Arboralopecia

We had a freeze last night. Our pecan tree reacted strongly. When I straggled out of bed this morning, I saw it dumping its leaves on the ground. The leaf fall has basically ended because there's nothing left to fall. I didn't see it start, but I don't think it took more than a couple hours. The lawn under it is now under many layers of leaves. You can hear the leaves falling.

Gotta rewrite the song: "Leaves are falling, loudly falling, tumbling to the ground. Yellow yellow green brown yellow, tumbling to the ground."



ISN'T THIS EXCITING?!?!?! I'll bet this is totally what Chen, Hurley, and Karim had in mind when they founded YouTube. I am at the forefront of 21st century journalism! I'm gonna be on Oprah!

The world in the air

Watch it in high quality*. You can see the great-circle paths, especially over the South Pacific from Australia to Buenos Aires.

* Hmmm. Can't flip to high quality when embedded. Look to the right below the player on YouTube's version.

Who says romance is dead?

Whoever said it is right: it's a fake. But still...

Mantis Shrimp

Mantis shrimp, a.k.a., stomatopods, are some freaky creatures. They're neither mantis nor shrimp, but a different kind of arthropod in the crustacean sub-phylum. What's so special about them? They're weird-looking, they can attack prey with the force of a bullet to literally smash their shells (or the walls of an aquarium), and their amazing eyes can perceive a form of light that I didn't even know existed. Who needs science fiction with these things around?

I learned it by watching you!

Uma's sense of humor is pretty edgy.

Carl Lewis, Olympian

Transcoding Canon SD400 videos for Google Video

Google Video has been glitchy lately when I've uploaded the .AVI files I get from our Canon SD400. Every time I uploaded one, it would just give me 2 silent seconds of grey. I did a little poking around and came up with the following mencoder (part of mplayer) incantation to transcode to MPEG-4 (with MP3 audio):

mencoder -o out.mp4 -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -srate 11025 \
  -channels 1 -af-adv force=1 -lameopts preset=medium \
  -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2048 in.avi

That gets Canon's slightly weird format into something Google Video can handle, at a pretty good quality level. If you've got a batch of files to transcode, you can use the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash

for f in "$@"
do
 mencoder -o "${f/%\.[Aa][Vv][Ii]/.mp4}" -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc
        -srate 11025 -channels 1 -af-adv force=1 -lameopts preset=medium \
        -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2048 "$f"
done

That will create X.mp4 from X.avi without altering the latter. As a plus, it will drop the size by about 85% to 90%.

Requiem for a day off

It doesn't have the novelty impact of Shining, but it's still a fine effort. "Lux Aeterna" was a nice choice, if obvious, considering how Hollywood as leapt all over it.

Billy Jean is not my Ice, Ice, Baby

Our Hardy Heron

Google Video finally got their act together.

the midnight golfer

Back when "MadTV" was funny (really, it happened), they aired this classic skit:

twuirrel

A bird-feeder with a twist: when it detects the weight of a squirrel, a motor starts it a-spinnin':



Things didn't go quite as planned, though. They learned to hang on, and they liked it: