On Speed Ramping

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I can tolerate seeing Matrix-style speed ramping (a.k.a. “Bullet Time,” the speedup-slowdown time effect, often with an abrupt transition from fast to slow) used in every other commercial for cars and roller coasters, but the way the effect was abused in When Animals Invade Your Home was just plain silly.

Some tips for you video editors out there: first of all, speed ramps don’t look good with walking people or animals, and using footage shot on video rather than high-speed film makes it even worse. Indiscriminate speed-adjustments on video footage tend to create jarring, jerky movements, more so if your keyframes are out of sync at the transition between the fast and the slow clips. When slowing down your footage on lower-end editing machines, always do it at increments which maintain an integer of frames per second, else you’ll get that same jerky movement effect caused by poor frame interpolation. When in doubt, use halfs and fourths.

Not that I have a very big audience of video editors out there, anyway. :P

Nova Potential

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The white dwarf HR 8210 may be set to go supernova, as its mass approaches the Chandrasekhar Limit. The star is 150 light-years away, which puts our planet well into the danger zone. Even more sobering is the fact that, if the star has already gone nova, we won’t know till 150 years after the event. So if HR8210 had decided to start violently blowing off its excess mass in 1853, we would only start seeing the first wave of light and radiation around next year.

Update: The danger is mostly just media-induced sensationalism. More here.

Love and Toilet Seats

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Contrary to what you may have read on the web, ******* and I are not yet married, we are not vegetarians, and love does NOT mean never having to lift the toilet seat. (When the original article was published a couple of years ago, the writer, a good friend, used our actual names for his hypothetical “neighbors.” Tiff and I had great fun tweaking the frantic callers who rung us up to see if the rumors were true. I told them it happened because I was pregnant.)

Strangelet Impact

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Watch out for stray strangelets! Myself, I’m not entirely convinced that there isn’t a more plausible explanation for these isolated events. Think about it: the entire methodology is centered around finding earthquakes in different parts of the world, close to each other on the time scale; and then calling the earlier earthquake a strangelet’s “entry” point, and the later earthquake the strangelet’s “exit” point. Couldn’t it be just the mere coincidence of earthquakes happening at near simultaneous points in time?

Not Just Sweaters

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The Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan seems to be escalating. I wonder if we’ll be seeing any heavier US or British intervention should the fighting reach the point of nuclear attack?