Thursday, November 5, 2015

sunset Nov 5, 2015




It's a phase, a'ight? 

Bear with me, It'll all be over soon enough. 

The camera IS sitting there like a mechanical eyeball with no idea what it is looking at. Each frame a brand new situation recalculated as if freshly opened and seeing a new scene. The camera decides for each individual frame how wide a pupil and how fast a blink, were it a real eyeball.  It is not recording what I saw, with my eyes holding steady. It calculated to produce the best photo possible each time. The photo set resized in Photoshop. The sunset rather boring, no color today. Maybe spectacular sunsets are a summertime thing. I don't know. Nevertheless, the sequence is rather nice, don't you think? 

I learned: 
  • Do not shoot in raw. 
  • The .mov of this sequence is 27.8 MB
  • This gif was 1.8 MB optimized to 1.1 MB, a tremendous savings.
  • The last frames were shot in the dark. I'm not even sure the camera took the photos. 
  • The Galaxy phone and the Nikon camera are brilliant together. 
  • I wonder how to handle incoming calls with this going on.
  • Mac Automator cannot handle NEF files. Adjust camera to shoot in JPG. Not worth the trouble. The problem is, the camera calculates optimization after recording what it saw to produce the best photo. Not what it originally recorded in RAW which often look much worse.
  • Nothing was touched, nothing moved, and the photos are still not aligned to the pixel. Little windows give this away. 
  • i-movie has Ken Burns feature preset. That must be turned off, reset start to overlap finish or else photos will appear to zoom in and zoom out and I do not want that artistic touch. But this is an animation from Photoshop, not a movie from i-Movie. 
  • how to set up a sequence in Automator to resize jpeg photos in batch. Plus copy them, change or add a description to their file names. 



25 comments:

chickelit said...

That descending dark hue is the shadow of the earth going westward, chasing the light.

MamaM said...

Nevertheless, the sequence is rather nice, don't you think?

Yes, enjoying the trade-off of light slowly disappearing from the larger picture to reappear in windows.

The process, though a marvel, as well as the equipment to do so, impresses, but not nearly so much as the actual captured and distributed result.

In addition to whatever the spark is that possesses one to know, try, fiddle and fool to make something work, serve or delight.

chickelit said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
chickelit said...

Michael Faraday introduced the word "cathode" into science after much discussion with a Latin and Greek scholar named William Whewell. link. The word was metaphorical in the sense that it meant "going downwards" much like a sunset. Faraday thought that electricity "went down" at the cathode (like the sun) and "came up" at the anode. It turns out that Faraday got it bass-ackwards. Electricity (electrons actually) "come up" at the cathode and "go down" at the anode. I've often thought that this fundamental error is at fault for giving beginning students so much grief.

bagoh20 said...

Below is a diagram of a process we do at my work every day in multiple 200 gallon tanks of nearly full-strength H2SO4 and H3PO4 acid in a 50/50 mixture. We pump in huge amounts (3000 amps) of low voltage current (~12 VDC). The work piece is almost always stainless steel. It basically dissolves the metal away in a matter of about 3 minutes from a dull finish to a bright smooth finish and removes sharp edges. The electrons travel to the workpiece, and are exchanged for metal atoms from the surface of the metal. The metal dissolves in the acid, and either precipitates out or deposits on the cathodes. If left long enough (many hours), the metal will completely dissolve away to nothing. Gas is produced at both the anode and the cathode. Hydrogen is produced at the cathode, but I'm not sure what the gas is at the anode, maybe Oxygen.

We hang the parts on racks made of titanium, because it's one of the few metals that is not affected at all by the acid or current.

Electropolishing

bagoh20 said...

This acid is colorless when brand new and pure, but soon after being used, the dissolved metal gives it a deep malachite green color, and it's the consistency of corn syrup.

chickelit said...

Bags:

At the cathode: 2H2O + 2e- ----> H2(g) + 2OH-
At the anode: 2H2O - 4e- ----> O2(g) + 4H+

The H+ and the OH- swam the distance between the electrodes and remake neutral water, completing the circuit.

bagoh20 said...

A couple photos:

Tank

Before and After

bagoh20 said...

Thanks Chick. Now I know.

chickelit said...

This acid is colorless when brand new and pure, but soon after being used, the dissolved metal gives it a deep malachite green color, and it's the consistency of corn syrup.

The color is due to chromium ions and the viscosity likely comes from polyphospate chains -- inorganic polymers. Sulfates will catenate too but not as well as phosphates (t's related to ATP/ADP phosphate chains but without the "A"). Unless of course you are creating "life" in those tanks. Are you creating life Herr Dr. Frankenstein?

chickelit said...

Water electrolysis was discovered in early 19th century but was not understood for many years. The great puzzle was not that the two different gases were produced, but rather that they were produced at different electrodes. It seemed to everyone that if the gases both came from the decomposition of water they should both appear at the same place. Bear in mind that in the early 1800's nobody had yet thought that water could ionize into H+ and OH- which is absolutely crucial for the understanding. The proton (and the electron) had not yet been discovered.

chickelit said...

The metal ions in solution may actually catalyze the phosphate polymerization -- thickening -- much as Mg2+ does in cells. R&B probably know more about ATP/ADP kinases.

rhhardin said...

I used to electroplate as a teenager summer job, as part of the deal around the machine shop. As I recall, cyanide was involved.

I built the electronics myself, as the one who knew about electricity. The shop boss knew about the chemistry.

Mostly I dealt with swiss screw machines. This was just plating some of the output for some job or another.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Excellent.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Chip== you need to show-off a sunset when we have color in the sky.

bagoh20 said...

"Are you creating life Herr Dr. Frankenstein?"

Not that can be discerned in the dimension I currently inhabit, but we are creating wealth that buys shoes, cell phones, food, toys, homes, education, travel fun, wedding rings, beer, etc, so in a way perhaps the process does create "life".

Incidentally, the process also creates hazardous waste that must be recycled or disposed of in an environmentally responsible way, and that is at least half of the work and expense involved. I've designed and and built all off the equipment in this process from scratch including a system for recycling the water we use so that we don't discharge a single drop to the sewer system, which we originally did - as most companies do - but which incurred substantial expense and hassle with the local regulations. I built a one of a kind wastewater evaporator that runs automatically using natural gas and excess capacity from our vapor exhaust system.

I built this stuff with a stubborn avoidance of researching how other people did it. In the end some of the ideas were unique, but it was surprising to find that much of what I had designed blindly turned out to be exactly how others had done it before and often with valuable patents secured. I was born too late.

This inventing process taught me how much we all think alike and how little invention is actually unique to the individual involved. Most invention would happen even without the particular individuals who get the credit for being first. Problems have set issues, and we have similar stuff to work with in and outside ourselves, so that we usually put it together the same way eventually. The answers are just waiting out there to be found by someone.

chickelit said...

@bagoh20: What do you do with your solid waste and what is in it?

The water recycling sounds like a creative solution to overcome practical, business-threatening obstacles.

chickelit said...

rhhardin said...
I used to electroplate as a teenager summer job, as part of the deal around the machine shop. As I recall, cyanide was involved.

Was gold plating involved? Cyanide is often used with gold refining and mining.

deborah said...

Very nice. It's cool how the windows light up as the light lessens.

chickelit said...

It's cool how the windows light up as the light lessens.

A lesson in enlightenment

deborah said...

Thank you chick, most illuminating.

Chip Ahoy said...

I like the way the contrail is shown being pushed sideways.

Chip Ahoy said...

I'm glad you said that about waste, really glad. The whole time you described the clear acid turning to goo I was thinking what happens to the goo. The picture of tanks of goo waste is disturbing.


Processed, refined back to original clear acid and even thicker darker goo that is pressed into molds to produce dark green/black bleak little statues of a variety of mythologic gods and goddesses of chaos and discord sold in the gift shop.

rhhardin said...

Was gold plating involved? Cyanide is often used with gold refining and mining.

No, it wound up just silverish.

bagoh20 said...

The acid absorbs a lot of metal in solution, but eventually it gets saturated and starts to precipitate out. This is a sludge of metal salts Fe, Cr, Ni, Cu, and some trace stuff. It is hauled away, mixed with similar waste from other companies, encapsulated, and returned to the earth from whence it came (landfilled in the desert). We do the same with disgruntled employees.

The same material is present in the rinse water we use to clean the acid off the polished parts. This water is neutralized, run through a gravity clarifier, and then the clean water is reused and the settled metal salts sent through my evaporator that turns it into powder which is again landfilled.

The acid eventually degrades and stops working. It is then either recycled back into acid or solidified and buried by a company that does that out of state.

Every gram of all this material and every paper towel or rag it touches has to be documented with chain of custody, and what happened to it along the way. I own that stuff and any liability it incurs for eternity. Not just the corporation, but also me personally.