jeffmcbride.net

PBS recently aired a NOVA episode, called “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documenting the trial of a group of parents vs. the Dover, Pennsylvania school board over “intelligent design” (e.g. creationism) in science education. I just learned that NOVA makes all of its shows available online, including Judgment Day. I watched it last night, and it was pretty well done. They did have some excessively dramatized courtroom reenactments, but I believe they adhered to the actual court transcripts, at least, and it did a good job of explaining the story, and build-up to the events. The dover story almost make me believe there is hope for reason in America after all. But then I watched the republican “Youtube” debates tonight, and that hope was diminished a bit.

I got a new camera last week, and have been having fun playing with it. I’ve already taken a few series of pictures with the intent of stitching them into a panorama, and tonight I started to figure out how to do it.

I found this linux.com article that talks about some open source tools for image stitching. It recommended an application called Hugin as “the reigning champ”, so I figured I’d give it a try. I haven’t tried much else, and I don’t think I will, because in about ten minutes with almost no effort I’ve got a pretty decent result. You’ve got to get some other tools for it to work (such as enblend, and autopano). I definitely recommend the autopano-sift control point search program, as it doesn’t have the limited functionality of the autopano (which requires a license for the sift feature), and worked great for me.

I’ve got some experimenting to do to figure out all of the possibilities, but I put together this quick panorama of part of Simi Valley from four photos taken from the hill where I work.

I love this show. Sometimes they do some really stupid things, I have to admit. But they do just as many really cool things, like in the episode I saw today. This makes me

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