Mandelbrot Set Zoom

 I just got through doing a video showing a zoom into a Mandelbrot Set which can be seen here on YouTube. There seems to have been some loss in the quality of the images during the upload process and I will see what I can do about that. I have also posted better stills from the zoom on Picasa.

Favorite Limerick

Relativity

There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
 She set out one day,
 In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

Published anonomously by A. H. Reginald Buller
in Punch, 19 Dec, 1923.

Night pans with the RAZR V3

The images that you can capture at night with the RAZR V3 are fairly good. One can do a mosaic to form a panoramic view. One can also increase detail by using it with binoculars or a small telescope but these images were taken with the +2 EV setting and no zoom.

Time names "You" as Persons of the Year for 2006

I just heard on CNN that Time magazine has named You as the Persons of the Year for 2006. By this they mean the online generation including people who contribute to Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. including bloggers.

Paperlilies tops 750,000 views

Paperlilies' featured scarcasm video is on YouTube's home page and she has made it over 750,000 hits.

Based on figures from Dec 14 the new projection is that she will soon get another 50,000 hits bring her up to about 800,000 hits. The updates on the number of views have been infrequent and the time that lapsed before they were noticed may alter the results somewhat.

Projected hits for paperlilies featured YouTube video

These are observations of the hits that paperlilies so far has received on her Scarcasm video which was featured on YouTube earlier this week .

The projection is that she will receive just under 750,000 hits but there is also the chance that she will go over this mark. As can be seen the rate at which she is receiving hits is slowly decreasing but the trend is that she will still be getting a substantial number of hits over the next few days.

Science fiction

I tried to include some links with my profile but that doesn't appear to be possible so I decided to do a blog on my favourite scifi authors and novels.

I started borrowing and reading scifi novels from the local county library and as you can probably tell have been hooked on them ever since. These are the ones that I would recommend to anyone interested:

The first scifi series of books that I became interested in was the Tom Swift Jr series which I borrowed and collected during the 60s. I still have a few of them tucked away in a closet.

Arthur C. Clark is best known for the 2001 and (with Gentry Lee) the Rendezvous with Rama series of books. There is a related video game called RAMA that was published by Sierra which I successfully completed.

My favourites by Robert A. Heinlein are Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers.

I have read almost every scifi book by Isaac Asimov including the Foundation series , his Robot series, the Galactic Empire series and a few others.

In the early 70s started collecting the Perry Rhodan series but when I reached #50 I decided enough was enough. I later took them to a used book store and now wish that I had't since you can't find them any more.

During the 70s I got hooked on the Lensman series by E. E. "Doc" Smith.

Frederik Pohl is another prolific scifi author though I have only read a few books of the Heechee series but have read his Starchild Trilogy (written with Jack Williamson).

One of the best known science fiction writers was H. G. Wells who wrote The Time Machine and the War of the Worlds, etc. Two less well known books by him that are must reads for diehard scifi enthusiasts are The War in the Air (1907) and A World Set Free (1914).

I should not forget to mention my Hugo Gernsback favourite: RALPH 124C 41+, subtitled "A Romance of the Year 2660," which is a classic originally published in serialized form in Modern Electronics in 1911 and is really quite charming. It contains one of the first discriptions of a radar device ever published. The Hugo Award is named after him.

A few years ago I became interested in the works of James P. Hogan, for example, the Giants series, Code of the Lifemaker and its sequel The Immortality Option, and Martian Knightlife which is about a detective, or "facilitator" if you will, on Mars who comes to the aid of a matter transporter inventor whose bank account suddenly gets cleaned out and credit cards become overdrawn.