect to discover was that two of the cartoons on the disc are shorts that have been either edited or outright banned for many years due to racist content. They’re fascinating from a historical context, and I actually think it’s kind of neat to have them and be able to see them — but man was it a surprise when we weren’t expecting them to pop up!

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2006 Emerald City Comicon

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I spent a few hours wandering around this years’ Emerald City ComiCon today. Most of the pictures I’ve posted to Flickr are of the costume contest, but there’s quite a few from my wanders through the showcase floor as well.

Two things definitely stood out as I made my rounds.

Jetfire, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAFirst was coming across what appeared to be a mint condition, still in the box version of Jetfire, my all-time favorite Transformer toy. Probably only as good as it was because it was a pretty direct rip-off of the Robotech Valkyrie, but I never cared. I’d have loved to have grabbed this, but at $225, it was a bit out of my reach.

Shel Silverstein's Different Dances, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAThe second find was a copy of Shel Silverstein‘s ‘Different Dances‘, which I’d never heard of before. It’s definitely not one of the kids’ books that Shel is most famous for, as I quickly discovered when I started flipping through it and immediately found a four-page spread titled “The Deadly Weapon” (pages one and two, pages three and four, both Not Safe For Work if cartoon drawings of naked people fall into that category). While I couldn’t afford the $125 that the book was priced at, it turns out that Xebeth might have a copy that she could send my way. Neat!

The rest of the Con was pretty much as to be expected, with the usual Stormtroopers, Jedi, and other assorted oddities wandering around. Not at all a bad way to kill a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Saturday Mourning

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At about 3:30 Saturday morning, as the rave at Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC) was winding down, the young people who lived at 2112 East Republican Street scanned the dance floor for people they could invite to their afterparty. They made a habit of welcoming strangers—it’s how they had all met one another in the first place. They had almost finished with the invitations when Jeremy Martin, 26, spotted a hulking, solitary figure.

“Go ask him,” Jeremy said to his best friend, Anthony Moulton.

Another person who lived at the home, 24-year-old Jesiah Martin (no relation to Jeremy), remembers having seen the man that night—conspicuous not just for his 6’5″ 280-pound frame but for the fact that he wasn’t dressed up or dancing. “He was by himself mostly, fly on the wall style,” said Jesiah.

Anthony, who is disarmingly goofy in the way of most in their group, approached the man and said, “Do you know the difference between Scotch and beer?” Most at the party were drinking beer, but Anthony handed the man a flask full of Macallan. The man took a swig and grimaced. But he liked it. He even smiled, leading Anthony to say, “Hey, what are you doing after this? We have half a keg at our place…”

And that is how Kyle Huff came to visit the house on East Republican Street.

I’ve mentioned before that The Stranger has been consistently doing the best reporting on the Capitol Hill shooting. They continue with this feature story on the events of the night.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Aaron Kyle Huff's weaponry (photo (c)2006 Greg Gilbert/The Seattle Times)

  • A semi-automatic assault rifle.
  • A pistol-grip shotgun.
  • An aluminum baseball bat.
  • A machete.
  • Over 300 rounds of ammunition.

All but the shotgun were recovered from Aaron Kyle Huff’s truck after the massacre on Capitol Hill; the shotgun is one similar to the one Huff used during the shooting. Not pictured is Huff’s semi-automatic handgun, also used in the attack.

All legal to own.

For God’s sake, why?!?

NRA members and “right to bear arms” wingnuts, feel free to brand me as a gun-control nut. I’m fine with that.

There is NO good reason why this sort of weaponry (specifically, the assault rifle and pistol-grip pump action shotgun…obviously, it’s a bit hard to get worked up over a baseball bat, and while I personally find a two foot machete pretty damn creepy, it’s nowhere near the same league as the guns) needs to be openly available to the general public. You want to hunt? Fine, hunt. Buy a hunting rifle and go slaughter as many deer as you want. But this kind of stuff?

Seattle Chief of Police Gil Kerlikowske has it right:

As many as 30 people were in the house when the man approached, draped in bandoliers of ammunition and armed with a handgun and a pistol-grip, 12-gauge shotgun — a weapon Kerlikowske pointedly said was “not for hunting purposes, but for hunting people.”

What actually happened was bad enough. It makes me ill to consider what could have happened if a police officer hadn’t been in the area and on the scene after only five minutes of shooting.