Boats, trains, and flying metal suits

Ah, Los Angeles. When I first arrived in LA, I remember walking down the street and seeing a free newspaper with an article about women's shoes. The headline read, 'if it looks good, it doesn't hurt.' That rolled around in my head like the coffee table book in the trunk of my car - I was missing something there, somehow.
Soon afterwards, I experienced something else. I was working on the set of 'Iron Man' and my first task was security. At the time, I was far from convinced that a six foot tall man in a metal suit merited my protection. However, when discussing the film, I asked who was to play Mr. Tony Stark, the man in the Iron Mask himself, to which my friend responded, 'Robert Downey Jr.' Given his previous history and 'chemical personality' I began to understand.
So my first day, they told me not to let anyone through the gate without a badge, or a car badge in the case of a vehicle. Easy enough? Right? So the first guy came by - and I asked for his I.D. which, in his case, was apparently his middle finger. I got on the walkie. "He's good - that guys' just a dick. Ignore him."
Fair enough. The next day, some guys on motorcycles BLEW right past me. Again I pulled out my walkie. "Those guys are with effects - they're fine - just ignore them." Right on, okay.
The day after, it was payroll - I pulled my walkie and was answered by "don't mess with payroll or you're check will get donated to an Afghani refugee."
It continued like this for days like a joke with no punch line. "A guy walks up to a gate and gives you the finger, to which the man grabbed his walkie and said, 'what the hell do I do?' At one point, I went to pull out my walkie, missed, and pulled my hair out instead. To help me out, the guys reduced my workload to the following: If he looks suspicious, stop him.
Fair enough. Then the next day came. Now, at some point, Downey Jr. fights terrorists in Afghanistan. And who else might come up the road but a bunch of guys with Turbans, bazookas, and bad attitudes?
Me: "Guys, there are terrorists here with guns. They look unhappy and I'm not going to lie: I think they aim to kill me."
Walkie Talkie: "They work on the movie. They're fine."
Me: There are photographers coming in also. With cameras. They look like photographers and they're dressed like photographers.
Walkie Talkie: "Yea, we have a press scene today."
When this happened, to prevent my mind from collapsing into a black hole, I chucked my clipboard to the left, my walkie to the right, and went and had a sandwich. It was the best sandwich I've ever eaten, mainly because it had mustard, mayo, and a whole lot of bitter.
As I was eating my turkey, anger and bitter sandwich, I saw one of the female setpieces woble by in ridiculous high heels - she would have been cute if she hadn't been plastic. And suddenly it hit me. The high heels. The job at the gate. Los Angeles. Visual effects. It was all an illusion - somewhat like David Copperfield, but more like lunchtime. It wasn't real - everything here was about maintaining an illusion. It dawned on me then that my future should be in either visual effects or mushrooms.
After a brief but epic failure in fungus horticulture, I began looking for a visual effects job. Skip forward a few months and I found myself on a boat with my boss. The weathermen, bless there little heads, had predicted 10-15 knot winds. As I stood at the helm, I read the display, which noted 35 knot winds. When I first set out, I was mistakenly under the impression that a knot was something like 2.5 miles per hour, making the windspeed over sixty miles per hour, but judging by the way my stomach rolled with the ocean, I would guess the wind was at 500 miles per hour. When you're in a sail boat, and you have a postage stamp of sail up, and your primary concern is to not die, and your secondary concern is to stand up, it's kind of what I would imagine standing on the altar with the wrong girl just before I do - your knees are weak, at some point you consider abandoning ship, but in the end you know that if you can somehow survive the rollercoaster ride, as soon as you get off the ride onto a stable bit you're going to throw up.
Once we rounded the corner of the AnaCappa Islands, however, it was a completely different story. The seas were calm, the breeze was warm, and the food was great - after you've eluded death whilst simultaneously doing the polka in an attempt to stand level, a glass of pickle juice and a bowl of dried pasta would taste good - so when I say the sandwiches are good, I mean that it was if God himself dipped the sandwiches into his ambrosia and dropped them into the little meat locker for us to throw up later. I'm not even sure what was on the sandwich - I ate it to fast - I'm pretty sure I ate some kind of non-biodegradable material as well.
The rest of the trip was a breeze - the ride back was a little smoother and the winds calmer. In many ways, riding a sailboat is just like dancing - you have to move with your partner, responding to her whims and hang on with just enough force - to lightly and you find yourself down a flight of stairs sleeping on the floor of the boat, to stiff and the next dip will jerk you into the carefully positioned Obstruction of Pain (tm) all of which are located exactly at toe or knee level. For the most part, I managed to avoid serious injury, but the boat was simply a crappy dance partner this particular day - to much of the drink, me thinks.
All together, it was great experience. I think, in the future, I will seek out more adventures in which my primary objective is to not die, as so far as sporting goes, these are the sports I've been most successful, mainly because motivation is high, and if you lose a match, you retire. On the bright side, if you survive a few times and lose once, you're going to have a pretty awesome batting average, methinks.

If a tree falls in the woods...

A new article over at ArsTechnica discusses something new: cloaking the audio behind objects - using principals discovered while attempting to bend light around both 2D and 3D objects. The cloak would work by creating a material that duplicates the wavelengths of the sounds bouncing into it - this would allow you to make something 'disappear' across a given sound wave.

In light bending, you need spatial coordinates applied to a given cloaking surface to bend around the material, however in sound doesn't require bending these coordinates, which means you could cloak a broad range of frequencies.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it could mean sound dampening applied to nuclear submarines and military enclosures. A more realistic idea would be to apply such a technology to a car, reducing engine noise, or possibly to computers and the ever humming 'fridge in your kitchen. Personally, I'd put it in my walls - my roommate could blast P-Diddy whilst I simultaneously cranked Led Zepplin up loud enough to blow my trousers clean off.

Our Deep Field World

In 2004, a tiny piece of our sky changed our view of our planet-- and our galaxy-- forever. The guys at Hubble, who had been playing with their camera lenses, decide to try something new. The idea was to point the Hubble space telescope at an empty area of space for ten days to see what they could find. Like a camera, the longer you leave the lens open, the more light the camera will catch.

So the project began - an empty region of space in the vicinity of the constellation Ursa Major was found, a telescoped was pointed in its direction, and then they waited.

Prior to this experiment, the optics on the telescope were incapable of fully appreciating the sky, generaly leaving images somewhat blurry.

To make sure they saw whatever was out there, it was essential that they select as empty an area as possible - one with no infra red, ultra violet, or x-rays, no bright lights, as little as possible. To narrow the field, they selected an area roughly the size of a tennis ball across - equivalent to one part in millions - of our sky - for study. When completed, the image was assembled into HUDF, or Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

What they found was astounding.

An area previously thought to be devoid of anything was found to contain over ten thousand galaxies in an area that seemed completely empty.

I can think of nothing more awesome - in the true sense of the word - than discovering that even in the darkest, blackest reaches of our galaxy there are more galaxies than can be counted - stars and planets so vast and plentiful that the collective conscience of the world could never fully appreciate its awe and grandeur of it.

The project didn't just show galaxies - allowing the camera to sit for eleven days gave scientists the ability to peer thirteen billion years into the past, revealing galaxies that were born shortly after the beginning of the universe - back when time and existence itself was only eight hundred million years old.

Looking at the universe at such a grand scale, one can imagine that, relative to all that is, our planet is far, far less significant than the tiniest grain of sand on the beach, leaving you and I and everyone else on the planet a very, very small spot in the very grand history - one beyond our very comprehension.

There are as many ways to interpret and perceive this data as there are people in the world. The first instinct is the vast loneliness that stretches across empty space, but there is a second option - wonder. There is an entire universe so rich with opportunity no one could possibly take advantage of it all - but we can begin to appreciate it. We can probe the limitless depths of the mind, the science (and mystery) of love and the art of mathematics.

My goal here will be to point you in new directions, open small bits of the world up, and occasionally bring fuzzy, distant images into the clear. There's a lot to know out there - and as every single human being slowly incubates our knowledge, we all learn a single thing before all else - the more we learn, the more we realize there is so staggeringly much more to learn.

After all, the only thing expanding faster than our universe is the human thirst for knowledge.