Székely találékonyság = 0 (legalábbis a statisztikák szerint)

Idézet az Új Magyar Szóból:

"Elképesztőnek tartom, hogy Hargita és Kovászna megyéből egyetlen szabadalmi kérés sem érkezett. Hol van a híres székely furfang?" - vetette fel az ÚMSZ-nek Varga Gábor, az Országos Szabadalmi és Védjegyhivatal (OSIM) elnöke, aki tegnap az idei szabadalmi oltalom igénylésekről számolt be. Varga kijelentésével arra utalt, hogy a két székely megye nem jeleskedett találmányokban az idén. (...) Az OSIM beszámolójából többek közt kiderül, hogy idén a legtöbb oltalom kérést - 230-at - Bukarestben nyújtották be, míg vidéken Iasi, illetve Kolozs megye 39 kérelemmel tartozik a "közvetlen élmezőnybe". A sereghajtók között Krassó-Szörény, Mehedinti, Olt és Teleorman megye található egy-egy oltalmi kérelemmel, míg a két székely megye nullával az abszolút utolsó.

Persze a saját találmányok hiánya nem akadályozza meg a székelyeket abban, hogy olyan kiemelkedő találmányokat ünnepeljenek és támogassanak (pl. itt), mint amilyen a Spanyol Zoltán vízautója.

John McPhee on geological language

Started reading John McPhee's tetralogue on geology, Annals of the Former World. Here is a memorable sampling of the thick sediments of geological language (p. 33):

As years went by, such verbal deposits would thicken. Someone developed enough effrontery to call a piece of our earth an epieugeosyncline. There were those who said interfluve when they meant between two streams, and a perfectly good word like mesopotamian would do. A cactolith, according to the American Geological Institute's Glossary of Geology and Related Sciences, was a "quasi-horizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths, whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith." The same class of people who called one rock serpentine called another jacupirangite. Clinoptilolite, eclogite, migmatite, tincalconite, szaibelyite, pumpellyite. Meyerhofferite. The same class of people who called one rock paracelsian called another despujolsite. Metakirchheimerite, phlogopite, ktzenbuckelite, mboziite, noselite, neighborite, samsonite, pigeonite, muskoxite, pabstite, aenigmatite. Joesmithite.

He could have included turbidite, tsunamite, tempestite, unifite, homogenite, debrite, hyperpycnite, and contourite as well. As if this wasn't enough, there are sedimentary geologists who suggest introducing new 'ites' (PDF link) like gravite and densite.

Bullshite.

Bedforms in Matlab - everything you wanted to know about ripple marks and cross beds

David Rubin's bedform-generating code has been implemented in Matlab (in fact, it has been out there for a while). It is a great learning, teaching, and research tool that can be downloaded as part of an USGS open file report. Strongly recommended to anyone having some interest in sedimentary structures, bedforms, and cool Matlab graphics.

That reminds me of something else: it would be nice to have a Matlab version running on Intel Macs. I hope Mathworks will keep its promises and have something ready by early 2007. Having to reboot the iMac in Windows XP is an acceptable solution, but I could live without it [although even Windows XP looks OK on this kind of hardware :) ].

New books, websites, and videos on disbelief

It is good to see that two books that talk about disbelief and attack religion are among the top sellers on amazon.com. One of them is "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris; he is a PhD student in neuroscience at Stanford whose first book (The end of faith) was also about - and against - religion. I have read that one and enjoyed it.

The second book, "The God Delusion", was written by Richard Dawkins, who would probably be the head of the Church of Atheists and Agnostics if there was such a thing and if atheism was religion. [Needless to say, it is not]. I have ordered it and looking forward to read it. If it is 'preaching to the converted', fine with me. After all, there are very few intellectuals out there who have the courage to 'preach' to those inclined to think that there are no gods, no santas, no angels, and no teapots in orbit around Jupiter. Dawkins also has a new website and foundation set up: http://www.richarddawkins.net/.

Also, it is worth checking out Google Video for films on atheism. The two-part series called "The root of all evil?" by Dawkins is there. I also found Jonathan Miller's "Atheism - A Rough History of Disbelief". It is a very enjoyable documentary. You can find all three episodes at Google Video if you do a search.

Georeferencing photos on a Mac

Not long ago I managed to georeference some of my photos using GPS measurements. Before I forget how I did this, here are some notes on the process. The key piece of software is GPSPhotoLinker, written by Jeffrey Early. After downloading and installing this nice little program, the next step is to get the GPS tracks from the GPS unit. For some reason, GPSPhotoLinker did not do this for me; so I downloaded GPSBabel, connected my Garmin Vista Cx to the iMac, and saved the tracks in GPX format. [GPSBabel is the same utility that is used inside GPSPhotoLinker]. I tried to open the GPX file in GPSPhotoLinker, but it did not work. The problem was that some of the tracks on the GPS unit were actually saved -- and saving tracks on a Garmin GPS unit (and maybe on other units as well, I don't know) results in losing the time stamp from each datapoint. GPSPhotoLinker apparently is not able to just ignore this part of the GPX file; the only solution was that I manually deleted all the saved tracks from the GPX file. After that, everything went pretty smoothly. GPSPhotoLinker finds the GPS points that are the closest in time to the time stamp of the photograph and writes the latitude and longitude into the EXIF header of the jpeg file. You can choose between 'snapping' photo locations to the nearest GPS datapoint or to interpolate between two points to find the best estimate for the place where the photo was taken. It is important, of course, to record a fairly large number of GPS points when you are taking the pictures.

Once I had the photos tagged with the geographic coordinates, I had two options to display them in the context of a map: either relying on Smugmug, the photo-hosting web service that I use, or on a cool iPhoto plugin called iPhotoToGoogleEarth. With Smugmug, both Google Maps and Google Earth can be used to look at the photos; the drawback is that the displayed pictures are small and you have to go go back to the Smugmug page to see the photos in a reasonable size. The iPhoto plugin generates a kmz file that can be opened with Google Earth and includes all the photos in a reasonable size, that, of course, can be adjusted by the user). The advantage is that you do not have to leave Google Earth in order to look at the photos.

Here is my first try at doing the gereferencing, as shown by Smugmug in Google Maps. It is not a bad idea after all to have a GPS unit handy when you are traveling and taking photos.

PS. In addition to the saved tracks, the other thing that GPSPhotoLinker does not like in the GPX file is the part of the header that refers to the geographic bounds of the file, e.g., "bounds minlat="-51.725563835" minlon ="-98.491744157" maxlat="43.777740654" maxlon="131.500083692"". You have to delete that in order for GPSPhotoLinker to read the file.

PS 2. There is always more to learn. I thought that the ideal workflow for georeferencing photos would be to (1) do the tagging in GPSPhotoLinker, (2) import the photos to iPhoto, (3) export the ones I want to post on the web, and (4) put them on Smugmug. It turns out this does not work well; all the photos I took in California (and were correctly labeled by GPSPhotolinker) ended up in Kamchatka. The point is that the georeferencing must be done (or redone) after the photos are exported from iPhoto.