Karl Pilkington

Gotta mention Karl Pilkington. I love the Ricky Gervais podcast. It is changing the world as we know it. They just started having random Channel 4 advertisements. It's getting annoying, but I guess you can only expect that someone would take advantage of this marketing opportunity.
I could eat a knob at night. Remix.

V-day

Happy Valentine's Day from Dwight Schrute and I.

I love this picture.

I wanted to take this moment to publicly* declare my love for Geena. As an example of how great she is; today she made me an amazing steak sandwich for lunch. Fluffy onion bread, juicy rare steak, cheddar cheese, lettuce... Brilliant.

* "public" is probably not accurate since nobody actually reads this blog.

Yay

Congratulations Shaun White and the US Snowboarding team. Shaun proved he could live up to the expectations and win the Gold Medal in the Halfpipe competition at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino. Shaun is literally the best Snowboarder in the world. Thats quite an honor.

Detailed Results...

Props also go to Danny Kass of the US team. He won the Silver Medal. Mason Aguirre almost completed a US medal sweep for the competition but Finish rider Koski Markku beat him out for the Bronze.

Shralp!

Best Video podcast available. The Snowboard Podcast from Finland... Shralp! Check out #15, it is a great example of some of the sick snowboard footage that they record. Even if I didn't have a video iPod, I would watch it on my computer. They recently started speaking English so there is less Finish with subtitles.

Enhance

So I'm watching a lot of CSI lately. Primarily Las Vegas. The other night on the show, Nick Stokes was looking at a photograph on the computer. They were using one of those magic computers that they have over there at the lab so they were able to zoom in sooooo closely on the eye of the person in the picture that they could see the image in the the reflection on the eye.

Now something about that always bothered me because I just can't understand how you can keep turning these big pixels into sharp lines. "Thats Impossible!" I would shout at the television. How can they do it? I wonder if it's technology that is just beyond my understanding. Well, I guess I'm starting to understand how it might possibly work, under the right circumstances.

They seem to be using a method called Interpolation to enhance the image. It actually gives a more accurate representation of the image the camera was attempting to capture.

I learned a few things at Smart Guy's Website about the algorithms they use to process these images and enhance them.

" The various algorithm's then divide the original large pixel into a number of smaller pixels whoose new values are derived (interpolated) from the shared values of the original adjacent pixels. Bilinear Interpolation multiplies the original pixel into four, Dipietro and Molenaar's S.P.I.T. multiplies it into eight, and the "Cubic Spline" method used by Carlotto uses twelve surrounding pixels.

This is, in effect a statistical analysis of the data provided by the pixel relationships. "