Physics band names

• Ultraviolet Catastrophe (punk)
• Tip Tilt ('80s hip-hop)
• The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment (twee indie group out of Brooklyn)
• Zustandssumme (pre-reunification West German metal)
• Simple Harmonic Oscillator (barbershop quartet)
• Spaghettification (jam band)
• Strange Charm (I think they played at Lilith Fair?)

HDR, photojournalism, and Lightroom 4

On his blog, Charles Apple discusses the use of high dynamic range (HDR) images in newspapers. The discussion raises questions about what constitutes excessive manipulation for photojournalism, and in particular what the impact of next-generation photo processing software will be on these definitions. I don’t know, in detail, the prevailing ethical standards of photojournalism, so in part I’m looking for the thoughts of experts on the topic.

Let’s begin by discussing HDR photography. The sensor in a digital camera is only capable of recording a certain range of scene brightness, from dark to light. A part of the scene that falls outside this range will be “clipped” to pure black or white, without detail. To get around this technical limitation, it’s possible to take multiple exposures of the scene, with different exposure settings (e.g. shutter speed). This will allow some of the exposures to record the bright parts of the scene, at the expense of the dark parts, and other exposures to do the opposite. These exposures may then be combined in software, to produce a “high dynamic range” image, whose range of scene intensities surpasses what the sensor can record directly.

Out with the old, in with the new

Engine oil, that is. Not the nicest day for an oil change, but appropriate nonetheless.

From all of us me at Scotch Tape & Duct Whisky, happy 2012. May it kick 2011 in the ass.

What does Emily Post say about dead guests at weddings?

I haven’t played Skyrim yet, but I enjoyed reading the changelog:

- Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player’s wedding dead

- Dragon corpses now clean up properly

- Fixed rare issue where dragons would not attack

- Fixed rare issue with dead corpses being cleared up prematurely

Dead corpses being cleared up prematurely

Happy Thanksgiving!

On pride

The following originally appeared on Facebook. I think I wrote it because I needed to remind myself.

---

In a comment elsewhere on Facebook, a stranger wrote:

So no I do not understand having pride in being a penn stater right now when the rest of the nation is quite frankly disgusted by your school.

Let me help.

I'm proud to be a Penn Stater because I received an excellent education that I would have had to pay much more for anywhere else. I did meaningful research throughout my undergraduate career. My advisor and the other faculty in my department were world-class, and so many of them went out of their way to improve my education. I went on to the best graduate program in my field, and my preparation was second to none. The people at Penn State who made this possible have nothing to do with the travesty now unfolding.

I'm proud of Penn State because it was the kind of place where you could skip Art History (yet again) to sneak off to the Creamery and have a cone with Whit Diffie. Or find yourself standing at a urinal next to Sir Roger Penrose.

I'm proud of Penn State for the elms and the cow fields and capture-the-flag on the golf courses at midnight, and the grilled stickies afterward. And the friends who were there through all of it.

I'm proud of Penn State for the guy in my dorm who took down a murderer on the HUB lawn. Because when you see violence happening in front of you, that's the right thing to do.

I'm proud of Penn State because, even though I now live a couple of hours from campus, there's "canners" at my local grocery store every year, standing in the cold, raising money for kids with cancer.

I like Penn State football, but my pride and love for Penn State were never based on that. And I sure as hell never loved the administration (does any faculty, staff, or student anywhere?). They were not the foundation of my pride, and their failures will bruise, but not destroy, that pride. The university is more than them, and what they did will not erase the achievements of hundreds of thousands of good and decent faculty, students, and alumni.

On optimism

Christian Annyas provides a chronological survey of Chevrolet speedometers.

Chevrolet Cruze (2008)

Related: The top speed of a 2011 Chevy Cruze LTZ was 124 mph in Car & Driver testing.