California

It was my first time on pacific shore. Surprisingly landscape looked like of a northern type. Small plants, lots of rocks, not much of a soil. But if you look closer flora and fauna are very different, lots of succulents with fancy flowers, lizards and all sorts of molluscs.
Weather was a bit chill, about 18C, but still comparing to minus in Ottawa it was perfect. While I was on my way to Asilomar I was anticipating to go swimming in ocean, but it turn out to be too stormy for that and I wasn't ready to give up myself to Neptune. Only people who were perfectly fine with the weather were some hardcore windsurfers.
And luckily I met couple of friends from Ottawa, Sean and Salima. Thanks to them I was able to travel a lot around the area.

On our last day visited Point lobos national park. That morning I was suffering from huge hangover, so I couldn't completely enjoy it.

And considering how many close-ups I made, I should have take macro lens.

These are last two days of my journey to west coast. Half of the first day, Sunday 22nd, we spent driving along ocean shore on our way to San-Francisco. Morning was in Monterey. Nothing particularly interesting about this place. Main attraction is aquarium, but we didn't go. For the rest it's just a quiet, relatively rich, southern town. Here I should point out that partly my judgement clouded by severe hangover after conference closing party. So most of the morning I felt like walking dead. I got to my senses only after nice lunch latter afternoon. Restaurant had nice patio with view on ocean and great seafood (I will never post a photo of my food!!!).
Few words about retail. They don't have chip cards, you have to swipe it and waiter gives you receipt you have to sign. But before that he spent quite a time trying split our table bill on 4 parts. He took a pen and started ask who ate what. I guess it happened because it was good fancy restaurant, in some chip shithole they would left to do this math to us.
On the way, before we got to SanFran, we stopped to see old light house. Next to it is the shittiest motel I ever saw. I don't know if anybody would want to stay there unless you escaped a prison. Toilet is just a hole in the ground and no way to wash your hands.
In the evening I checked in hotel, felt so nice and fresh already, hangover vanished, ready to dink again. So I went to see old Russian fried and eat some sushi. My hotel was on Market st. which was filled with homeless people. I thought that I'm, like born and raised big-city-dweller, got used to that kind of landscape. But comparing to what I got used to those people was particularly interactive and lively. When night comes they completely modify environment of the street to themselves. All you see there are small tents made of big plastic bags and boxes, and piles some hardly identifiable scrub here and there. You quickly learn not to kick it by accident, because with good chance somebody is under it.

Next day I mostly spent traveling around the city. By afternoon I realised that hobos mostly live on Market street and completely avoid Chinatown. I've seen not a lot, though by its appearance city is nothing special, only Chinatown was interesting and bright, so I made lots of shots in there.
At the evening I met Reg M. Hilarie. And I should say it was the most amazing time throughout the whole trip. Thank you Reg, I'm so happy that we met, we had the greatest evening in Castro district. I didn't have time to sleep and why to bother, I had only one evening in SanFran, so I better spend it as much as I can.

The End

Intrastellar

When I saw this year Oscar nominees I was overwhelmed with sad feelings. Because to me Interstellar was the best movie of the year and it did get only few funny technical nominations.So, point is that it didn't get anything for actual content and the whole idea behind it. If Oscar, by any means represents, the opinion of general public, it is clear to me that majority of viewers (including jury) either misunderstood it or didn't understand at all. Too long I guess, but I don't want to go to discuss modern people's inability to process long chunks of information at once.

Here is just basic overview on ideas and good features of Interstellar which make it so great.

Coolest things of all is that they managed to cover in the movie three huge topics of science fiction and didn't screw it up. These are "apocalyptic Earth", "Deep space exploration" and " Singularity".

At the beginning we introduced into the world of dusty Earth. Human civilization more and more gets buried in sand. Apocalyptic-earth part shows us disastrous condition in which people did put themselves. And this disaster is not collapsing climate, the disaster is degradation of curiosity, the most unique feature which allowed us to evolve and move forward, was thrown away at the first signs of real threat. This part metaphorically shows us our present time, where people became closer to the ground and more "realistic" about life. We are not allowing curiosity and dreams enter our world and guide us into the future. People convinced themselves to stop looking into the sky and decided to look into the ground. To do that they started to destroy their history and all achievements of previous generations. It's like they think that Gods are mad at them, so they have to stop all wrongdoing. Reasoning was simple and straightforward: technology brought us disasters, so we need to get rid of technology and do farming. Because everything was fine when people were only farming. But with time it becomes more and more obvious that the whole thing doesn't work. The more those future people get closer to the ground, the more they realize that they basically digged their own grave.

I don't really have much to say about space exploration part. The main thing I guess was that it felt natural. Even though authors didn't use much of special effects, which you would think "natural" for space movies. Instead they tried to make it look as realistic as possible. And  I think it did work. 

When it comes to make something popular about Singularity, you have to make it good, it is a total mine field. It's like popular quantum physics, very few people can explain it so that majority will understand. Singularity and space-time are least explored areas in cinematography, even though there is already tons of sci-fi books discussing the matter. By the end of the movie, authors give us some idea about what future of humanity may look like, which is basically all humans leave their physical body and ascend in astral, figuratively speaking. Or will be substituted by AI.  And if you think about it, among those three subjects of Interstellar this one is least fantastic one. Once we will get computers capable of supporting fully functioning human consciousness, there is not that far from time when those beings start to live their own live, leaving physical humans as previous evolutionary step. Another challenge was how to show space-time. For  that authors found very elegant approach by showing time-space at one particular place. And here is where special effects came really handy and were properly used. Explaining multidimensional space it is always tough challenge for teachers and scientists. But showing it in the movie was almost impossible task. So, in my humble opinion, you will hardly be able to find better presentation of that topic in any other movies before.

And last thing is of course robots. The whole presentation is so unusual and so great. Every time I was looking at them I had constant feeling of cognitive dissonance. Usually when they make robot voice, they make it sound like somebody talks through a metal pipe or compiling prerecorded sounds, and either they look like humans or appear just like camera on the wall. But here robots absolutely practical in design, like camera on the wall, but surprisingly mobile. And they have perfect human voice. So dissonance feeling comes when you see a metal box with the screen starts to talk like a human, and you understand that there inside is conscious being, person. And you completely finished when it starts moving and running.

So in conclusion, Interstellar definitely deserves a place in gold collection of science fiction movies.

Winter

Keep hoping that this winter will be good. In all possible directions. especially for my research.

Fonts

It always seemed strange, but as  I noticed people involved in design have some special feelings toward fonts. I looks like they feel sort of an exaltation when they see good font. And making new font it's like painting a  face of Jesus. Everything must according to rules and if you brake them all design community will banish you.

What I'm trying to say is that who cares about those metal pieces when fornt itself already digitised.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31188255

Archers

This is so cool. Completely destroyed my stereotype about archers. Now I can understand why guy like Robin Hood was so cool at his time.

Russian right wing

This is a archetypical representation of Russian far-right (in particular those guys who fight with Ukraine).

What you can see on the pic above is a hybrid. Nazi skinhead turned in to ultraorthodoxe christian.  

The Sun

The most beautiful image of the sun I have seen so far.

"Processed image of SDO multiwavelength blend from Jan. 19, 2015, the date of the spacecraft's 100th millionth image release. Credit: NASA/SDO"

"On Jan. 19, 2015, at 12:49 p.m. EST, an instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured its 100 millionth image of the sun. The instrument is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, or AIA, which gathers uses four telescopes working parallel to gather eight images of the sun – cycling through 10 different wavelengths -- every 12 seconds." Continue...

Photos of the Year 2014

Maybe it's a bit late, but who cares.
Collection of my favourite photos from last year.

Scientific method: Statistical errors

Few words about p-value.
"statistical hypothesis inference testing"

Full article 

Diet

Going through some weight training diet recommendations, it starts:

 "1. Eat at least 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, daily."

Tell me people, this only me who sees the problem in here.