Today, I virtually had the processing room to myself since everyone else is out for the holiday.  This is a rare occasion, and one that I usually take advantage of by playing music and sometimes singing out loud.  (And you thought archivists were serious, proper folks who never raise their voices above a whisper except to scold you when you pick up your pen!)

After many days of sighing loudly at the number of Civil War payment vouchers I was going to have to rehouse, I happily discovered that my pace rapidly improved with a little Billy Bragg playing in the background.  I got through about ten linear feet today.

today's progress

I felt happy all day, and dancing a little bit in between boxes didn’t hurt!  I should probably not reveal these secrets, but, then again, it increased my productivity and made me feel better about all of these gritty receipts that I have to rehouse.  Perhaps it’s time for me to give in and buy an MP3 player.   Especially since this is what I have yet to finish:

so many vouchers

There are a few more shelves below these too, but instead of being dramatic about that 80 linear feet of madness that awaits me, I’ll just dance my way through it…

Happy holiday, all.

I often think of highly processed food as “plastic food”, mostly because it comes so heavily packaged in plastic and because of the fact that compared to fresh whole foods it tastes so artificial.  Processed cheese slices are probably the best example of what I think of as plastic food.  They just look like shiny, bright orange plastic squares with almost no real dairy content whatsoever and they taste absolutely nothing like the read cheddar cheese that they supposedly mimic.  We’ve all been approached by a child playing house in one of those Fisher Price kitchens with the pretend food and when they ask us to taste their home cooked meal we laugh and say “num num num num” as we pretend to eat it.  But of course we’d never take a real bite out of it.  It’s plastic!  It would taste aweful and be terrible for our health.  Hmmm, exactly.

We all know that processed food is bad for our health.  Even if you’ve never read any of the studies, it’s just common sense that feeding your body artificial flavours, chemical additives and preservatives is just not a great idea.  But I thought I’d attempt to shed a little light on just where exactly all these unhealthy food additives come from.  Essentially it all boils down to two words; corn and soy!

Before looking into it, I had no idea that such a wide variety of food products could be derived from such a small number of inputs, but a diagram I found on ADM’s website (see link below) shows just how few common denominators there are in a long list of hard to pronounce processed food ingredients.  Corn and soy beans represent an enormous percentage of all crops grown in the American mid west, otherwise known as the “corn belt”.  But that’s not because Americans love to eat corn on the cob.  No no no, it’s because corn is cheap to grow and it’s easy to process into hundreds of other things ranging literally from things like high fructose corn syrup (sweetener) to the multi talented dextrin, a carbohydrate produced by the hydrolysis of corn starch.  Dextrin has dozens of useful applications not only in food processing plants to enhance the crispiness of food batters, coatings and glazes, but also in the textile industry to increase the weight and stiffness of fabrics, and even in the stationery industry as a binding agent for the glue on envelopes and waxy paper coatings.

So there you have it folks, American farmers don’t grow corn because the world likes to eat corn, they grow it because the world likes to dip cardboard boxes in it, swallow their pills with it, burn it in their vehicles, and even wear it in their shirts.

But the list of uses for giant surpluses of corn and soy brought on by excessive government subsidization doesn’t end with corn syrup and dextrin.  There are dozens of even more bizarrely named food additives and preservatives like isoflavones, lecithin, sorbitol, lysine, astaxanthin, and yes even polymers.  Polymers as in “plastics”?  Yep, one of the myriad byproducts of heavily processed corn is, quite literally, “plastic food” or more accurately, “food plastic”.  ADM’s website boasts of their achievement of creating “polyhydroxy alkanoates (or PHAs) that are made from corn sugar and can be used in everyday products like cosmetic packaging, cell phones, office supplies and shopping bags.”   Fantastic!  This means we can stop pumping oil out of the ground to make plastic, right?  Wrong.

Guess where all the energy comes from not only to turn corn into plastic for making cell phones, but also to make corn into ketchup, chicken nuggets and soda?  Well, the milling, crushing, grinding, hydrogenation, enzymatic interesterification, saccharification, extraction and deodorization are all energy intensive processes that require burning vast quantities of natural gas or oil.  So when you look at the system as a whole, we’re now growing food and turning it into plastic by using oil, instead of just making oil directly into plastic.  Have we really solved an environmental problem or just created a new one by using up hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile land to grow cheap corn?

Now, if you’re thinking that I’m just an extremist wingnut screaming about the evils of food corporations, then rest assured, this is not a conspiracy theory or extremist evangelism.  I’m not saying that the companies that process corn and soy are wrong to do so.  There are some incredible benefits of using grains that can be grown, stored and transported efficiently for the wide variety of purposes that science has discovered.  I’m also not saying that people who eat heavily processed foods necessarily need to repent and switch to any other particular diet.  I’m just saying we should be taking a deeper look at what we put in our bodies and where it comes from.  You can start by visiting http://www.FarmOn.com and by checking out ADM’s site for yourself.

References:
http://www.adm.com/_layouts/admprocess/processpop.aspx
http://www.adm.com/en-us/products/industrial/polymers/Pages/default.aspx

Toxi (aka Karsten Schmidt) is one of the heros of the Processing scene. Apart from the wonderful Toxiclibs he’s written (and given away for free), he’s also produced some very inspiring work incorporating coding into various parts of his process, for example the cover for Print Magazine shown here.

I assigned a homework to my students to modify a simple tree generator and break the simmetry in the algorithm by adding randomness. Two of our students have each created a random tree generator using Processing.

Andre Xerri and Roland van Lent have turned in very interesting looking trees generated with their code. Well done!

Andre Xerri’s code and applet

Roland van Lent’s code and applet

I met her reputation before I ever met her.

She was a favorite amongst the staff- befriended by many and admired by more. On my first day at the organization I watched people struggle to keep their composure, her name whispered amongst colleagues with sad eyes. This was the day everyone heard the news.

D had cancer.

Her picture hangs above the copier in the communal mail room. I’d look at it amongst the checkerboard of other staff faces- her long blonde hair and big beaming smile- and wonder about her. We were close in age.  It could have been me. Cancer is an unjust lottery that no one wants to win.

When I met her in person her smile was wry and weary, the punchline to her witty sarcasm. Over the last three years I got to know her. She was real and hilarious and had such a good soul. I loved her directness and her snark. She was a realist with a soft spot. She had an awesome sweater collection and we’d often exchange boasts of our bargain finds from Target. Both proud aunties, we’d compare cute nephew and niece tales. She would always say hello and ask how you were doing even when she was limping, or in pain, or puffy from the meds. Even when she’d just come from chemo before work. She was humble and generous and beautiful. She was a fighter and I admire how she never gave up.

A few months ago we talked in my cubicle about how her cancer had come back.  I bought her a copy of my favorite book – Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening. He had survived cancer and we were all hoping she would. It was a small gesture that I hope brought her some comfort. I wanted to do more but what can anyone do when someone you care about is sick? But show up. Care. Reach out. Be real. Give love.

I arrived to work yesterday to the news: D had passed away on Sunday.

Goddamnedfuckingcancer.

I’m so sad and angry and at a complete loss. So I sat down and wrote this post about her. Because she mattered to me. Because I’m really going to miss her.

Do me a favor, will you? Go tell someone you love:  You matter to me. And mean it. Say what is in your heart now. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Life is too fucking short to live small.

Live big. Live brave. Live like my friend, D- with guts.

“I’ve learned that grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are. In this way, grief is yet another song the heart must sing to open the gate of all there is.

In truth there is a small one who suffers in each of us, an angel trying to grow wings in the dark, and as this angel learns how to sing, we lose the urge to hide. Indeed, when one heart speaks, all hearts fly. This is what it means to be great- to speak what feels unspeakable and have it release what waits in us all.” – Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

3144614    การควบคุมคุณภาพและการแปรรูปผลิตภัณฑ์สัตว์น้ำ    Quality Control and Processing of Aquatic Products

การควบคุมคุณภาพสัตว์น้ำก่อนและหลังเข้าสู่โรงงานแปรรูป กระบวนการรักษาความสด การแปรรูปผลิตภัณฑ์สัตว์น้ำ การเก็บรักษา การวิเคราะห์สารตกค้างและสารปนเปื้อน สุขอนามัยของโรงงานแปรรูป

(Quality control of aquatic animal products before and after being transported to processing factories, handling process for freshness, aquatic animal product processing, residue and contamination analysis, and hygiene of processing plants.)

3144614 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

I’m thought hotboxing. I have a lot of thought going through my head right now, and I’m going to actively process it, sort of like hotboxing. I’ll call this process ‘thoughtboxing.’ Maybe at some point that will become my replacement word for ‘processing.’

My bike was stolen today. I was eating breakfast at the beginning of a very long (but good) day, and Abe informed me that my lock was broken and lying in the space that my bike had occupied the night before.

While disappointed, I’m not all that upset about the loss of my two-wheeled mode of transportation; I have another, so I’m not out of a ride.  Yes, it was expensive, but it was also just a hunk of metal with wheels on it. I will continue life as before without my well-loved GT Thumper. I will miss the opportunity to cling to it long enough to pass on to future generations, but even that doesn’t really bother me.

What bothers me is that an unnamed individual felt it necessary to violate my belongings for his personal gain. They crossed a line that I firmly established with a thick cord of metal and a padlock, in order to satisfy a desire of their own. They didn’t need that bike; it’s a BMX bike — these have no practical application as a means of transportation. Their wheels are much too small and they possess only a single gear. The only reason for someone to steal that bike was from greed and envy.

They were willing to cross the line into criminal behavior to satisfy their lust for personal gain. Does the language I’m using seem to make it a bigger deal than it is? Maybe.

The fact of the matter remains, though, that this individual has perpetuated the system of belief and behavior upon which injustice is built. The only reason injustice exists in the world is because people are willing to violate others for their own gain, whether that gain is tangible or not.

This event was a concrete expression of injustice. It wasn’t a big deal, but it gave a glimpse into something bigger.

What’s it mean? It means there’s a whole world built on systems of injustice, power, and inequality that each individual is a part of. We can be as aware or as ignorant of it as we want. We can respond how we want. The only way to achieve change, though, is for individuals to recognize the little windows into injustice and to look through them, so as to see the inner workings of injustice.

Then, and only then, will we be able to throw a wrench into the machine and enact some cambios for the better. Only with awareness will we be able to be proactive about establishing justice for the oppressed.

As the next semester and the coming years approach and pass me by, I want to know the poor, the oppressed, the wrongfully imprisoned better. I want to know them and to know what it is that makes their situation. I want to tell others, and with them I want to give a go at changing the world.

(Ha! Idealist blog! The pessimist in me laughs.)

film processing – Working in the darkroom to process the film I shot this weekend. Word project and portfolio!

… not to mention late.  I was making promises for this release that I didn’t keep.  I was hoping to finish some other functions, but for now all I was able to do was complete PVector.  Hence, the name of this new post being “flimsy”.  Basically, I was stuck and I didn’t follow through on Dave’s teachings “to trudge through these times”.  I could’ve kept going and found some other functions to work on, but instead I just stopped working.  This can be seen by the fact that I haven’t made a blog post in almost a month.  Well, enough about berating myself over the past.  What’s important is learning from it and using it in the future; which I will do by getting a head start on my 0.3 release.  I pushed back my camera releases to get a better handle on it and the fact that there was no easy way to test 3d features before the 0.2 release.  This was all thanks to Andor and his work.  I’ll be looking at a whole bunch of 3D functions for 0.3 and hopefully I can follow through this time.

Now for PVector… reinvented!

That’s right, it’s brand spanking new!  The images above are examples of Processing PVector along with it’s JS Counterpart.  If you wish to see the new PVector, click here.  And just so you can compare the two, click here for the old PVector.  I was also actually stuck on a problem for PVector.  It was solved the Monday/Tuesday of the 0.2 release week.  I was able to finally sit down and talk to Al (aka F1LT3R).  He was able to show me the way to get myself unstuck from my problem.

Let me, first, describe to you what was happening.  We’ll focus on the add() method of PVector.  Here’s a copy of the old PVector add method below:

p.PVector.prototype.add = function add(){

	if (arguments.length == 3){
		this.x += arguments[0];
		this.y += arguments[1];
		this.z += arguments[2];
	}
	else if (arguments.length == 1){
		this.x += arguments[0].x;
		this.y += arguments[0].y;
		this.z += arguments[0].z;
	}
	else if (arguments.length == 2){
        var a = arguments;
        return new p.PVector( a[0].x + a[1].x,
                              a[0].y + a[1].y,
                              a[0].z + a[1].z );

	}
};

Now, above is a depiction of handling the three different uses of the add method; which can be found here.  The problem I was having was the prototyping function within Javascript’s objects.  I was using prototype to link this method in a clean way to the original object.  Now, the problem occurs when using PVector.add(v1, v2).  The method simply doesn’t exist due to the nature of prototyping.  To be able to use it that way, I’d have to type PVector.prototype.add(v1, v2); which is definitely a problem because this is a port of an existing application.  The number one rule of “ports” is to make it functional in the same way as the original.

Now you would think it’d be easily solvable by removing prototype, but another problem occurs due to the breaking of another object operator called “this”.  Removing prototype breaks the link to the original object, which in turn, breaks the functionality.  It wasn’t an easy problem to solve but Al, with his JS prowess, showed me a way to make PVector a wrapper and be able to use the functional language properly.

function PVectorAdd(){
    var a = arguments;
    return p.PVector( a[0].x + a[1].x, a[0].y + a[1].y, a[0].z + a[1].z );
}

function vectorStuff(){
    arguments = arguments[0];
    this.x = arguments[ 0 ] || 0;
    this.y = arguments[ 1 ] || 0;
    this.z = arguments[ 2 ] || 0;

    this.add = function(){
        if (arguments.length == 3){
            this.x += arguments[0];
            this.y += arguments[1];
            this.z += arguments[2];
        }
        else if (arguments.length == 1){
            this.x += arguments[0].x;
            this.y += arguments[0].y;
            this.z += arguments[0].z;
        }
    };
}

p.PVector = function PVector(){
      return new vectorStuff( arguments );
}

p.PVector.add = PVectorAdd;

I realized that there was room for redundancy removal and that specific calls went through specifically to how the method was used and split some of the code.  It might be a little less cleaner looking but the necessary checks are removed and I feel it’s cleaner overall.

The following link are the tests for PVector working properly (feel free to go through them all):  click here!

Also, I’m willing to give contrib credit to anyone in the class wanting to test the object extensively and give me some feedback!  Just leave a post!

New ambient upload with FFT spectrum analysis done in Processing. Inspired by bell ringing at a temple on the shore of lake Kawaguchi, near Mt Fuji.

Capture NX2 is an integral part of my workflow and provides some very powerful tools for editing.  One of the drawbacks is that NX2 has not gained a large share of the post process market and therefore does not get as much coverage as the more popular programs like CS4 and Lightroom.  This makes finding good resources, tutorials and tips online very difficult for NX2.  One advantage to NX2 is the somewhat intuitive interface, but unlocking its full potential can still be very time consuming.

In my search for additional resources I came across the website DPT&T.  I was pleased to find tips and tutorials that went beyond the basic control point, and dust removal steps.  Some of the links on the site (click here) take you back to the Nikon NX2 website, but they also list their own tutorials along with other sites that have relevant information.

If you are a Capture NX2 user and are looking for good information on what NX2 is capable of hop over to DPT&T and check out the information.

201423     การแปรสภาพด้วยความร้อนและการแช่แข็งอาหาร     Thermal Processing and Food Freezing

หลักเบื้องต้นสำหรับการแปรรูป หลักการใช้ความร้อนในกระบวนการแปรรูปเครื่องแลกเปลี่ยนความร้อน วิธีการประเมินการแปรสภาพด้วยความร้อน การเปลี่ยนแปลงทางเคมีและชีวภาพของผลิตภัณฑ์โดยกระบวนการใช้ความร้อน อุปกรณ์การทำความเย็น การลดอุณหภูมิก่อนการแช่เย็น การทำให้อาหารอยู่ในสภาพแช่แข็ง การคำนวณเวลาการแช่แข็ง การละลายอาหารแช่แข็ง

(Principles of food processing, principles of thermal processing, heat exchanger, evaluation of thermal processing, chemical and biological changes of products in thermal processing, refrigerator, precooling, freezing, calculation of freezing time, thawing.)

(201423 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

201426     การกำจัดของเสียจากโรงงานแปรรูปผลิตผลเกษตร     Waste Treatment in Agricultural Processing Plant

ปัญหาของของเสียและภาวะมลพิษ การวิเคราะห์ของเสีย วิธีการบำบัดของเสีย

(Waste and pollution problems, analysis of agricultural wastes, methods of waste treatment.)

(201426 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

originally published here

Data visualization sounds pretty dry. Mundane, technical, the stuff of economists and accountants. But that’s changed. Data is more accessible than ever. The US Federal government is releasing and publishing data in usable digital forms in an unprecedented fashion, the City of Vancouver and other municipalities around the world are doing the same. The keepers of the data are challenging constituents to do something with it. And the challenge has been taken up by many.

This week the specialist in the field of data visualization have gathered in Madrid for the 3rd annual Visualizer conference. With the goal of new ways to make data public and offer new tools to make this data meaningful.

Here’s a good look at some of the presentations at the conference from Information Aesthetic, one of the best blogs on the topic.

But the point here goes beyond a new trend and a powerful source of civic awareness. It’s about creating meaning, emotion, in a new way. In a way made possible by technology by a new medium. For example, a recent project by digital artist Todd Vanderlin, examines usage of the Boston Subway system.

Or another very well known project is Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns. Here Koblin took FAA data about flight routes over the US and visualized the patterns of movement over the course of a day. Again, using the most mundane information he created an emotive, informative, and compelling work.

Vancouver is home to one of the pioneers in the field, Jer Thorp. Jer, known by his online meme blprnt, is one of the masters at taking everyday things and building works of art out of them. A most compelling work in its conceptual simplicty and engaging aesthetic is GoodMorning. In it, Thorp visualizes entries from Twitter that contain the phrase “Good morning”. With this information he documents the evolution of a day in the Twitterverse using this simple data source.

In all these examples the creators, the artists, are taking very utilitarian subject matter which necessarilly compelling nor emotive and infusing it with new layers of expression. But with the data in the hands of an artist using tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks which make data visualization simple subway usage stats suddenly becomes fascinating.This is the power of art. Since the Cave of Altamira humans have been compelled to capture the everyday. To find meaning in the mundane, peel back the layers of routine, expresses the human spirit.

And that’s what we are wittnessing here. Analyzing the archives of day to day human activity through an artistic lens changes the conversation. We can look at subway data or flight paths or when people say good morning on Twitter in a way that says more than the data alone. That’s the power and the beauty of art in a digital age, massive amounts of everyday information can be transformed into elegant works of art.

A great refernece for anyway looking to get started down the path of data visualization is Ben Fry’s book Visualizing Data. Fry is one of the creators of the programming language Processing. A programming environment I’ve been using for the past year.

Update: All the source, plus an absolutely-alpha-beta-alpha build will be put up on Google Code very soon, but please be patient, since I have a lot of work right now. I’m trying to squeeze in work on this wherever i can, so I can get it out there

So, here is a few more details on Katapult. I’ve been adding a lot of stuff today, and getting close to something that is release-worthy. The current features include:

• Hold button
• Toggle button
• Horizontal fader
• Vertical fader
• Horizontal slider-zone
• Vertical slider-zone

Okay, might have forgotten something, but it does give a good overview of the current state of the thing. I’m going to implement support for 2D-pad controls, as well as an “indicator” control, that doesn’t send output, but can be used as an indicator light, before releasing it. I think that will make it out for a pretty suitable start. And after that? More advanced visualizers (beat-grid style, etc), timed functions, triggered after x beats, controller-chaining (altering one control can influence others), macros(!). A visual layout-editor would be nice but definitely won’t be first priority, since the layouts really are very easy to write by hand. Here’s a new video. It doesn’t show any of the bi-directional stuff, but it does make it clear how multi-page layouts are handled.

The more technical stuff: It’s all written in Processing. I’m writing and using it on OS X 10.6, but should work fine on other platforms as well. I found Processings MIDI support a bit annoying to work with (for output), so I took the easy route and offloaded the MIDI output handling to PureData through OSC. When I get the motivation, I’ll probably move the MIDI output back into the actual program, but I couldn’t find any MIDI-framework that did what I wanted to do, so PD is a fine solution right now. The patch is very simple and looks like this:

So, that’ll be it for now Hopefully a release soon!

A representative of HempOil Canada discusses the processing of hemp and materials made of hemp used in a myriad of products mainly destined for the United States:

Today I saw Julie & Julia at the dollar theater.  Nothin’ like a movie about blogging to get you thinking about blogging so much that you want to blog.  Ridiculous, I know.  But really… it got me thinking.  Why do people blog?  Or, more specifically, why do I blog?

Generally, I think the root of all blogging is a mild form of narcissism.  We think we have something important to say so we broadcast it, puffing up our own self-image.  And it’s a cushy place to do it, too, because people can’t interrupt your blog and tell you you’re an idiot when you’re blogging.  (Unless they say so as a comment, but even those can be deleted!)

If you’ve read my blogs for the past few years, you’ve probably noticed that it has suffered from a form of digital ADD.  I’ve never quite known its purpose, so I merely write whatever I feel like.  But in that sense I wouldn’t necessarily call it a journal.  I do that offline… and no one will ever read the words in the 25-odd journals I have hidden away in my room.  They are messy, misspelled, boring and deeply personal.  Those words are completely unfiltered, written only to me.

Actually, my blog is the opposite; it’s entirely filtered.  The words are written out, edited, deleted, rearranged, and re-written until they are more-or-less crafted into the message I want to present to whomever is listening.  In the process, I’m also editing, deleting, and crafting an image of myself that may or may not be 100% accurate.

In its rawest form, I guess I use blogging as both a mask and a microphone. It gives me the platform to say whatever I want to say, but also an alternate image to hide the imperfections that I wouldn’t necessarily want to showcase for all the world to see.

And, somehow at the end of every blog I seem to catch a new sense of who I am.  Maybe that’s why I blog.

…that I figured things out. No guarantees, no promises, but I know SOMETHING will finally happen near the end. And I know I’ll be coming out of it stronger, whatever it may be, because God was with me the entire time.

“It’s simple, confusing: the truth is… I’m winning but I’m losing;
I’m pulling and pushing wont do me any good
It could, it should
I’m honest to myself that the truth is I lied.”

I went to an intro to Processing workshop today. It was kind of overwhelming, but I saw some cool projects that have been done with it. Check out one here.

Yes, I say Katapult. What is it you say?

Well, I recently, after much struggle, got my hands on Novations Launchpad controller, hooray. It’s pretty cool, and very functional for controlling Ableton Live. Unfortunately my plan was never to use it with live, but instead with Traktor. In this regard, it is utterly lacking and uncool. Mostly because Novations Automap software is absolutely featureless in terms of what i wanted to do.

So when the software to make your dreams come true doesn’t exist, you just have to write it yourself. Hence I started writing Katapult. It’s intended to be a dynamic, totally customizable mapping solution for the Launchpad, that allows for much more functionality than the pretty mediocre hold-button scheme of Automap. So what does it do?

It allows you to create various controls on the surface of the Launchpad such as faders, buttons and “slider zones”. The MIDI output of these indivdual controls can then be mapped to different fuctions in Traktor, for example.

I have a lot of interesting ideas planned for this thing, but basics first. When I feel I’ve gotten all the basics down and tidied up the code a bit, I’ll release a preview and move on to some of the more interesting stuff

Okay, it’s late and I’m brainsmashed, so this might not be a very informative and detailed post. Intsead, I give you ZE VIDEO!

Here’s a rather uninspired and boring “mix” using the thing. It definitely won’t give you eargasms, but it’ll give you a general idea of how it works. Promise to post the technical nitty-gritty later