Playing with the an old Canon "nifty fifty" (Model 1) that I bought at a local consignment place for $24. Shooting wide open at f/1.8, it has a very shallow depth of field, resulting in a lovely bokeh from the Christmas lights in the background.
In case you haven't figured it out, Cooter is the cat's name.
This photo marks a bit of an improvement in my technique. I used an Orbis light ring to provide the extra light that I needed to get more depth-of-field than I've been able to get in normal lighting situations -- particularly on a November evening.
Eating a Mediterranean diet combined with physical activity can help to improve some of the symptoms of sleep apnoea, according to new research.The study, which is published online in the European Respiratory Journal, looked at the impact a Mediterranean diet can have on obese people with sleep apnoea, compared to those on a prudent diet.
Obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS) causes frequent pauses of breathing to occur during sleep, which disrupts a person's normal sleeping pattern. It is one of the most prevalent sleep-related breathing disorders with approximately 2-4% of the adult population experiencing the condition. This percentage increases up to 20-40% with obesity, and weight loss is often an essential part of the recommended treatment plan.
The researchers, from the University of Crete in Greece, examined 40 obese patients suffering from OSAS. Twenty patients were given a prudent diet to follow, while the other 20 followed a Mediterranean diet*. Both groups were also encouraged to increase their physical activity, mainly involving walking for at least 30 minutes each day.
In both groups, the patients also received continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy which involves wearing a mask that generates an air stream, keeping the upper airway open during sleep.
The researchers monitored the patients during a sleep study, known as polysomnography. This involved monitoring several markers for OSAS, including electrical activity in the brain, eye movements and snoring. The patients were examined at the start of the study and again 6 months later.
The results showed that people following the Mediterranean diet had a reduced number of disturbances, known as apnoeas, during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, which usually accounts for approximately 25% of total sleep during the night.
The findings also revealed that people following the Mediterranean diet also showed a greater adherence to the calorie restricted diet, an increase in physical activity and a greater decrease in abdominal fat.
Efforts by some in Congress to dismantle clean air laws are a threat to public health, experts warn in a "Current Issues" article published online today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
New Scientist Science in America: Decline and Fall
Less than 2 per cent of its 535 members (of congress) have professional backgrounds in science. In contrast, there are 222 lawyers, whom one suspects largely avoided science classes in college. Lawyers are trained to win arguments, and as any trial lawyer will tell you, that means using facts selectively for the purposes of winning, not to establish the truth. No wonder ideology and rhetoric have come to dominate policy discussion, often bearing little relationship to factual reality.
BOSTON — Drinking plenty of fluids may provide men with some protection against bladder cancer, according to a study presented at the 10th AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held Oct. 22-25, 2011.
PIERRE, S.D. — The South Dakota Senate voted Wednesday to require women to wait 72 hours before they can have abortions and to submit to counseling about why they shouldn't go through with the procedures.And this...
Florida Gov. Rick Scott is expected to sign a bill that will make the state the first in the nation to prohibit doctors from asking patients if they own guns. The bill is aimed particularly at pediatricians, who routinely ask new parents if they have guns at home and if they're stored safely.How do Republicans reconcile these two ideas without appearing insane?
According to some classic research, our attitudes can be based upon our classifications as "individualists" or "communitarians" in combination with either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" outlooks. Conservative Republicans are typically "indiviualist-hierarchical" while liberal Democrats would be "communitarian-egalitarian."
Dan Kahan, the author of the study, sums it up nicely:
Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.On a tangential note, I see that today's Rapture Index is the highest ever: 184. This is because category #38, Wild Weather, has been recently elevated. I think it's funny that the keeper of these categories sees no irony between category
43 Climate: Record cold temps put the freeze on global warming hype.and categories #38 and #45:
38 Wild Weather: The US is hit by a historic tornado Outbreak.What values would give these facts a fighting chance?
45 Floods: Heavy flooding in South America and Europe.
According to the Rapture Ready web site, today's rapture index is 183, which on their scale translates to "fasten your seatbelts!" Scan the "Comments on Active Categories" section:
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? The Republicans are trying to bring on the apocalypse! They think that Obama is the Antichrist, and maybe this will finally expose him.
Some other wonks on the net are trying to rain on everyone's parade. They offer a list of years throughout the ages where the end of the world (TM) was forecast. Mark your calendar for May 21st.
Silly prognosticators! The Rapture has already occurred. The only things missing are a couple of socks, some pets in my neighborhood, and a hitherto undiscovered tribe in the Amazon. I hope they like harp music.
So, I rested and I learned (a little). Results are more pleasing:
Notice a couple of new eggs?
A person who I rely upon for PhotoShop advice offered the criticism that shadows were noticeably missing from this piece. Each egg should have a shadow..., etc.
Damn! No, wait. My picture is just well-lit. That's it.
Here's how I did this.
I started with a small swatch that I made of short lines in various stroke weights and shades of brown/tan. I turned this into a pattern brush.
Once I had the pattern brush, I used the circle tool to create an oval that matches the lip of the basket. I applied the brush to the oval and tweaked the stroke some more until I was happy with the look.
The rest of the bowl was really simple: I used the Transform tool and started with an arbitrary 29 repetitions. I then tweaked the horizontal scale control down into the minus category (the Preview feature is really handy here). Then I tweaked the Move Vertical a bit into the minus category, watching the preview until I stopped seeing white space between the rings. Expand the Object, and that was all there is to the bowl of the basket. I added some extra body to the basket by copying the bowl layer, pasting it over the top of the original and shifting it horizontally and vertically several keyboard clicks. This worked to fill in the occasional blank space between coils.
The lip of the bowl was created from a fresh circle that I visually matched up with the top ring. Once again, I applied the pattern brush to that. To get that the cool windings, I used the Zig-Zag tool in the Distort and Transform tool set. You can see the dialog box for that below:
Like always, I turned Preview on, so I can see what I'm rendering. By setting Points to Smooth, I got a coiling effect instead of the basic zig-zag. Then I just pumped up the Ridges per segment slider until I got some tight coils. Voila!
Finally, the handle is the top half of a circle arc with the same wood brush applied. After thickening it up a little, I put another circle arc over that and applied the actual zig-zag transform to that.
Now I'm ready to put some Easter eggs in this basket!
Cows being -- well -- dumb, this one managed the climb up several flights, but it seemed unable to walk back down. Consequently, it was removed in much the same way that the dead horse in Animal House had to be removed from the dean's office, albeit before the days of chainsaws. Thus was born the legend of the Woodburn Hall Cow, whose ghost is still mooing in the night.
Now the reason for the story about the unfortunate cow is because I had done a vector drawing of Woodburn Hall, based upon a night-time Christmas lights photograph that I had taken. I was able to catch the night-time look of the building, but I was hesitant to attempt the lighting effect.
Something about my showing this Illustrator drawing to a coworker caused him to remark that my picture needed a cow, whereupon he told me of the legend. Lest you think that I keep strange company, this person is a director-level at the University.
It's funny how an idea grows.
She does these patterns free-style, with no design in mind when she starts. My interpretation used a single, uniform cross-stitch, whereas my mother's original features a variety of stitching styles.
I flipped the central portion and made it into a repeating brush pattern (right). It's funny how the eyedropper tool in Illustrator interpreted the orange-gold color -- it came across more bronze in Illustrator.I doubt I could claim credit for applying the techniqe of using a cross-stitch "X" pattern to build an elaborate design in Adobe Illustrator, but I came up with the idea on my own and developed it through experimentation.
Here's an inset portion, showing a two-color stitch pattern:
Once you have a few patterns, you can start to replicate them and lay them out into a larger work. Here is a completed rushnyk from a design I copied:
There's a really cool trick you can do in Illustrator, where you can take something you've designed and make it into a pattern brush. The pattern brush can then be applied to a vector shape like a line, rectangle or circle. The basic square of this pattern lends itself particularly to a rectangle, because you can designate a specific design to be a corner piece in your brush pattern.
To do this, I first stripped away the outer zig-zag border. Here's what the replicated squares would look like in a corner pattern:
Once the pattern brush is complete, you can begin applying it. Here is a circle within a square with the rushnyk brush pattern applied:
Note that you can change the stroke. The circle is one-half the stroke of the square. The only problem with creating these elaborate designs is that you can run out of memory when you try something large based upon an elaborate design.
According to Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., "We will be active and aggressive using every tool in the toolbox to protect American jobs and our economy by rolling back the job-destroying (greenhouse gas) regulations." (I suppose the Republicans' filibuster against the auto industry bailout last year was also done out of concern for jobs.)
It just so happens that I've obtained a hither-to unknown wikileaks release on the GOP's agenda for this year:
Make no mistake about it -- since the current health care reform law has made it illegal to cancel an insurance policy because of a pre-existing condition, Insurance Policy Processing Clerks have been having a tough go of it. Many of these weasels, whose job it is to cancel insurance policies, have been out of work. You'd think that the GOP would have extended jobless benefits to these, their brethren. But they are looking at the big picture. If they help the insurance companies recover their enviable ability to cancel policies, then the weasels will have their jobs back. Brilliant!
Besides, weasels don't contribute much in the way of campaign donations.
